Good idea about getting more concrete. Here are some examples that come to mind:
A few weeks ago I had some leftover pasta and meatballs. The pasta wasn’t enough to feed myself and my girlfriend, so I opened up a box of pasta that was shaped differently, eg. rigatoni when the leftovers were shells, and mixed it with the sauce and meatballs. My girlfriend was upset and thought that was really weird. I left that experience feeling confused about my culinary intuitions, because while she had strong feelings about it, it seemed perfectly fine to me. Fast forward to a week or two ago, I watched one of Massimo’s videos where he cooked mac ‘n’ cheese, and he too used many different shapes of pasta. Seeing that, I update my beliefs pretty strongly towards such a thing being reasonable, because I trust his intuition. There are caveats of course. Fine dining is a different context than a casual Wednesday night meal. Maybe it makes sense to do “weird” things in the former context but not in the latter. These are things to think about, but I believe that there is still a pretty good amount of value in watching someone like Massimo make decisions. I think I can use my common sense to make reasonable updates to my beliefs. Not just about the specific instance (eg. different types of pasta), but about the more general category (doing “weird” things). Contrast this with watching, let’s call it Some Random YouTuber. For Some Random YouTuber, I don’t have that same amount of trust in their intuition, and thus I can’t make the same updates to my beliefs. Let me provide some additional concrete examples.
In that same mac ‘n’ cheese video, his bechamel sauce wasn’t too crazy. He didn’t do anything too fancy to it. This surprised me a little bit. I would have expected a chef like him to have tricks up his sleeve, but that didn’t really happen.
Or maybe it did. Maybe the trick is using super high quality ingredients. I’ve been getting the impression that for more mundane ingredients like milk and flour he tends to use the type of stuff you’d get at the supermarket, but for ingredients like parmigiano reggiano, he always seems to have some sort of super high quality version. He doesn’t really emphasize it though. Maybe this is just an instinct that great chefs have. “Well duh, of course you wouldn’t just use parmigiano reggiano from the supermarket.”
Still in that same video, I thought it was a little interesting that he used so many different types of cheeses. I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from that. It’s something that I’ve sorta stashed away to keep in mind and come back to.
I noticed that he added chunks of ricotta cheese. I have a feeling there’s something important there: heterogeneity. Instead of just a uniform flavor throughout, you get these pockets of something with a different flavor and texture. Again, he didn’t really call this out specifically, and if he were a better video maker I think it’s something he would have talked about (Kenji Lopez-Alt does a fantastic job of this), but I still find it pretty cool to be able to observe him and try to take what I can from it. Maybe this is one of those things that is obvious to him that he doesn’t even think to mention.
I’ve heard the term “mise en place” before. It means that you should prep your ingredients before you start cooking. I’ve always wondered whether that’s just something that people say but in practice, when good chefs are actually cooking at home for their families, that just goes out the window. I noticed that in his videos he always has stuff prepped. I interpret that as weak evidence because it could be because he’s filming, but it’s something.
I could continue to give more examples like these if you’re interested, but I think this probably gets the point across about the value I see in getting to watch someone who’s a master.
To learn some specific fact or recipe. (For that, a book is usually better.)
Maybe. His videos aren’t about that, but I happen to be someone who watches a ton of culinary YouTube stuff and has also read books, and IMO there are a lot of subtle things you pick up with video that you don’t pick up in text + pictures (many books are annoyingly light on pictures too).
To observe his technique doing some “ordinary” thing.
Yeah, I agree that this isn’t a compelling reason to watch him.
To observe his technique doing some unusual thing that he, specifically, is particularly good at.
Nothing comes to mind for me here.
To learn from his probably-exceptional culinary judgement.
I think this is the big one. I tried to address it in my first block of text.
To be inspired by his probably-exceptionally-ingenious ideas: combinations of ingredients I’d never have thought of, etc.
To me this feels like there’s a lot of overlap with culinary judgement, and my response is similar.
To be entertained.
This is certainly a reason I’d expect people to watch his videos, and a secondary reason why I enjoyed watching them. I agree that there are better options out there, like Ramsay perhaps. And I agree that it makes sense for the existence of such options to take away from Botturas viewers. But not as much as it actually does in practice. I would expect that him being ranked as the worlds best chef would provide a lot more entertainment value than actually has in reality.
For the experience of watching a Great Person at work.
Similar to the above, except I wouldn’t expect as much interest purely for being a Great Person.
Thanks for the concrete examples. Of course the drawback of getting concrete is that since my reasons for finding them uncompelling are also rather concrete and specific and don’t fit into any particular pattern, it’s not clear what conclusions to draw :-). But:
I already make pasta-bake dishes with different kinds of pasta, and I didn’t need to watch a multi-Michelin chef to tell me that was OK.
My bechamel sauces are already pretty simple.
I already try to use high-quality ingredients. (This is a thing that’s emphasized, e.g., in a lot of cookery books.) It may be that the likes of Bottura are better than I am at seeing which ingredients it matters more for, but I think I have reasonable intuitions for this already.
I already make pasta-bake dishes with different kinds of cheese, and again I didn’t need a multi-Michelin chef to tell me this. (If there’s a specific thing I learned this from, it’s probably the experience of eating a “quatro formaggi” pizza many many years ago. No multi-Michelin chefs involved there either.)
When I make pasta-bake dishes I already leave the cheese in chunks. Again, no multi-Michelin chefs involved.
I agree that the fact that he has his ingredients prepped before the start of each video is some evidence that mise en place matters even in non-restaurant situations. But (1) there are already plenty of cookery books aimed at home cooks urging you to bother with mise en place, (2) there are plenty of non-world-class cooking YouTubers who also get their ingredients prepped before they start / at the start, so you could learn the same lesson elsewhere, and (3) it shouldn’t be very strong evidence because another explanation is just that watching someone finding things in their cupboards doesn’t make very compelling video.
Maybe there is a pattern to the above: the things you say you learned from watching a master at work, I (and I’m fairly sure many others) managed to learn in other ways, which suggests (though of course it doesn’t prove) that the advantage of watching a world-class chef rather than a merely professionally-competent one is not very large. (It suggests it in two ways. First of all, if I learned those things from people less stellar than Bottura then other people can too. Second, if even I know that you can make a good pasta dish with a variety of different pasta shapes and cheeses, then it seems a fair guess that a large proportion of cooks much more skilled than I am also know that, which in particular means that most merely-competent-professional level cooks know it, which means you could learn it from them too.)
Let me mention two things I haven’t accounted for. (1) It may be that any competent cook could teach the same lessons but that they’re easier to learn from someone you know is world-class, because you find what they say more believable. That might be true, but if so I think it’s an individual quirk rather than something that makes world-class teachers much better. I don’t have any particular difficulty believing advice I get from merely-competent chefs, and I’m pretty sure that’s typical. (2) It may be that any competent cook could teach the same lessons but would also teach other anti-lessons, and that what distinguishes Bottura-level chefs is that they don’t have misconceptions to pass on. That might be true, but I haven’t so far noticed that when I watch Bottura (or Ramsay, who at least has been at something close to Bottura’s level) or read books by the likes of Keller or Robuchon I keep thinking “oh, gosh, that contradicts something I thought I knew from reading/watching lesser chefs”.
To be clear, I’m not rejecting the idea that one might sometimes learn more from watching a top-level chef like Bottura than from watching Binging with Babish (skilled amateur) or Bon Appetit (mostly merely-competent professional) or whatever. But the skill level of a teacher is not the only thing that determines the effectiveness of their teaching, and it seems to me that even if the only thing you care about in your cooking videos is how much they teach you (and not at all about entertainment, the illusion of getting to know a nice friendly person, etc.) a carefully thought out, well presented video from an ordinary professional is likely to teach you more than one of Bottura’s.
This is partly because I think Bottura’s are unusually bad in all respects other than his own skill. If someone put together a series where they went to the home kitchens of, say, a dozen Michelin-level chefs, talked to them for ten minutes about what they were about to make, did a single take using no more than an hour of the chef’s time for a half-hour video, and gave it just enough editing to not suck too badly, I suspect that would make very good YouTube content, it would teach viewers a lot, and I personally would probably watch the hell out of it. It wouldn’t need to be at Ramsay’s level of slickness or stuffed with jokes or anything. And my guess is that something like that would actually do pretty well on YouTube.
Hm, I think we agree about a lot of things. There are a lot of people I’d prefer to watch over Bottura for all of the reasons you said. But I like to supplement the other stuff with Bottura. Which, actually, sounds like something you also agree with.
I agree that all of the examples I gave are things that you could pick up, probably more efficiently, from other sources. But 1) getting the stamp of approval from someone like Bottura allows for a belief update that I think is larger than the update you can perform by hearing the sixth moderately skilled YouTuber preach it to you.
And more importantly, 2) there’s gotta be some “secret sauce” that distinguishes a master like Bottura from the rest! Which we agree on. So...
2a) I personally enjoy getting to observe him and trying to figure out what it is. Is this a quirk of mine? I’m not sure. I get the sense that it’s maybe 30% me being unusually interested in this, and 70% a thing that a lot of people would enjoy.
2b) Maybe the examples I gave haven’t hit the nail on the head in terms of me figuring out the secrets. Maybe none of the examples I have succeeded in this. But I suspect that over time you’d pick some of this “secret sauce” up, even if it’s moreso subconsciously/via osmosis. Mopping up “secret sauce” isn’t really the most practical goal for someone like you or me, which is why I spend more time watching Adam Ragusea, who is extremely practical and a great teacher, but as a supplement, I think it’s fun to spend some time seeking out the secret sauce.
And my guess is that something like that would actually do pretty well on YouTube.
I agree!
FWIW, after talking this through, with you and elsewhere, I’ve come to believe that Botturas YouTube channel is a pretty bad example of the larger point I’m trying to make in this post about the best frequently not rising to the top. Well, not necessarily “the best” and “the top”. Moreso about quality and reception.
I think a much better example is with his restaurant! Iirc from Chefs Table, he struggled for a while, and then success came very quickly after he received a good review or some magazine ranked him. So then, quality didn’t really change (food + ambiance + service + location + whatever else), but reception changed significantly. I suspect that this sort of thing happens all of the time, and that what abramdemski proposes about getting the right exposure and then benefiting from a snowball effect is a very plausible explanation.
Good idea about getting more concrete. Here are some examples that come to mind:
A few weeks ago I had some leftover pasta and meatballs. The pasta wasn’t enough to feed myself and my girlfriend, so I opened up a box of pasta that was shaped differently, eg. rigatoni when the leftovers were shells, and mixed it with the sauce and meatballs. My girlfriend was upset and thought that was really weird. I left that experience feeling confused about my culinary intuitions, because while she had strong feelings about it, it seemed perfectly fine to me. Fast forward to a week or two ago, I watched one of Massimo’s videos where he cooked mac ‘n’ cheese, and he too used many different shapes of pasta. Seeing that, I update my beliefs pretty strongly towards such a thing being reasonable, because I trust his intuition. There are caveats of course. Fine dining is a different context than a casual Wednesday night meal. Maybe it makes sense to do “weird” things in the former context but not in the latter. These are things to think about, but I believe that there is still a pretty good amount of value in watching someone like Massimo make decisions. I think I can use my common sense to make reasonable updates to my beliefs. Not just about the specific instance (eg. different types of pasta), but about the more general category (doing “weird” things). Contrast this with watching, let’s call it Some Random YouTuber. For Some Random YouTuber, I don’t have that same amount of trust in their intuition, and thus I can’t make the same updates to my beliefs. Let me provide some additional concrete examples.
In that same mac ‘n’ cheese video, his bechamel sauce wasn’t too crazy. He didn’t do anything too fancy to it. This surprised me a little bit. I would have expected a chef like him to have tricks up his sleeve, but that didn’t really happen.
Or maybe it did. Maybe the trick is using super high quality ingredients. I’ve been getting the impression that for more mundane ingredients like milk and flour he tends to use the type of stuff you’d get at the supermarket, but for ingredients like parmigiano reggiano, he always seems to have some sort of super high quality version. He doesn’t really emphasize it though. Maybe this is just an instinct that great chefs have. “Well duh, of course you wouldn’t just use parmigiano reggiano from the supermarket.”
Still in that same video, I thought it was a little interesting that he used so many different types of cheeses. I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from that. It’s something that I’ve sorta stashed away to keep in mind and come back to.
I noticed that he added chunks of ricotta cheese. I have a feeling there’s something important there: heterogeneity. Instead of just a uniform flavor throughout, you get these pockets of something with a different flavor and texture. Again, he didn’t really call this out specifically, and if he were a better video maker I think it’s something he would have talked about (Kenji Lopez-Alt does a fantastic job of this), but I still find it pretty cool to be able to observe him and try to take what I can from it. Maybe this is one of those things that is obvious to him that he doesn’t even think to mention.
I’ve heard the term “mise en place” before. It means that you should prep your ingredients before you start cooking. I’ve always wondered whether that’s just something that people say but in practice, when good chefs are actually cooking at home for their families, that just goes out the window. I noticed that in his videos he always has stuff prepped. I interpret that as weak evidence because it could be because he’s filming, but it’s something.
I could continue to give more examples like these if you’re interested, but I think this probably gets the point across about the value I see in getting to watch someone who’s a master.
Maybe. His videos aren’t about that, but I happen to be someone who watches a ton of culinary YouTube stuff and has also read books, and IMO there are a lot of subtle things you pick up with video that you don’t pick up in text + pictures (many books are annoyingly light on pictures too).
Yeah, I agree that this isn’t a compelling reason to watch him.
Nothing comes to mind for me here.
I think this is the big one. I tried to address it in my first block of text.
To me this feels like there’s a lot of overlap with culinary judgement, and my response is similar.
This is certainly a reason I’d expect people to watch his videos, and a secondary reason why I enjoyed watching them. I agree that there are better options out there, like Ramsay perhaps. And I agree that it makes sense for the existence of such options to take away from Botturas viewers. But not as much as it actually does in practice. I would expect that him being ranked as the worlds best chef would provide a lot more entertainment value than actually has in reality.
Similar to the above, except I wouldn’t expect as much interest purely for being a Great Person.
Thanks for the concrete examples. Of course the drawback of getting concrete is that since my reasons for finding them uncompelling are also rather concrete and specific and don’t fit into any particular pattern, it’s not clear what conclusions to draw :-). But:
I already make pasta-bake dishes with different kinds of pasta, and I didn’t need to watch a multi-Michelin chef to tell me that was OK.
My bechamel sauces are already pretty simple.
I already try to use high-quality ingredients. (This is a thing that’s emphasized, e.g., in a lot of cookery books.) It may be that the likes of Bottura are better than I am at seeing which ingredients it matters more for, but I think I have reasonable intuitions for this already.
I already make pasta-bake dishes with different kinds of cheese, and again I didn’t need a multi-Michelin chef to tell me this. (If there’s a specific thing I learned this from, it’s probably the experience of eating a “quatro formaggi” pizza many many years ago. No multi-Michelin chefs involved there either.)
When I make pasta-bake dishes I already leave the cheese in chunks. Again, no multi-Michelin chefs involved.
I agree that the fact that he has his ingredients prepped before the start of each video is some evidence that mise en place matters even in non-restaurant situations. But (1) there are already plenty of cookery books aimed at home cooks urging you to bother with mise en place, (2) there are plenty of non-world-class cooking YouTubers who also get their ingredients prepped before they start / at the start, so you could learn the same lesson elsewhere, and (3) it shouldn’t be very strong evidence because another explanation is just that watching someone finding things in their cupboards doesn’t make very compelling video.
Maybe there is a pattern to the above: the things you say you learned from watching a master at work, I (and I’m fairly sure many others) managed to learn in other ways, which suggests (though of course it doesn’t prove) that the advantage of watching a world-class chef rather than a merely professionally-competent one is not very large. (It suggests it in two ways. First of all, if I learned those things from people less stellar than Bottura then other people can too. Second, if even I know that you can make a good pasta dish with a variety of different pasta shapes and cheeses, then it seems a fair guess that a large proportion of cooks much more skilled than I am also know that, which in particular means that most merely-competent-professional level cooks know it, which means you could learn it from them too.)
Let me mention two things I haven’t accounted for. (1) It may be that any competent cook could teach the same lessons but that they’re easier to learn from someone you know is world-class, because you find what they say more believable. That might be true, but if so I think it’s an individual quirk rather than something that makes world-class teachers much better. I don’t have any particular difficulty believing advice I get from merely-competent chefs, and I’m pretty sure that’s typical. (2) It may be that any competent cook could teach the same lessons but would also teach other anti-lessons, and that what distinguishes Bottura-level chefs is that they don’t have misconceptions to pass on. That might be true, but I haven’t so far noticed that when I watch Bottura (or Ramsay, who at least has been at something close to Bottura’s level) or read books by the likes of Keller or Robuchon I keep thinking “oh, gosh, that contradicts something I thought I knew from reading/watching lesser chefs”.
To be clear, I’m not rejecting the idea that one might sometimes learn more from watching a top-level chef like Bottura than from watching Binging with Babish (skilled amateur) or Bon Appetit (mostly merely-competent professional) or whatever. But the skill level of a teacher is not the only thing that determines the effectiveness of their teaching, and it seems to me that even if the only thing you care about in your cooking videos is how much they teach you (and not at all about entertainment, the illusion of getting to know a nice friendly person, etc.) a carefully thought out, well presented video from an ordinary professional is likely to teach you more than one of Bottura’s.
This is partly because I think Bottura’s are unusually bad in all respects other than his own skill. If someone put together a series where they went to the home kitchens of, say, a dozen Michelin-level chefs, talked to them for ten minutes about what they were about to make, did a single take using no more than an hour of the chef’s time for a half-hour video, and gave it just enough editing to not suck too badly, I suspect that would make very good YouTube content, it would teach viewers a lot, and I personally would probably watch the hell out of it. It wouldn’t need to be at Ramsay’s level of slickness or stuffed with jokes or anything. And my guess is that something like that would actually do pretty well on YouTube.
Hm, I think we agree about a lot of things. There are a lot of people I’d prefer to watch over Bottura for all of the reasons you said. But I like to supplement the other stuff with Bottura. Which, actually, sounds like something you also agree with.
I agree that all of the examples I gave are things that you could pick up, probably more efficiently, from other sources. But 1) getting the stamp of approval from someone like Bottura allows for a belief update that I think is larger than the update you can perform by hearing the sixth moderately skilled YouTuber preach it to you.
And more importantly, 2) there’s gotta be some “secret sauce” that distinguishes a master like Bottura from the rest! Which we agree on. So...
2a) I personally enjoy getting to observe him and trying to figure out what it is. Is this a quirk of mine? I’m not sure. I get the sense that it’s maybe 30% me being unusually interested in this, and 70% a thing that a lot of people would enjoy.
2b) Maybe the examples I gave haven’t hit the nail on the head in terms of me figuring out the secrets. Maybe none of the examples I have succeeded in this. But I suspect that over time you’d pick some of this “secret sauce” up, even if it’s moreso subconsciously/via osmosis. Mopping up “secret sauce” isn’t really the most practical goal for someone like you or me, which is why I spend more time watching Adam Ragusea, who is extremely practical and a great teacher, but as a supplement, I think it’s fun to spend some time seeking out the secret sauce.
I agree!
FWIW, after talking this through, with you and elsewhere, I’ve come to believe that Botturas YouTube channel is a pretty bad example of the larger point I’m trying to make in this post about the best frequently not rising to the top. Well, not necessarily “the best” and “the top”. Moreso about quality and reception.
I think a much better example is with his restaurant! Iirc from Chefs Table, he struggled for a while, and then success came very quickly after he received a good review or some magazine ranked him. So then, quality didn’t really change (food + ambiance + service + location + whatever else), but reception changed significantly. I suspect that this sort of thing happens all of the time, and that what abramdemski proposes about getting the right exposure and then benefiting from a snowball effect is a very plausible explanation.