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Adam Ragusea seems a little insecure, the comments regarding his poor knife skills got to him and he made a 13 minute video explaining why having good knife skills is not important because he only cooks at home. Reeked of insecurity, git gud scrub.
Jack doesn't seem insecure at all, making trash food videos for years and keeps on trucking. A true pillar of the cooking community, providing endless entertainment for the masses.
 
Adam Ragusea seems a little insecure, the comments regarding his poor knife skills got to him and he made a 13 minute video explaining why having good knife skills is not important because he only cooks at home. Reeked of insecurity, git gud scrub.

That video from Ragusea was hilarious, sad, and cringe all at the same time.

First you have Weissman with a how to cut video saying, “Look, it ain’t hard and it’s so much safer. Watch how easy it is.”

Then Ragusea with his how not to cut video saying , “It’s too hard! You don’t wan’t to! Just get cut rather than learn the right way!”
 
Adam is a bit of a strange guy. He also made a 10 minute video about why you shouldn't deep fry at home, grossly exaggerating the issues and being in general not very thoughtful about optimizing the way he could do it.
Then some other video cook guy Ethan made a video explaining how deep frying at home is actually not difficult at all.
Adam then literally writes a nearly six thousand character Russian novel in response, saying both that his original video wasn't very serious but also it kinda was. The insecurity is palpable.
He also made an absolutely toe-curling video about how metric scale recipes are not very useful. The guy is peak level midwit.
 
Adam is a bit of a strange guy. He also made a 10 minute video about why you shouldn't deep fry at home, grossly exaggerating the issues and being in general not very thoughtful about optimizing the way he could do it.
Then some other video cook guy Ethan made a video explaining how deep frying at home is actually not difficult at all.
Adam then literally writes a nearly six thousand character Russian novel in response, saying both that his original video wasn't very serious but also it kinda was. The insecurity is palpable.
He also made an absolutely toe-curling video about how metric scale recipes are not very useful. The guy is peak level midwit.

That ordeal caused me to click "Do Not Recommend Channel".
 
Adam Ragusea has over two million subscribers, so I'm thinking he must be doing something right. I watch the channel and, by and large, find that it's entertaining, educational, and mostly fine. I picked up a few recipes and tips that way.

The knife skills episode was a bit of a miss. I was cringing most of the way. But that doesn't mean that I have to wholesale reject everything he does.

If everyone who ever posts a YouTube video with a mistake in it were treated that way, there would be no-one left watching YouTube…
 
Yeah Adam Ragusea is a bit hit or miss. He has some really good videos that are properly researched (the ones about food science) and where he usually lets the experts do the speaking. But then you also have these rather silly ones like the ones mentioned about cutting technique, deep frying and imperial measurements... where he clearly just decided to go off the cuff instead of talking to an actual expert like he usually does. It's a bit of a shame since there are plenty of clear advantages to having proper cutting technique for a home cook, and it's really not that hard. Watching him cut always makes me cringe; the way he has his fingers stretched out is just an accident waiting to happen and it's all so incredibly inefficient.
Having a lot of subscribers isn't necessarily a strong indicator of anything except really knowing how to game the algorhytms... ;)
 
Well, yes, he misses every now and then. There was an episode where he declared that volumetric measurements are fine, and that all this obsession with grams is misplaced

I happen to disagree. Accurate scales are the second-most important measuring device in a kitchen. (The most important one being an instant-read thermometer.)

But the man is entitled to his opinion, just as I am entitled to disagree with him every now and then.
 
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I don't like Ragusa's style at all. I subscribed for a bit and gave him a shot but it just didn't click for me. The no deep frying event just solidified it for me. But no doubt many do like him.

But hey, I don't watch Josh Weisman or Kenji either so... ;)
 
opinionated celebrities don't enjoy criticism -- news at 9!
 
while i share many (but not all) of kenji's opinions, i am allergic to SJW-style campaigning.
(edit: i was referring to kenji's SJW streak, but i don't like it in others either)

my favorite of all of kenji's content is his food lab writings on serious eats that consist of two parts: 1) a long form article going over food theory/"science", experiments, mistakes, whys, and hows 2) the actual recipe

i'm much less of a fan of his new stuff where he's in his home kitchen with a gopro. it's far less technically interesting (though even a cynic like me can understand the merit in that), and i feel it's formulaic. lots of pandering to the masses. he does the "do whatever you want, there's no right way" thing, but not in a charming, chef john way. that thing where he feeds his dogs on camera every time (for our widdle weddit fanboys!). throw in some pre-emptive, condescending, nasty-sounding strikes against people who will likely leave him critical comments ("the ___ police") when he does obviously dumb stuff like pouring oil down the drain, and we have content that is not entirely enjoyable to me. you can tell that he gets really butthurt, and it turns him nasty.
 
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Adam Ragusea...

he obviously has talents. i like how he goes the extra mile to record on location and/or secure interviews (in person or remotely) with experts. there's not a lot of that kind of food content on youtube. he's a decent journalist. even so, i notice he often mispronounces jargon, which i think is inexcusable in otherwise often well-researched videos that are intended to be educational.

imho, his talents do not lie in science or math. it's a train wreck every time he touches such topics beyond just letting experts speak.

and to me, his videos about technique and equipment are rage-inducing. gravimetric recipes, metric recipes, induction, deep frying, distillation, etc. his viewpoints are so flawed. many of his arguments and assumptions clearly come from ignorance. worse still is how confident he seems. i could give examples if anyone's curious, but i'd have to rewatch his stuff for point-by-point analysis, and i'm not in the mood for "outrage porn" rn.

also, he's the king of pandering. somehow even worse than kenji.

finally, he's always got this manic expression on his face. something uneasy in the eyes. it creeps me out, lol
 
as for the handling of criticsim... Ragusea responds strongly as well, but it has a very different feel than kenji.

both of their responses come from insecurity of course, but where kenji turns nasty, Ragusea handles it more positively. sometimes what he does is pretty funny, though. he'll do some pandering or will retroactively contrive explanations that make him sound like less of an idiot, but he doesn't lash out at his audience from what i've seen.

for example, he distilled some wine but didn't drink part of it because he claimed he was afraid of the undesirable fractions making him ill. however, the total amount of wine input to the stillpot was an amount a person could ordinarily drink in a sitting. later, he concocted some explanation that he was being responsible to his audience by not drinking it even though he claimed he knew it was safe to do so. maybe i'm being super uncharitable, but i'm not buying it. i actually do think he's that dumb 🤣
 
Damn that's a lot of drama for Internet cooking.... Honestly I still enjoy watch some of Kenji's stuff, he might not be a great person people claim him to be but everyone's flawed, if we ought to cancel some one for their past behavior we'd need burn down most of the library.
 
i personally don't think kenji's a bad person. i think that self righteousness is best enjoyed in small doses though, and he could also handle criticism better.
 
There is this guy that does cooking shorts on youtube and Instagram reels that always throws his knife tip first into the cutting board at the start of his videos. That is just painful to watch.
Nick DiGiovanni, now that's someone I truly can't enjoy, you can find everything that's wrong with the internet bro culture on him.
 
while i share many (but not all) of kenji's opinions, i am allergic to SJW-style campaigning.

my favorite of all of kenji's content is his foodlab writings that consist of two parts: 1) a long form article going over food theory/"science", experiments, mistakes, whys, and hows 2) the actual recipe

i'm much less of a fan of his new stuff where he's in his home kitchen with a gopro. it's far less technically interesting (though even a cynic like me can understand the merit in that), and i feel it's formulaic. lots of pandering to the masses. he does the "do whatever you want, there's no right way" thing, but not in a charming, chef john way. that thing where he feeds his dogs on camera every time (for our widdle weddit fanboys!). throw in some pre-emptive, condescending, nasty-sounding strikes against people who will likely leave him critical comments ("the ___ police") when he does obviously dumb stuff like pouring oil down the drain, and we have content that is not entirely enjoyable to me. you can tell that he gets really butthurt, and it turns him nasty.

I don't share hardly any of Kenji's opinions but I can accept that other people have different opinions than mine and recognize we can still find common ground and be friendly. Kenji clearly doesn't agree with that sentiment.

:)
 
Damn that's a lot of drama for Internet cooking.... Honestly I still enjoy watch some of Kenji's stuff, he might not be a great person people claim him to be but everyone's flawed, if we ought to cancel some one for their past behavior we'd need burn down most of the library.
I agree. Kenji/Serious Eats really spoke to my love of cooking and science. Honestly he has decent recipes in different forms of media, and I enjoy his writing style. I really liked his first book and reading theories tied with recipes.

As we all know everyone can have moments where their flaws show, and he isn't immune. Those insta stories seem to boil down to: His stance on MSG may not be wholly factual, he misrepresented who was on the serious eats team, and he didn't want Maga idiots in his restaurant...which he walked back(I think it would have been legit if he held his ground on this, more at 11). All this was definitely interesting to see, and it does paint Kenji in a bit of a different way for me regardless, but Joe Rosenthal made it sound like he was a serial killer.

I think it's a bit hard to be calling people we never met sociopaths based on some online encounters, we all have different personas online and in real life. I do think some of his stuff on his youtube is catering a bit....ie ending videos with guys, galls, non binary pals lol..but I don't see a problem with feeding his dogs and any of his other shtick. Well I guess he shills for those awful kan knives. Besides that, meh.
 
I was being a little hyperbolic but in my opinion, he’s not a great guy.

From Joe Rosenthal’s IG

https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17844825062430322/
https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/18198775915157410/

You know, to me these links speak more about Rosenthal being obsessed with cutting Lopez-Alt down than they do about Lopez-Alt. I mean, the statement about being the only POC working at Serious Eats when he started was pretty weird, stupid and insensitive to the other POCs who worked there, but then he apologized for it, and the rest of the twitter story seems to mostly be Rosenthal sharing screenshots of rants by other people, including himself. I don't really care one way or another about Lopez-Alt... I mean, I liked most of The Food Lab, and many recipes on Serious Eats are good and smart, and I don't know anything one way or another about him as a person, but those links don't really convince me of anything other than that he made a pretty terrible self-aggrandizing gaffe at some point.
 
i'm much less of a fan of his new stuff where he's in his home kitchen with a gopro. it's far less technically interesting (though even a cynic like me can understand the merit in that), and i feel it's formulaic.

I honestly don’t know what he was thinking when he started doing that. He went from being the maestro of food science to a guy who cooks barefoot in his kitchen, and nobody wants to see his toes. In other words, words a high-level of professionalism to virtually none at all. It’s as if he did not know what was making him successful. Or maybe he felt that he was so successful that he didn’t need professional production.
 
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It’s as if he did not know what was making him successful. Or maybe he felt that he was so successful that he didn’t need professional production.
I suspect that he knows exactly what makes him successful. His channel has 1.3 million subscribers.
 
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