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Scroll through your timeline of choice and it won’t be long until you land on a video posted by a social media chef trying to send their recipes viral.
Such is the popularity of cooking videos that everyone from Michelin star masters to self-taught beginners like Brooklyn Beckham are setting up tripods on their kitchen counters to capture the perfect cut, cuission or crust on their culinary creations.
But the lure of social media could, according to some industry figures,be causing young cooks forgo the formal training of a catering college.
Will Murray, who worked at the double Michelin-starred restaurant Dinner by Heston before opening his own critically acclaimed venue, Fallow, said social media cooking videos sometimes stretch the boundaries of what is possible.
“Social media has helped people get into cooking. Do I think that’s necessarily the best way to do it? I don’t. The difference right now is there is so much more cooking content online that people look to get their knowledge elsewhere other than old school methods, the traditional gateways into it,” he said.
“If people think it’s easy because they saw it on Instagram, that might set someone up for a hard entry into a kitchen.”
Murray said that some of the apprenticeships are finding it difficult to find young people who want to do the traditional cookery courses: “A lot of apprenticeships are struggling up and down the country to get young talent. I don’t think cooking is any different, it is hard to get people inspired.”
Murray is a judge for the San Pellegrino academy and said these competitions help forge people’s skills. Applications for the academy are open, and the Roux scholarship winner has just been announced.
Twenty-eight-year-old Harrison Brockington, head chef and owner of Gather in Totnes, Devon, won the prestigious award with a Mediterranean-inspired “Surf & Turf” dish and won a three-month apprenticeship at a three-star Michelinrestaurant.
Murray said: “We’ve put quite a few people through competitions at Fallow. It’s a proper pressure cooker, it teaches you to work at such a high level and for young people to be exposed to that is brilliant.”
It has been easier for him than other restaurant owners to hire chefs; his restaurant has 1.5 million followers on Instagram and the team is constantly posting videos of their interesting recipes, including a whole cod’s head bathed in sriracha butter.
Emily Roux, Michelin-starred chef at Caractère restaurant in Notting Hill, is the daughter of celebrity chef Michel Roux Jr. She is also judging the San Pellegrino awards and is involved in the Roux scholarship.
She said the competitions help test skills in the real-life and high-pressured environments of cooking for other chefs, and allow cooks to learn skills they may not have had before.
“It is also a great life lesson, it is putting a little bit of pressure on yourself going through a competition. They’re never easy. I think they help with skills, you can learn from the other candidates there, there is a lot of waiting involved when things are being judged, and a lot of chatting.”
The new MasterChef judges Anna Haugh and Grace Dent have complained about the proliferation of unrealistic cooking videos on TikTok in the buildup to the new series.
Haugh said in a recent interview: “Some of the stuff you see on social media, it breaks my heart as a chef, where I’m like: that’s not true, that can’t be done.”
Dent added that her feelings on social media recipes “have become much more nuanced recently”.
She said: “On one level, I’m absolutely aware that a lot of those recipes don’t work, because I’ve been foolish enough to try them. Like, this cake only takes two and a half minutes, it only needs bicarbonate of soda, a frying pan and an egg.”
