Lights, Camera … Latkes

[Video below!]

It’s easy to look like a frizzy-haired sweaty mess while cooking on camera. The studio lights beam into my eyes, the stove burners and ovens heat up the kitchen. And because the audience of the videos I am shooting will not be able to actually taste the latkes and applesauce I am preparing, vanity is not entirely superficial — my look is part of what I’m selling. I want to show all  of YouTube that you can stay cool and calm while cooking for Chanukah.

When Jeff Appelbaum asked me to be one of the teaching chefs on his newly launched food channel, Salted, I jumped at the opportunity.  Appelbaum and I share a mission: to provide extraordinary education in the world of cooking.

Although food shows have inundated our television airwaves, food television is not synonymous with cooking education. With programs like “Iron Chef” and “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” the Food Network seduces viewers with saucy close-ups and sizzling competitions.

And though viewers, from the comfort of their own couches, are exposed to new types of cuisines and witness behind-the-scenes food preparation, they are left with hunger. They are not given any tools to satisfy that hunger with the use of their own pots and pans.

Essentially, television cooking shows offer food porn, a term that is now commonplace in our vernacular and one of the most searchable on social media platforms such as Instagram.

Just as we would not expect sexual pornography to improve the skills of lovers, we cannot expect food porn to turn anyone into a cook. And yet, if crafted with education in mind, video offers an ideal avenue to effectively teach cooking to a world that is already baited by the visual stimulae of food. That is the idea behind Salted, Appelbaum’s brainchild. Salted is a new type of cooking school. It is completely online. Members have full access to beautiful, high-definition videos of 70 world-class chefs, including New York City’s Jonathan Benno and Los Angeles’ Ori Menashe, teaching the skills and recipes they know best.

Appelbaum cites repetition as the No. 1 factor needed to learn culinary skill sets, and with Salted there is nothing stopping you from listening to your professors’ lectures more than once to make sure you picked up every detail as you test recipes in your own kitchen.

Appelbaum is disrupting the status quo by offering a quality culinary education at a fraction of the cost of most culinary schools. As The New York Times has reported, an onslaught of culinary-school graduates are faced with financial debts upward of $50,000, a sum far greater than they are able to recoup with $10-an-hour jobs in professional kitchens. At $99 a year, Salted offers wisdom from the most talented and passionate chefs at Netflix prices. For now, the majority of Salted members are hobbyists, and they hail from all over the world, including Cambodia and Bulgaria.

With a background in e-commerce entrepreneurship with startups such as DealQuad (a sort of Groupon for university students), Appelbaum is experienced at eliminating expensive obstacles and paving a cost-conscious path directly to the consumer.

“When I was starting my first business in L.A., the white noise in the background was the Food Network,” Appelbaum said. “It piqued my curiosity. As a culture, I saw that we were deeply engrossed in food and that our newest celebrities were chefs. We had over 3,000 farmers markets in the country, and food was the new hotbed of venture capital. I wondered how I could capitalize on this phenomenon and make it easier for people to learn to cook. The Internet might not be the answer to all of our problems, but I think it is the answer to most of them.”

Because Salted offers a year of online cooking courses for the price of one of my hands-on cooking classes, it is only fair that we address this question: Can people learn to cook from videos alone? In my professional opinion, no.

Cooking is a community-based undertaking. We must learn by eating each other’s foods, by being in the kitchen together, and by being willing to vulnerably share our creations with others.

Beginner cooks usually need some handholding in the kitchen. That’s what classes offer. On the other hand, more experienced cooks who are ready to take risks in the kitchen, no matter how small, can benefit  from Salted’s detail-focused videos that address kitchen skills such as chopping and roasting, and that also anticipate common questions in each recipe video. 

In the future,