4 ms·

That's kind of like asking any variety of, "Can X videos make us better at X?" Absolutely, but the more relevant question is if a particular cooking video or s

That's kind of like asking any variety of, "Can X videos make us better at X?" Absolutely, but the more relevant question is if a particular cooking video or series, out of the vast set of "cooking videos" will make a particular viewer a better cook. Probably not. I'd suggest a few questions to determine if that's true. What is the specificity of the video? Some "cooking" videos only pretend to be about teaching cooking but they're actually about something entirely different. I love watching old episodes of Iron Chef but I don't expect to learn anything practical. Some cooking shows are about a particular aspect of cooking; a video on cooking with Spam won't make me a better cook because I don't cook with Spam. A video on how to make cakes look attractive with fondant won't make me a better cook because I like food made of food ingredients rather than construction materials. Does the author know their subject matter? Many videos tell you stuff that's just plain wrong, or even dangerous (don't make popcorn on a soda-can stove with methanol or it could blow up in your face). Are they level-appropriate? When I left for college, my mom gave me a copy of "How to boil an egg". I got a lot of benefit out of that book but something similar would be useless today. By the same token, years later, we got a lot of great information of of Rose Levy Beranbaum's "The Bread Bible", but it wouldn't have helped me at all as a freshman with a communal kitchen and minimal cooking ability. There's also the question of what the viewer is going to do with it. You can watch videos all day long without getting any better at cooking. If you want to get better at cooking you primarily need to cook. Some videos may aid that effort but even the best ones will only help to the extent that you're willing to implement what they teach and practice it.

airwejtilawj 3y ago
Of course. The vast majority of "cooking" videos are intended for entertainment, not instruction. I can honestly say that the majority of what I know today about cooking I learned from Youtube, but the most popular videos on Youtube are the most shallow ones, the ones that do three second cuts between unrelated images and spend most of their time showing people's faces instead of the purported subject matter. For most cooking videos, 95% of viewers will never even consider actually doing any cooking based on what they watched. But in spite of that, Youtube is an incredible learning resource for the minority of users who actually want to use it to learn. Maybe that's the best we can hope for.
- aprentic 3y ago
  I'd say the area where cooking videos particularly shine is technique and visual assessment. It's much harder to describe the proper motion in text than to just show a video. A still image of dough doesn't show you the elasticity as well as a video does. Areas they're particularly bad for is anything involving data; recipes, ratios, times. Those are all much easier to see in text. They're both pretty bad at teaching "feel". There's no way around tasting and poking at any recipe you're not familiar with. Neither videos nor text will teach you how to do that. They'll tell you it's important but you really just need to do it a bunch.

airwejtilawj 3y ago

Of course. The vast majority of "cooking" videos are intended for entertainment, not instruction. I can honestly say that the majority of what I know today about cooking I learned from Youtube, but the most popular videos on Youtube are the most shallow ones, the ones that do three second cuts between unrelated images and spend most of their time showing people's faces instead of the purported subject matter. For most cooking videos, 95% of viewers will never even consider actually doing any cooking based on what they watched. But in spite of that, Youtube is an incredible learning resource for the minority of users who actually want to use it to learn. Maybe that's the best we can hope for.

aprentic 3y ago
I'd say the area where cooking videos particularly shine is technique and visual assessment. It's much harder to describe the proper motion in text than to just show a video. A still image of dough doesn't show you the elasticity as well as a video does. Areas they're particularly bad for is anything involving data; recipes, ratios, times. Those are all much easier to see in text. They're both pretty bad at teaching "feel". There's no way around tasting and poking at any recipe you're not familiar with. Neither videos nor text will teach you how to do that. They'll tell you it's important but you really just need to do it a bunch.