With the school year coming to a close, many students will be moving off of the Hill and into an apartment for the first time. This change also means that they are moving away from the convenience of the delicious dining halls, and will have to make their own meals – maybe for the first time. While social media has painted cooking as an impossibly stressful task that demands the utmost perfection, thanks Gordon Ramsay, in reality, it is not only super fun but can be as easy as throwing vegetables in a pan with some olive oil.
However, this side of cooking is often overshadowed by trendy “stunt foods” someone would never make, based on ingredients no one would ever possess or useless tips and tricks that don’t work. Due to this sheer over-complication of cooking content on the internet, finding helpful and accurate information can be difficult. So here are three tried-and-true cooking YouTubers students can learn from.
KWOOWK
@KWOOWK is a great place for college students to start learning because most of the channel’s videos are geared toward them. Kevin Tatar started his channel while he was attending university, so he knows exactly what it is like having to feed oneself on a school schedule and budget – or lack thereof. Tatar’s content centers around cheap, easy and quick meals anyone can make. His video titles often use phrases such as “Cheap Dinners That Your Bank Account Will Love You For” or “Cheap and Healthy Meals That Got Me Through College.” Another plus of his videos is that he offers numerous ideas on how to do meal prep, elevate pre-made food like canned tuna or rotisserie chicken and transform old bananas into delicious foods. In addition, he also advises on what to buy from the grocery store and gives price breakdowns of the dishes he makes. Tatar also features vegan options in many of his recipes. Watching @KWOOWK can help students start their culinary journey as he provides a simple and budget-friendly cooking style.
ThatDudeCanCook
While the name is a bit on the nose, this dude delivers when it comes to surprisingly easy, flavor-filled meals. Sonny Hurrell’s videos are mostly intermediate chicken-based recipes such as shoyu chicken, peri peri chicken and chicken biryani. The reason his videos are a step up in difficulty from the @KWOOWK channel is because of the emphasis on spices, marinades and sauces in his recipes. While Hurrell does include more rare ingredients to make the dishes as authentic as possible, he does always point out what ingredients can be substituted for more common ones or emitted altogether to make these recipes accessible for everyone. He also has a lot of content that focuses on one particular topic or food. Hurrell has videos on just marinades, tips for making better burgers, different Brussels sprout recipes and how to repurpose specific leftovers. Even though his content is more advanced, it does have a lot of valuable tips and techniques to elevate and change the way someone goes about cooking.
Joshua Weissman
Joshua Weissman is without a doubt one of the most famous YouTube chefs on the platform, and for good reason. Weissman serves up such a wide variety of content and he is essentially a cooking encyclopedia. His series, “But Better,” sees Weissman recreate famous food items such as the Spicy Chicken Deluxe from Chick-fil-A, the Oreo, the Big Mac, the Raising Cane’s Box Combo and the list goes on. While a student cook may not necessarily be frying up their own Popeye’s chicken sandwiches or remaking Domino’s Pizza, Weissman does help beginner cooks get ideas on how to recreate some of their favorite meals. Weissman’s other playlists, “But Faster” and “But Cheaper,” are also great resources for college students that show how cooking a delicious meal does not need to take hours and can be done on a budget. Likewise, he has also made a couple of videos specifically for college students where he crafts quick and healthy recipes based on the cooking equipment and budget a student might reasonably have. Weissman also has tons of great videos about making unhealthy food healthy, other cooking skills and trying viral internet recipes. The sheer amount of useful and accessible cooking knowledge Weissman has put out into the world is exactly why he is one of, if not, the best YouTube chefs to learn to cook from.
The internet has a wealth of helpful culinary information as well as a lot of misinformation. While @KWOOWK, @ThatDudeCanCook, and Joshua Weissman are certainly not the end-all-be-all for cooking content on YouTube, they each bring something specific to the conversation that cooks of any expertise can learn from.
—
Featured Image Photographed by Patrick Shao/BruinLife
