Every chef hones their craft somewhere, whether it’s through a friend or relative’s kitchen, culinary school, or out in the field. But Andrew Rea, the mastermind behind the YouTube channel Binging With Babish, had a much more accessible way of figuring it out.
“I learned to cook via YouTube,” he explained during a recent cooking demonstration. “YouTube is the new way to learn how to cook. It was always a big hobby of mine. I grew up and my mom taught me how to bake when I was very, very young, and I just kept teaching myself. I didn’t get halfway decent until YouTube came along and then I was able to just look up whatever I needed to see.”
Rea, a self-taught chef, explained how he started cooking as he made chicken parm sliders doused in homemade buffalo sauce instead of tomato sauce, one of a few recipes he concocted ahead of the Super Bowl.
“A few seconds online and you can learn how to make something the best way possible from the best,” he added.
Rea, who makes dishes that feature in famous films and TV shows on top of offering basic tutorials for future chefs in the making, is still learning. As he walked through the process of making the sliders, he added that he learned the method of cutting dinner rolls evenly—slicing six rolls at a time through the middle—from BuzzFeed Tasty.
His videos regularly make overly difficult or downright impossible dishes to be attainable (or at least something that we might be tempted to take on ourselves), and seeing him prepare a dish in person was no different. And the end result wasn’t only delicious, but it seemed like something just about anyone could tackle.
He’s still learning, and he’s able to find new techniques with almost no effort at all.
“It’s never been a better time in history to learn how to cook,” Rea said.
