Welcome to the Golden Age of Cooking Advice

Thomas Keller will even tell you which tip size to use when you pipe your dough into the hot water.Streaming sites like YouTube and Netflix didn’t invent cooking shows, of course, but their unlimited capacity for content, and the bite-size segment time of most cooking instruction videos, means there’s never been a time to seek out some simple dinner advice. It also means that the people who make these videos want to ensure that you, the curious home cook, will actually be able to find any kind of kitchen advice you could possibly want — and the most popular videos are often the videos that speak to a very specific need.In 2016, for example, Bon Appétit decided to create an entire show about fermentation. Making things even more difficult: Leone’s first words in the video are, “People get concerned about botulism …”The video has now been watched on YouTube nearly 2 million times, and the YouTube channel has grown from 30,000 subscribers to 3.3 million since adding targeted shows like It’s Alive and Gourmet Makes — a series where pastry chef Claire Saffitz attempts homemade Gushers, Cheetos, and Kit Kats. Though the episodes are understandably less focused than single online videos, Nosrat herself has said that working with Netflix allowed her to “imagine something that looks totally different and feels totally different” from a show that would appear on traditional broadcast television.In fact, even YouTube is filled with blockbuster cooking shows that are very hard to imagine airing on, say, the Cooking Channel: Cooking With Dog uses Francis the toy poodle to teach classic Japanese recipes. It turned out that his Modernist Cuisine co-alum Grant Crilly is great on camera, and their YouTube cooking videos now have racked up over 100 million views, spanning topics from baking naan and growing your own microgreens to making cold brew in two hours with a whipped-cream dispenser.Despite the wealth of content, Young says they can’t rely on ad revenue from YouTube or Facebook; the volume of competition and low pay rate are simply too nuts.