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> He explains that long videos don't do well. But it takes time to cook.

This is not a mystery. People don't "cook along" with videos. People watch cooking videos for either to get inspired or for a vibe, most often for both.

A stew might take hours to be ready, but the core idea of it can be expressed succinctly in a few sentences. Totally made up example: "We brown beef, and then simmer it with potatoes low and slow with the bones in. It is ready when the meat falls off from the bones. Spice with a pinch of cinnamon." Those are long and sweaty hours in a kitchen to make it, but you can read the idea in seconds. Put the details and quantities in the description. Those few who want to cook it will find it there.

If there is some technique or twist, make a video about that specifically? It doesn't all have to be recipes. I have watched a video the other day where a person explained why they put a few drops of water in the pan when they are frying bacon. If they would have done it in the middle of a 20 minute video I might have missed it. Or what is even more likely would have been skeptical of the technique without the added explanation and test pieces where he has done it both ways to show the difference.

And videos you watch for vibes are not about cooking. They are about the personality of the presenter, that parasocial interaction. It doesn't matter how the food tastes. You won't eat it anyway. What matters are the feelings you experience while watching it.

Perhaps a stew doesn't need to show all the steps.

But a lot of recipes require you to multitask between several parallel workflows of ingredient preparation and combination, keeping you active in cooking until either the final step ("put everything except the garnish into the oven for X minutes") or until the recipe is complete.

I'm an amateur who enjoys cooking and does it once a day in order to feed my family.

One of my biggest learnings is that no matter what I do it takes quite a while to cook a meal. Huge complex meals can take hours to prepare, but even a simple meal usually takes me half an hour - because that's just the time it takes to grab the ingredients, boil water for pasta/rice/potatoes/..., cook and present it. The time it takes to cook a meal is largely determined by the duration of the longest step. All the rest is done in parallel, with more complex recipes simply requiring more multitasking. So cooking a simpler meal often makes for a less stressful experience and simpler flavours, but often doesn't save much time.

Exactly what I have experienced. Even whatever time is mentioned in the cookbooks, I was never able to beat it. It takes a minimum of 45 minutes to prepare a decent dish for me. I too am an amateur and I measure my time with my mother's time and I see a difference but not so much. I do not do multitasking if I have something on the stove which requires constant stirring or moving around.

Also I found that slow cooking brings out the best flavours and aroma.

My sister was a chef. I cook okay but the very difference with her is 1. the skills, 2. the tools and 3. the ability to do things in parallel. All that means she's a lot faster than me.

1. To chop an onion or a shallot real fast, you need to do it a lot. In restaurant, you can probably chop 100x what you can do at home. Grated carrot with julienne knive ? It seems absurd to me at the time, but in the end that's a training.

2. To not lose time, you need the proper tools (and know how to use them). Sharped knive, flour stifler, ... . For example, my knives are not sharpened often enough, which means I cannot chop vegetables that well.

3. Cooking several things in parrallel will go wrong if you do not know what to look at before things get burned. If you are too "prudent", you will lower the fires and degrade your scalability.

Video editing is a thing. Something that takes 30 minutes to cook can (and should!) be cut down to 10 minutes of video. You cut five onions, you film how you cut one and edit out the rest. If you stir for 10 minutes watching for certain signs to note when it's done - put in a 30 second show&tell for when it's close to done but not yet; and a 30 second show&tell for when it is ready; and edit out the other 9 minutes.

You can look at Josh Weissman's channel to see that in action. All his stuff takes forever, but it is edited down to be informative and entertaining

Yeah but if you're a newbie you're not really seeing the whole thing. That's the problem in my opinion. You're told to stir until golden brown, wait till the jiggle is just right, etc. You edit out the boring bits because that's common TV etiquette but then it doesn't become a cooking video anymore, it's just entertainment. That's the fundamental divergence of cooking content: instructional cooking or cooking as entertainment. One tries to mask itself as the other, because the other is boring. You end up with this weird edutainment content that's barely instructional and ripe with inaccuracies, hence recipes that take three times as long in reality to prepare.

I wager that most people hardly ever try the recipes they see, and of those that do, most suck at cooking. The point at which you start fast forwarding through stuff is the point in which you don't need cooking videos anymore and can just work off a written recipe. People want entertainment, and cooking is one of those easily monetized. non-politicized things on youtube that's just ripe to turn your brain off and follow along.

Well, no, the whole point is that a well edited cooking video would help a newbie to understand it, by explicitly and intentionally showing what exactly does "stir until golden brown" mean instead of just filming the whole cooking process and expecting that they'll magically notice which moment they should pay attention to.

You don't need to show the initial 5 minutes of stirring which are unambiguously not golden brown, you do need to show the "it looks brownish but it's not yet golden brown" and the "this is done" steps - and if you cut out the unimportant parts which aren't relevant to any decision, then it helps focus the learner's attention where it's pedagogically most effective.

In an ideal world they would also show "this is how it looks when it's too much and you should have stopped earlier", but that requires cooking/wasting an extra batch.

And for onion cutting, instead of spending the valuable viewer's time on looking at how you cut 5 onions, instead show how you cut 1 onion but make sure that the camera angles make it clearly visible how exactly you do it while you explain it; then the other 4 onions then add no value and can be cut off-camera.

Video editing? Shhhh! Don't give away all the secrets.. I'm waiting for their geology channel.

> Audiences want fast.

Audiences don't want long segments of monotonic action with predictable outcome. No need to show how to slice a kilo of onions. It doesn't sound like the chef videos you mentioned suffer from this, but your "want fast" generalization is off the mark.

He doesn't waste time mincing onions, at most he'll showcase how to do one with proper technique. He has entire videos dedicated on how to chop vegetables and prepare meat. His videos take a long time because he doesn't bullshit the cooking process. You watch him stir until he's at the right consistency to add other ingredients, you watch him go through the entire process for literal 30 minute meals because that's what he promises you. If you have your ingredients ready, this will take 30 minutes. And 30 minutes is what you get.

Yep, that's how I read your original description and I'd watch the heck out of that if I had time. I was just commenting on the "they want it fast" remark.

I have seen a couple of TikTok creators do cooking videos in a very condensed way. They cut everything, but the important parts out of the video. For example no one wants to watch something in the oven for 20 Minutes, just say that it goes in the oven for 20 minutes and show the result after you took it out.

I’ve cooked with him a few times (he gave classes at our family’s cookery shop) and he’s the real deal. Colourful doesn’t begin to describe his actual background, though.