Not only has Massimo Bottura’s YouTube channel failed to rise to the top of (say) YouTube channels you find if you go looking for cookery content on YouTube—it’s failed to rise to the top of YouTube channels you find if you put “Massimo Bottura” into the YouTube search box. (I think its first appearance on the page when you do that is in 29th position.)
[EDITED to add:]
… having said which, I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing. I took a look at a couple of his videos. One was (for me) practically unwatchable, consisting mostly of Bottura and (I assume) his family being annoyingly loud; I bailed after a few minutes of near-content-free video. Another was just an advertisement for some masterclass thing he’s selling. I tried another video with some actual cookery in it and forced myself to watch all of it despite his annoying family, background noise, terrible camerawork, etc. I learned a bit, but if there was anything in it that revealed 3-star Michelin chef magic I missed it.
He may be a brilliant chef, but I don’t think his YouTube channel is “the best” or deserves to “rise to the top”.
His videos are clearly filmed with a phone, vertically, with no effort whatsoever in terms of production.Also he posted around 15 videos in the span of a couple of monhts, and never posted again. If you contrast that with cooking channels like Adam Ragusea, it’s pretty clear why it didn’t become as popular.
My perspective is that things like the camerawork and background noise in his videos a) aren’t particularly bad, and b) given (a), I’d think it’d only knock him down a few points. Maybe from, let’s say 800k views to 700k or 600k, not all the way down to 10-20k (very ballpark-y of course).
As far as Michelin chef magic, personally I feel like I have picked up some things, like the amount of ingredients he uses. I see it as valuable to be able to watch someone with that degree of mastery. A lot of times such people don’t actually know how to explain or articulate what they’re doing correctly, so observing them can be hit or miss, but still seems pretty valuable to me.
It’s not just the camerawork and background noise. The information density is low. The bad camerawork, as well as being annoying in itself, makes it difficult to see any details of what he’s up to, so you can’t e.g. improve your knife skills by observing exactly what he does when chopping things. He explains rather little of what he’s doing. At least in the video I watched all of, things like quantities and times are left unspecified. He wasn’t doing anything particularly imaginative or highly polished. I can readily believe that I was watching a master at work, but I don’t think there’s anything much to distinguish what I saw from what I’d have seen if he’d been secretly replaced by a merely-competent professional chef.
(To be clear, I’m not claiming that all the things I describe are bad. What’s relevant here is that they make it matter less just how good he is.)
Why, concretely, would I watch one of his videos?
To learn some specific fact or recipe. (For that, a book is usually better.)
To observe his technique doing some “ordinary” thing. (For that, the difference between a three-star Michelin chef and an ordinarily competent professional line cook is probably small. The line cook may actually be better at it—they probably do it more than Bottura does. If some random merely-OK professional has a YouTube channel with better presentation and/or more variety of things, they’re better for this than Bottura. A highly skilled amateur might be just as good for my purposes, in fact; the professional may use some technique that works very well but takes hundreds of hours of practice to do competently, and watching them do it may do little to improve my sub-professional skills if I’m not going to put in those hundreds of hours. And the amateur may make mistakes and then fix them, which the professional is much less likely to do but might be instructive.)
To observe his technique doing some unusual thing that he, specifically, is particularly good at. (That would be good. I don’t know of any examples on his channel. Do you?)
To learn from his probably-exceptional culinary judgement. (Plausible, if there were actually anything on his channel demonstrating that judgement. I didn’t see any examples in the quick look I had. Did you?)
To be inspired by his probably-exceptionally-ingenious ideas: combinations of ingredients I’d never have thought of, etc. (Also plausible. Also no examples apparent to me.)
To be entertained. (If what I want is merely entertainment, I can turn to TV star Gordon Ramsay, also a multi-Michelin-star chef-proprietor. Or to cooking-comedy channels like You Suck At Cooking. Or many other things. I certainly wouldn’t go to Bottura’s videos, which I find grating rather than entertaining.)
For the experience of watching a Great Person at work. (I guess? But that isn’t a thing I particularly value, except to whatever extent I can see their Greatness actually being operative and learn from it, which—see above—doesn’t seem to be the case for Bottura’s YouTube channel.)
I’m quite sure that if you gave Bottura a skilled production team and used multiple hours of his time per episode, he could produce something as good as anything else out there. I bet he’s a more skilled cook than, say, Ramsay at this point. But doing that hasn’t been his priority—no doubt he prefers to get on with cooking and with running a restaurant (and, lately, with spending time with his family during the deadly worldwide plague) -- and that’s perfectly OK. But it means that what he does produce is neither very instructive nor very enjoyable to watch. For me, at least.
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.
This seems to assume roughly linear relationship between quality and reception. As I mentioned in my other comment, this seems far from necessary. We can have something like an exponential relationship between the two, in which case a small difference in quality can create a massive difference in reception.
I just don’t get why you think moderately bad camera work should a priori best be thought of as some percentage of views lost (taking something from 800k to 700k or 600k) rather than in orders of magnitude (taking something from 800k to 80k or 8k).
I think you’re underweighting production quality (false consensus bias?). Just as an example, my girlfriend is big into youtube, but she only watches high production channels, and will quickly skip past anything that looks like it’s been shot on a phone. She’ll also basically refuse to watch any movie or show that was shot before about the year 2000 for similar reasons.
Another big factor is personality of the creators. She likes to watch channels where she feels some connection to the creators. They’re usually a couple of people or more where there is entertaining and comedic banter that’s always going on besides whatever subject the actual video is about. It’s chiefly entertainment for her, with any educational content just being a bonus.
I would posit that most people who watch youtube have preferences closer to hers than to yours, although my own are probably closer to yours.
Here’s an example of the kind of video I’m talking about:
Yeah, maybe. My thinking is that some people care about it more than others, but in my experience watching YouTube videos (and I happen to watch a ton of cooking videos on YouTube), I recall seeing videos that seem basically even to Massimo in terms of production quality, personality, etc., yet have hundreds of thousands of views.
Not only has Massimo Bottura’s YouTube channel failed to rise to the top of (say) YouTube channels you find if you go looking for cookery content on YouTube—it’s failed to rise to the top of YouTube channels you find if you put “Massimo Bottura” into the YouTube search box. (I think its first appearance on the page when you do that is in 29th position.)
[EDITED to add:]
… having said which, I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing. I took a look at a couple of his videos. One was (for me) practically unwatchable, consisting mostly of Bottura and (I assume) his family being annoyingly loud; I bailed after a few minutes of near-content-free video. Another was just an advertisement for some masterclass thing he’s selling. I tried another video with some actual cookery in it and forced myself to watch all of it despite his annoying family, background noise, terrible camerawork, etc. I learned a bit, but if there was anything in it that revealed 3-star Michelin chef magic I missed it.
He may be a brilliant chef, but I don’t think his YouTube channel is “the best” or deserves to “rise to the top”.
His videos are clearly filmed with a phone, vertically, with no effort whatsoever in terms of production.Also he posted around 15 videos in the span of a couple of monhts, and never posted again. If you contrast that with cooking channels like Adam Ragusea, it’s pretty clear why it didn’t become as popular.
My perspective is that things like the camerawork and background noise in his videos a) aren’t particularly bad, and b) given (a), I’d think it’d only knock him down a few points. Maybe from, let’s say 800k views to 700k or 600k, not all the way down to 10-20k (very ballpark-y of course).
As far as Michelin chef magic, personally I feel like I have picked up some things, like the amount of ingredients he uses. I see it as valuable to be able to watch someone with that degree of mastery. A lot of times such people don’t actually know how to explain or articulate what they’re doing correctly, so observing them can be hit or miss, but still seems pretty valuable to me.
It’s not just the camerawork and background noise. The information density is low. The bad camerawork, as well as being annoying in itself, makes it difficult to see any details of what he’s up to, so you can’t e.g. improve your knife skills by observing exactly what he does when chopping things. He explains rather little of what he’s doing. At least in the video I watched all of, things like quantities and times are left unspecified. He wasn’t doing anything particularly imaginative or highly polished. I can readily believe that I was watching a master at work, but I don’t think there’s anything much to distinguish what I saw from what I’d have seen if he’d been secretly replaced by a merely-competent professional chef.
(To be clear, I’m not claiming that all the things I describe are bad. What’s relevant here is that they make it matter less just how good he is.)
Why, concretely, would I watch one of his videos?
To learn some specific fact or recipe. (For that, a book is usually better.)
To observe his technique doing some “ordinary” thing. (For that, the difference between a three-star Michelin chef and an ordinarily competent professional line cook is probably small. The line cook may actually be better at it—they probably do it more than Bottura does. If some random merely-OK professional has a YouTube channel with better presentation and/or more variety of things, they’re better for this than Bottura. A highly skilled amateur might be just as good for my purposes, in fact; the professional may use some technique that works very well but takes hundreds of hours of practice to do competently, and watching them do it may do little to improve my sub-professional skills if I’m not going to put in those hundreds of hours. And the amateur may make mistakes and then fix them, which the professional is much less likely to do but might be instructive.)
To observe his technique doing some unusual thing that he, specifically, is particularly good at. (That would be good. I don’t know of any examples on his channel. Do you?)
To learn from his probably-exceptional culinary judgement. (Plausible, if there were actually anything on his channel demonstrating that judgement. I didn’t see any examples in the quick look I had. Did you?)
To be inspired by his probably-exceptionally-ingenious ideas: combinations of ingredients I’d never have thought of, etc. (Also plausible. Also no examples apparent to me.)
To be entertained. (If what I want is merely entertainment, I can turn to TV star Gordon Ramsay, also a multi-Michelin-star chef-proprietor. Or to cooking-comedy channels like You Suck At Cooking. Or many other things. I certainly wouldn’t go to Bottura’s videos, which I find grating rather than entertaining.)
For the experience of watching a Great Person at work. (I guess? But that isn’t a thing I particularly value, except to whatever extent I can see their Greatness actually being operative and learn from it, which—see above—doesn’t seem to be the case for Bottura’s YouTube channel.)
I’m quite sure that if you gave Bottura a skilled production team and used multiple hours of his time per episode, he could produce something as good as anything else out there. I bet he’s a more skilled cook than, say, Ramsay at this point. But doing that hasn’t been his priority—no doubt he prefers to get on with cooking and with running a restaurant (and, lately, with spending time with his family during the deadly worldwide plague) -- and that’s perfectly OK. But it means that what he does produce is neither very instructive nor very enjoyable to watch. For me, at least.
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.
This seems to assume roughly linear relationship between quality and reception. As I mentioned in my other comment, this seems far from necessary. We can have something like an exponential relationship between the two, in which case a small difference in quality can create a massive difference in reception.
I just don’t get why you think moderately bad camera work should a priori best be thought of as some percentage of views lost (taking something from 800k to 700k or 600k) rather than in orders of magnitude (taking something from 800k to 80k or 8k).
Good point, exponential does seem like it could sense. I’m not sure.
I think you’re underweighting production quality (false consensus bias?). Just as an example, my girlfriend is big into youtube, but she only watches high production channels, and will quickly skip past anything that looks like it’s been shot on a phone. She’ll also basically refuse to watch any movie or show that was shot before about the year 2000 for similar reasons.
Another big factor is personality of the creators. She likes to watch channels where she feels some connection to the creators. They’re usually a couple of people or more where there is entertaining and comedic banter that’s always going on besides whatever subject the actual video is about. It’s chiefly entertainment for her, with any educational content just being a bonus.
I would posit that most people who watch youtube have preferences closer to hers than to yours, although my own are probably closer to yours.
Here’s an example of the kind of video I’m talking about:
Yeah, maybe. My thinking is that some people care about it more than others, but in my experience watching YouTube videos (and I happen to watch a ton of cooking videos on YouTube), I recall seeing videos that seem basically even to Massimo in terms of production quality, personality, etc., yet have hundreds of thousands of views.