"Gourmet Makes" and the Art of Failure
Illustration by Rodrigo Muñoz (@roy_mnz)
As a kid, one thing about cooking shows deeply confused me: were people supposed to follow along? Did people at home have little glass bowls of portioned out spices on hand, ready to be mixed in at the perfect moment? Did viewers pause the show as a pot simmered for hours and resume when their kitchen timers beeped? The answer was obviously no, but then why bother watching? Why not just read a recipe and try it out yourself? I later realized that for me, these shows were never actually instructional; they were aspirational. Maybe one day I would have the time, energy and cute enough kitchen to whip up that perfect meal. Until then, I would have to settle for the simple pleasure of watching someone charming and capable create something beautiful.
Bon Appétit’s YouTube series “Gourmet Makes” takes that joy of watching a skilled chef at work and adds a twist: chef Claire Saffitz goes into each episode with no recipe on hand. Instead, she is challenged to improve upon, or at the very least, recreate, a processed food item like Twinkies or Hot Pockets using only her background knowledge and some limited research. As an homage to the genre, each episode does end with Claire sharing her final recipe, with ridiculous instructions such as “press dry kidney beans into a slab of freshly mixed food-safe silicon putty” (from the Jelly Belly episode) and “drill six or seven holes in the top of a salad spinner” (Peanut M&Ms), as if viewers would bother to try it themselves.
You could imagine a version of this series that is played as a cruel joke, forcing one person in a relatively standard (if very well-stocked) kitchen to recreate products that are engineered in labs and produced en masse in factories. However, while it is deeply entertaining to watch Claire experiment and fail over the course of each episode, her failures are not angled for laughs the same way they might be in other cooking shows like Nailed It! or Kitchen Nightmares. Instead, watching Claire iterate again and again on a recipe reminds me of a short moment from the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi involving one of the titular chef’s apprentices, Daisuke Nakazawa. Daisuke describes how he spends months creating the same egg sushi again and again, failing more than 200 times before he creates one that gets Jiro’s approval. When he finally does, he breaks into tears.
“Claire is captivating because she learns from her failures, and not in an annoying, chipper, motivational-speaker kind of way.”
“Gourmet Makes” takes the emotional catharsis of that Jiro side plot and makes it the main attraction. Claire is clearly a brilliant cook, able to casually toss out informational asides about the type of sponge she is making or the culinary technique she is using to create a specific texture. That brilliance alone, however, is never enough for her to succeed on her first try. Claire is captivating because she learns from her failures, and not in an annoying, chipper, motivational-speaker kind of way. She grumbles and sulks at the end of a particularly unsuccessful day. She forgets to do research that she tells the camera she will do at home. She tells her coworkers “I cannot accept any criticism right now” when they try a version of her recipe that she knows is not quite perfect. But she still shows up the next day to finish the job.
This willingness to portray failure with good humor extends past “Gourmet Makes” to the rest of the YouTube content produced by Bon Appétit. In the first episode of Brad Leone’s series “It’s Alive,” he spills a large amount of kombucha as he transfers it between containers. In Carla Music’s “Back-to-back Chef,” K-pop star Tiffany Young cracks open eggs using the side of a fork and scrambles a French omelet beyond repair before nailing it on her second try. This is maybe what makes their videos so soothing to watch after a long day: I never see these people as irredeemable or incompetent because of their mistakes, and by extension I allow myself to be more forgiving of my own. In that way, Bon Appétit videos are aspirational in a different way than other cooking shows I’ve seen. The dream sold by the show is not to produce an amazing meal on the first try and serve it to your attractive friends in your beautiful dining room. The dream is to have a reserve of knowledge and experience that can serve you in unexpected situations. The dream is to have people around you who can provide useful feedback or simply affirm your efforts when you want them to. The dream is to have room to fail and maybe throw a small tantrum about it, but still have the confidence to finish what you started.
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Kevin Su is a medical student living in Philadelphia interested in the intersections of queer and immigrant health. When not studying, he spends his time exploring new corners of YouTube.
