Khan Academy for Cooking?
Hey IH,
Do you guys know of a website like Khan Academy, i.e. short, concise videos covering topics as well as more in-depth tutorials for cooking and other life skills that a competent adult should know?
I'm a freshman in college so I'm new to the art of being a fully functioning human and every website for cooking and home life is garbage. I think it might be a fun project to work on. Would you all use it if it existed?
Thanks in advance.
kenji lopez alt's videos and articles on serious eats are pretty good, but you're right; most content out there is garbage.
Unfortunately, as a viable business you are better off putting out garbage, or rather mediocre content. Imagine that great content takes 100x more effort and expertise to put out than mediocre content. A competitor can put out a much greater variety and therefore more popular content by being mediocre or simply ripping great content off (look at the buzzfeed cooking shorts, for example).
I think this is a big problem with food bloggers out there currently. They produce so much, the quality isn't there...
That's why places like Milk Street and America's Test Kitchen (and even at a fundamental level, cookbooks) survive. They product quality. And make subscribers pay for it.
I've used a few. I used http://www.saltedtv.com and https://rouxbe.com/cooking-courses and https://www.craftsy.com/cooking/shop/cooking-classes they were all helpful.
I am a fan of tasty.co. The short videos there are definitely great given my attention span.
If you're really interested in the idea, you should see what this guy has done with Brazilian Jiu Jitsu: http://www.bjjcollective.com/ . It's essentially curated by topic, into a ton of detail. Not the prettiest website, but it's useful if you're into the sport.
Making the videos yourself is going to be hard.
Consider making an accompanying textual list of ingredients and steps that when clicked on positions the video at the appropriate moment in time. That way the viewer can quickly jump to the content in the video that they immediately care about.
Additionally if you could allow users to filter recipe / video by ingredients that would also be valuable for people that are short on ingredients and are just looking for a quick solution.
To be honest I don't think that video is a good format for cooking. Just imagine - you want to cook something, what do you usually need? The list of ingredients and the consequence of steps. With video, it's very hard to go forth (and maybe back), hard to stop at the specific position.
But! If you provide some way (can be done programmatically) to list all steps as a text and link a short video/photo for each step it probably will be more valuable.
I just noticed your comment. My suggestion above may adequately address your valid concern. i.e providing accompanying text that links to relevant points in the video.
There's a lot of free stuff.
In terms of a paid product, this is the most successful one I know of: https://www.masterclass.com/classes/thomas-keller-teaches-cooking-techniques
Thomas Keller's class is spot on for learning a wide range of cooking fundamentals. I'd recommend it as well!
You could test out your idea by making a website of a curated list of cooking videos on YT you really enjoy and see what kind of response you get.
This is smart! Thanks for the suggestion.
btw, take a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/GifRecipes/ or https://imgur.com/r/GifRecipes and their sources like https://www.tastemade.com/recipes for your competition
Good suggestion, like http://thekidshouldseethis.com/ but for cooking