As long as televisions have been our living room centerpieces, there have been its mainstays: broadcast news, sports, soap operas, reality series, and, of course, cooking shows. From cozy recipes to cutthroat cooking competitions, food programming is as ubiquitous as what we put on our plates. Now, Bon Appétit’s YouTube channel has revitalized the genre for an online, social media savvy viewership, and it might just change the world—or at least cooking entertainment as we know it.

“Our culture has become utterly food obsessed,” Molly Baz, senior editor at Bon Appétit says. “A decade ago, we were championing chefs as celebrities. The focus has now shifted towards championing home cooks. Home cooking is so much more relatable to the average person than any chef-driven restaurant-y food will ever be, and I think that’s why our videos really resonate with people. We’re just highly skilled home cooks, who happen to have backgrounds in professional kitchens, but whose main objective is to teach. People watch us on YouTube, realize we’re just regular ol’ people and feel immediately connected to us.”

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Bon Appétit has been a mainstay on magazine stands across the U.S. since 1956. The monthly food magazine is published by Condé Nast under current editor-in-chief Adam Rappaport, and it takes the traditional approach to food coverage, sharing time-tested recipes and food trends. But it’s the BA YouTube channel that has emerged as the brand’s bread and butter. It first launched in 2012, with more standard cooking tutorials and recipes from the Test Kitchen. It wasn’t until 2016, with the premiere of It’s Alive! with Brad Leone that the channel started to take on its new style, cementing its current popularity in 2017, with the premiere of Gourmet Makes with Claire Saffitz. The channel now has over four million subscribers and over 800 million views.

“I don’t think anybody could have predicted that the inner workings of our Test Kitchen would become so visible to the outside world,” Chris Morocco, Deputy Food Editor at Bon Appétit, says. “I don’t think it is surprising that a food magazine would make a successful jump into video, but what makes it fun for us, and I think for our audience too, is that we have done it in a way that feels organic to us and how we work. We aren’t just talking to a camera in a stiff studio kitchen; We are interacting with each other, with the camera operators, having impromptu cream whipping competitions. We aren’t going off script because there is no script.”

Here’s everything you need to know about the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen:

Who’s Who In The Cast?

What truly sets the BA channel apart from more traditional cooking programming is that no single video exists in a vacuum—the Test Kichen staff shares constant encouragement, advice, assistance, and a fair share of ribbing with their co-workers, essentially creating a crossover multiverse to rival Marvel.

“The Test Kitchen videos have just done a really exceptional job of showcasing the distinctive personalities of all the people who work there,” Louis Peitzman, a Culture writer who has covered Bon Appétit for Buzzfeed and Vulture, says. “There’s definitely something aspirational about watching co-workers helping and supporting each other, and of course, watching them have that much fun at work. But I think a lot of the appeal is that the food always goes hand-in-hand with getting to know the chefs. They’re charming, they’re great on camera, and they never let the cooking—which they also do really well—get in the way of showing you that they’re real people.”

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The core group of chefs who helped launch the Bon Appétit YouTube channel include Claire Saffitz, Contributing Food Editor; Brad Leone, Test Kitchen Video Host; Chris Morocco, Deputy Food Editor; Molly Baz, Senior Food Editor; Carla Lalli Music, Food Director; and Andy Baraghani, Senior Food Editor. But the BA Test Kitchen is filled with personalities, and viewers will meet all of them throughout the channel’s various series. Other key players to note include Amiel Stanek (Editor at Large), Christina Chaey (Associate Editor), Alex Delaney (Associate Editor), Gaby Melian (Test Kitchen Manager), Rick Martinez (Contributing Food Editor), Sohla El-Waylly (Assistant Food Editor) and Priya Krishna (Contributing Writer).

What Series Do You Need to Watch?

There are at least 20 different series, either past or currently running, that you can dive into on the Bon Appétit YouTube channel. But there are some stand-outs that are a must-watch for anyone who wants to get to know the various Test Kitchen personalities and become fully immersed in the fandom.

Gourmet Makes with Claire Saffitz

Gourment Makes is undeniably BA’s most popular series—Saffitz regularly gets upwards of four million views per video, with the most-watched hitting 12 million — and for many fans, the series is their first introduction into the BA universe.

“Gourmet Makes was my first love, and it remains my favorite series,” Peitzman says. “As someone who takes junk food very seriously, I love seeing Claire break it down into its most essential components.”

The show, which premiered on July, 18, 2017 with the episode “Pastry Chef Attempts To Make a Gourment Twinkie”, follows Saffitz as she recreates iconic snack foods—Skittles, Snickers, Sno Balls—using better quality ingredients and home-kitchen cooking methods. The results range from near-perfect (Ferrero Rocher, Oreos) to disastrous (Pop Rocks), but Saffitz herself has emerged as a fan-favorite thanks to her passion, persistence and relatable perfectionist tendencies.

“Claire is freakishly good at what she does,” Peitzman says. “She’s just aggressively competent, and it’s so satisfying watching her succeed. But she’s also relatable and nerdy and effortlessly funny. She’s just someone you’d want to hang out with. Even when she’s struggling, she’s entertaining, and because you like her so much, you’re desperate to watch her overcome the odds.”

It’s Alive! with Brad Leone

Gourmet Makes might have cemented the popularity of Bon Appétit streaming shows, but it was Leone’s It’s Alive! that first featured the casual style and comedic editing that the channel would soon become known for. The series, which launched on October 21, 2016 with the episode “How to Brew Your Own Kombucha with Brad” opens with Leone accidentally spilling the contents of a tube filled with homemade kombucha on the Test Kitchen floor—and the rest, as they say, is history.

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It’s Alive! often follows Leone as he attempts to create recipes using microbial food cultures—think fermented foods like sauerkraut, ginger beer and yeast doughnuts. But it also goes off-script (a lot) especially in the spin-off series It’s Alive: Going Places which has capitalized on Leone’s outdoorsy nature for chocolate-making in Ecuador and catfish noodling in Oklahoma, among other adventures. The series matches Leone’s endearingly zany personality (he is known for stumbling over his words and making outdated pop culture references) with an equally off-the-cuff editing style by editor Matt Hunziker that has cemented Leone as the Test Kitchen’s resident funny guy.

Back to Back Chef with Carla Lalli Music

All of the Test Kitchen series are made for sharing on social media, but Back to Back Chef combines fans’ love of the BA staff with their devotion to outside celebrities who come with their own built-in fandoms—think Queer Eye’s Antoni Porowski, Riverdale‘s Charles Melton, and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s Ellie Kemper—doing viral video so right.

In the series, which launched with Lalli Music at the helm on June 27, 2018 with the episode “Natalie Portman Tries to Keep Up With a Professional Chef”, she instructs her guest on making dishes, from Croque Madame to Sole Meunière, with only verbal instructions. The guests each have varying degrees of experience in the kitchen, which of course adds to the fun, as does Lalli Music’s unique blend of wit peppered with sarcasm, and sweetness tempered with undeniable skill. It’s a blast watching her laugh through the dishes with some super-famous faces, while teaching them something in the process.

Reverse Engineering with Chris Morocco

Chris Morocco’s reputation as the Test Kitchen’s “super taster” makes for one of the channel’s most unique series to date. In Reverse Engineering, which premiered on May 28, 2019 with the episode “Recreating Gordon Ramsay’s Beef Wellington From Taste”, Morocco is given two days to recreate another chef’s dish, chosen for him by a member of the Test Kitchen staff. He is allowed to taste, smell and touch the dish, but is at no point allowed to look at it.

Morocco is undeniably the Test Kitchen’s most analytical chef, known for smelling every dish before he eats it, being able to identify subtle flavors from the smallest of bites, and for having quite the impressive spoon collection. Watching a masterful palate marry with top-knotch cooking skills to recreate dishes under unusual circumstances is an unbelievably rewarding viewing experience.

Making Perfect with the BA Test Kitchen

Not only is the Making Perfect series—there have been two “seasons” so far, Making Perfect Pizza and Making the Perfect Thanskgiving Meal—a great place to meet a majority of BA’s Test Kitchen personalities, it’s also the ideal series for viewers who want not only to be entertained by the bickering and joking between the ensemble cast of co-workers, but want to learn more about what goes in to great cooking.

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Each Making Perfect season separates a meal into its individual parts—in the Pizza series there are episodes dedicated to dough, sauce, cheese and toppings, for instance—with the cooks researching and recipe-testing to find the magic components that make the best of our favorite foods. For Baz, this is where the Bon Appétit YouTube truly shines.

“It has been an incredibly gratifying couple of years because I can really feel the impact of my work out in the world,” Baz says. “People are really cooking our recipes in their home kitchens, thanks in large part to the YouTube channel, and there’s really nothing more gratifying to witness—as a recipe developer whose prerogative is to teach people how to cook—than that.”

Is There A Bon Appétit Fandom?

pic.twitter.com/rpRaPLHdso — out of context bon appetit test kitchen (@outofcontextBA) March 30, 2019

When asked how he would pitch Bon Appétit to new viewers, Morocco says, “Think The Office but in a kitchen, and everyone is allowed to talk to the camera whenever they want to.” That description is never more accurate than when you take a look at the countless inside jokes and running gags that have become the life’s blood of the BA fandom. BA videos don’t just exist on YouTube; They are an endless source of memes, merch, other YouTube channels dedicated to testing BA recipes and compiling BA’s funniest moments and, of course, fan accounts.

out of context bon appetit test kitchen, a Twitter account with over 90 thousand followers, is just one of the many that have cropped up to celebrate not only BA’s series and cooks, but the many relatable quotes and hilarious hijinks that pop up throughout. You might not know what “wourder” means, or why the simple question “Are you going to temper the chocolate?” is so funny, but spend enough time in the Test Kitchen, and you soon will. Like a majority of BA’s fans, the account’s creator, who requested to remain anonymous for this interview, says that they turn to Test Kitchen videos not only for entertainment, but because its a wholesome haven in a stressful world.

pic.twitter.com/viS0E6HqEe — out of context bon appetit test kitchen (@outofcontextBA) November 13, 2019

“I think overall it’s just fun,” they say. “Nobody takes themselves too seriously, it’s about enjoying yourself and making mistakes to learn new things. Everyone in the Test Kitchen is so different that it seems like there’s someone for everyone and they’re all relatable. I think it’s easy to lose yourself watching one of their videos and just forget about everything else for a while.”

Whether you’re a food programming devotee who wants to add another series or two to your to-watch list, a home cook who’d like a few more recipes in your arsenal, or just a stressed-out human looking to unwind with a few friendly faces at the end of a long day, Bon Appétit has something for you.

“Come for the really freakin’ great recipes,” Baz says, “stay for the laughs and the highly insignificant drama.”

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