Though we live in a world of street food pop-ups, rock-star chefs and Instagrammed baps, home-cooking is on the wane, declining by 54% in the past 30 years. The same survey (of 4,000 Brits) also found that young people don’t have the skills to cook a week’s worth of meals; and one in four has no interest in cooking at all.
In an east London attic studio, four millennials are leading the fightback against kitchen apathy, in an attempt to bridge what they call “the cooking gap”: the disparity between food-lovers and food-makers. They are trained chef Ben Ebbrell, 29, and his friends Barry Taylor, 29, Jamie Spafford and Mike Huttlestone, both 30. They went to school together in Hertfordshire and now run SORTEDFood, a YouTube channel that has grown into one of the world’s leading social media cooking brands.
Last week they partnered with the Co-op to launch Now Cook It, a comprehensive free online cookery course, with step-by-step videos in “one-pot recipes and core cooking techniques,” says Ben (The Trained One). He lists these techniques as “poaching, boiling, grilling, frying, baking, roasting and braising… And if you can understand what they are, when to use and how to control them, you can in theory cook 90% of the world’s dishes,” he asserts.
“It’s cooking for idiots like us,” grins Mike (The Techie One, who edits their videos). “If we can do these recipes, anyone can,” chimes Barry (The Creative One).
“Cooking for idiots” has been their concept since they started their YouTube channel seven years ago, in order to share recipes Ben had given friends to help them eat better at university. “Things had got bad,” says Jamie (The Business One, with a marketing degree). “Like, frozen doner kebab bad.” Now they have 1.7m subscribers globally who watch for an average five and a half minutes. In the attention-deficit world of social media, that’s A Very Long Time.
SORTEDFood has flourished in a crowded marketplace. Food is one of the fastest-growing genres on YouTube. Cooking works here, because you can search for recipes, see them being made and pause when you want. Star chefs such as Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver (with Food Tube) have successful channels each with 2.8m subscribers, but SORTEDFood claims its content has more shares, likes and comments than any other personality-led food channel.
What SORTEDFood has in its favour is their accessibility – the fact that they aren’t celebrity chefs – and their comic presenting style, where they slaughter each other in an uncontrived Ant and Dec-ish way that only longstanding friends can.
Their twice-weekly FridgeCam shows see them tackle classic dishes, but they often veer towards the outlandish for entertainment value – granola-fried chicken, bavette steak with ants, chocolate soup. “If you’re cooking from scratch with bought ingredients, you’ll naturally get a more balanced diet,” says Ben. “But at the same time we don’t shy away from milkshakes with dollops of ice cream.” And their audience is involved every step of the way, suggesting recipes on Twitter, critiquing new dishes on Instagram, discussing each FridgeCam episode afterwards on the website, and participating in live “cook-alongs” on Facebook.
But why are the “foodie generation” so estranged from the kitchen? There is no easy answer. “There are lots of apps where you can get restaurant-quality food delivered to your door,” begins Mike. “We’ve nothing against restaurants, but the way they season food, if you’re eating that every day it’s not healthy, and it’s expensive. Compulsory cooking lessons being taken off the school curriculum is part of it. And socially people are running out of time, so convenience is a huge factor.
“With the cooking gap, things have just built up. And we’re four guys who have a snippet of an answer and a decent audience, so we’re trying to make a difference.”
Visit nowcookit.co.uk for free cookery lessons with SORTEDfood and Co-op
