One of my favorite things to do is cook.  I was lucky enough to grow up in a home with fresh cooked meals prepared nightly (not including Friday pizza night of course) – and so shortly after college when I found myself living out on my own, I began to try to teach myself how to make the various meals I enjoyed while growing up.  Once I had mastered my chicken parmesan and could knock out pork-chop night by memory, I began to expand a bit further than the old family kitchen.

There are tons of great cooking websites out there, with excellent recipes rated by thousands of visitors, with delectable looking photographs of the finished product. If you have the Food Network, there’s an endless parade of celebrity chefs with examples already waiting in the oven to show-off.  But for my money – the place to start for new recipes is YouTube.

I’ve been wanting to write a blog post about YouTube for some time now, because I get the impression when I explain to folks where I’ve learned this or that, they are surprised to hear it was on YouTube. There are literally thousands upon thousands of informative videos, with an endless array of hosts and narrators, and an equally wide range of production quality, available on YouTube, all for free.  There are videos on almost every topic imaginable.  In just the last year I’ve watched videos to fix my toilet, learn the mandolin, build iPhone apps, begin studying Chinese, figure out which video games to buy, and as previously mentioned, learn to cook a wide variety of dishes.

My first foray into cooking with YouTube was about two years ago, when I decided I wanted to make one of my favorite childhood side-dishes – potatoes augratin – from scratch, rather than the box style I’d become accustomed to.  I found some basic recipes, but I couldn’t be certain how things were suppose to be prepared.  It occurred to me that there might be a video up on YouTube that could help – and I discovered Dave, the world’s greatest chef.  Well, at least that’s what it says on his apron.  I don’t know what possessed this big Carolinian to do his own cooking show – but it’s not only bizarrely hysterical, he has a damn good recipe for those taters.

Another potato chef I came across in the early days was Betty.  While I opted not to go with her canned butter spray approach – the rest of the recipe was pretty darn tasty – and I found her voice was rather nice to listen to while I followed along. When watching videos like this – I often can’t help but ponder what this person does when they aren’t using a flipcam in their kitchen.

Some of the folks on YouTube record numerous videos.  I recently decided to start learning how to cook lebanese food after I found half my budget going to Nicholas’s on Grand. I came across DedeMed – a great channel started by Denise Hazime.  In 2007 Denise found herself living on the west coast with no quality lebanese dining options, so she began cooking the meals herself, and decided, along with the help of her husband, to start a website and YouTube video series.  In 2010, her hummus recipe became the #1 hummus recipe on YouTube, with over 400,000 people watching it!  She now continues to make great recipe videos, but also sells spices and other ingredients via her website.

One of my favorite YouTube cooks is Maria, who currently has over 300 recipes on her channel, ranging through all types of dinners, desserts, appetizers, and soups. About four years ago she decided to start a blog about the dinners she made for her family – and began recording herself preparing those dinners.  Over time she’s learned better filming techniques, and how best to show various stages of preparation.   Even though her videos are well made, Maria doesn’t have a film crew, and she has a hungry family to feed, so there are no second takes, or clean cuts.  In one of my favorite recipes of her’s – gnocchi verdi – the family cat jumps in front of the camera right as she is explaining the meal.  It doesn’t phase her for a second. The purpose isn’t to create a great video or become famous – it’s to show you how dinner was made. She’s not using fancy cooking equipment and chatting with a studio audience – half the time there is a tv playing in the background and the dog is barking. But it’s the quality of the content that matters on YouTube – and her recipes are great!

As video equipment and publishing tools become easier and cheaper, more and more individuals will begin sharing their talents, passions and bizarre interests online.  Once engaged, they will begin to see not only how others perform those same tasks, but also how others present their lessons, and so the quality of content being produced will radically improve.  We are only in the first stages of a video publishing revolution, that will wildly shift where people get their information and entertainment from.  The days of content being produced by the few, for the masses is coming to an end, and YouTube is a hotbed of creative content producers experimenting with a completely new communications platform.

For dinner tonight I made Irish Stew and brown bread.  It was one of my 50 Goals For the First Quarter – and I turned to Maria for the recipe for the stew.  It was absolutely delicious – and took me back to The Lord Edward – a small pub in Dublin across the way from the ChristChurch Cathedral that my father and I had a great lunch in.  For the brown bread recipe, I came across a video clip featuring Mary Murphy from Schull, Ireland of the County Cork.  That video clip led to a blog post about making brown bread. It had a few helpful YouTube videos, the bread looked great, so I made it.  It turned out absolutely perfect.

How else but via the internet and social media could you acquire a handwritten recipe from a complete stranger?

Filed under: Food, Homelife, New Media, Websites by gspies
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