I tried the MasterClass for chefs. Here’s what I learned

If your laptop isn’t being flecked with olive oil spatter during a decathlon of online cooking classes, you’re probably doing something wrong. Of course, you’re probably doing something wrong anyway. That’s just the nature of this journey.

After a couple of weeks using YesChef, my laptop was once again in shambles. Shiny smudges on the trackpad. Crusty texture on the keys. And yes, greasy Jackson Pollock oil droplets—the kind that need to be scraped, not scrubbed—all over the screen. There was no time to worry about that, though. Not while juggling two full fry pans for an imminent dinner party. Instead, I had to look past the residue on my screen and do exactly what the tiny Nancy Silverton who lives there commanded, as though she were the rat from Ratatouille. Luckily, the weeks leading up to this moment didn’t just turn my laptop into a backsplash and my kitchen into a test kitchen: They also turned me into a more confident home cook.

The concept behind YesChef is essentially MasterClass: Whoops, All Cooking Lessons—and that’s intentional. Founder Steve Avery was inspired to build the service after his mother gifted him a Gordon Ramsey MasterClass back in 2017. He enjoyed watching the videos, but never used them as intended, despite Ramsey’s obvious talent as a chef and educator. However, if a service could combine the star power and instructional depth of MasterClass with the intimacy and biographical narrative of Chef’s Table on Netflix, well, Avery figured, that would be right up his alley. The entrepreneur soon put together a business plan and started reaching out to chefs he was interested in shadowing—many of whom he’d first seen on Chef’s Table.

“I basically made YesChef for myself,” he tells Fast Company over Zoom. “I’m customer 001.”

The platform launched in August 2020, with a mission statement built around the belief that “anyone can learn how to cook,” which also happens to be the theme of Ratatouille. I am, more or less, anyone. I find cooking meditative and am borderline competent at it. Following a viral recipe from Bon Appétit, to me, combines the challenge of assembling Ikea furniture with the tastiness of eating plant-based Swedish meatballs on the way out of Ikea. The results don’t always turn out showroom-worthy, though. Part of the problem is that I collapse like a soufflé at phrases like “season to taste.” Even the most rigid recipes require cooks to make a choice or two, and it can be terrifying to be the one in charge of how a flavor experiment turns out.

When I took the same Ramsey MasterClass that inspired Avery, it was as part of an early COVID-19 quarantine experiment in distance learning. But now, almost three years later, I merely wanted to challenge myself. And over the course of two weeks with YesChef, I made 14 dishes, far more decisions, and moved miles outside of my comfort zone. Here’s how it turned out.

Stories on a Plate

Last summer’s hit series The Bear is probably the best thing that could have happened to YesChef—at least in terms of name recognition. The addictive FX drama is mostly set inside a Chicago beef shop, where the main characters constantly say “Yes, chef” to each other. Indeed, Avery gave his platform that name because he wanted users to feel like they were following world-renowned chefs around their kitchens and interacting with them.

But first those users have to choose who they want to follow around. YesChef currently offers courses from seven cooks, all of whom either have Michelin-starred restaurants, James Beard Awards—or both. Because I’m a vegetarian, the only ones I don’t try out are Kwame Onwuachi’s meat-heavy Afro-Caribbean course and Dario Cecchini’s butchery tutorial. That leaves five classes, each with between five and seven hours of video content.

The recipe videos deliver the expected food porn and expertise, but the roughly hour-long introductory “stories” also feature soaring footage of locations like Kolkata, Panicale, and Chef Francis Mallmann’s private island in a remote corner of Patagonia. These longer videos give viewers an opportunity to see where the chefs are coming from—geographically, influence-wise, and also just as people. In at least three cases, we also meet their romantic partners.

Mallmann, the pioneer of open-fire grilling, draws me in right away with his knowledge, passion, and eccentricity. He dresses with the precise aesthetic of a Wes Anderson character and has an immense philosophical respect for fire. (“The moment you see fire,” he says at one point, “you recognize something that was inside of you long before you were born.”) Viewers meet the chef amid a shakeup in his intensely loyal crew—his fire director is moving on—and watch the team put together a bountiful feast that is long on potatoes, the primary ingredient in Latin American cuisine. By the time the video ends, I am primed to learn some of the literal dozen methods that Mallmann teaches in his 30-minute video, “Potatoes: A Love Affair.”

The longer videos also offer the first hints of YesChef’s factoid factor; the fascinating tidbits tossed out along the way, perhaps to be redistributed among viewers’ dining companions. As Chef Asma Khan gives us a tour of Kolkata, for instance, she explains how the international spice trade influenced which foods became native to India. Her videos don’t just teach recipes, they also explore flavor profiles and illuminate Indian culture. A journalist featured in her introduction says of the chef, “Asma is not about food, she’s about stories on a plate.”

Watching these videos makes me hungry for both.

Diving into the Deep End of the Skillet

Eggplants have always filled me with primal terror. When prepared correctly, they taste fantastic, but in the wrong hands, they become seed-filled sponge-blobs that can ruin your day. I’ve never dared cook something with such little room for error.

Not until now, anyway.

In one of my first lessons with YesChef, Khan guides me through the smoky pitfalls of baingan bharta (eggplant mash), my go-to order at Indian restaurants. I click on the dish and set to work. On the left side of my screen, a video shows the chef preparing her meal; while on the right, I toggle between an Ingredients tab and one listing the Recipe. As I follow along, Khan seems to anticipate my questions before they occur to me. Her written recipe says to “remove the skin” and “place the flesh in a bowl,” as though I’m capable of intuiting how to do so myself, but in the video she deftly slices open her charred eggplant and starts scooping out the meat with a spoon. The baingan bharta I make with her assistance isn’t quite restaurant-caliber, but it’s rich and thick and tastes like baingan bharta. Either my fears about eggplant were unfounded, or this level of instruction makes cooking them foolproof.

Because I am a glutton for punishment, I choose another eggplant-based dish next, moving from Kolkata to Argentina with Mallmann’s eggplant milanesa. Again, the video proves immensely helpful. I’m not sure how I would’ve interpreted the written instructions to simply “coat” a peeled eggplant with bread crumbs, but I definitely wouldn’t have thought to dunk the yolk-soaked eggplant in a pan filled with them and roll it around like a bread crumb snowball. The dish takes far longer to make than the 40 minutes listed, and there are too many cracks in the fillet’s golden-brown shell, but it comes out shockingly tasty, with just the right chew.

This time difference proves typical. Everything takes longer to make than I think it will. Perhaps it has something to do with the disparity in equipment. Both chefs Khan and Mallmann cooked their eggplants directly in the embers of a fire, for instance, and I used the coward’s method of putting them in an oven. While Mallmann cooked his fillets on a plancha, I had to settle for the suggested alternative of a cast-iron skillet. I had never even heard of a plancha before.

This kind of immersion in cheffy cooking classes is a great way to discover just how much equipment your kitchen is missing. While it’s entirely possible to get by without Mallmann’s beloved plancha, several other utensils don’t have alternatives. Nancy Silverton’s peperonata requires a food mill, which I do not own. The recipe for falafel, paradoxically, calls for a meat grinder. Although I do have a mortar and pestle, which is needed for making hummus, I do not have one spacious enough to accommodate 500 grams of chickpeas.

Some dishes I stay away from because of missing equipment or such hard-to-procure ingredients as watermelon radish. Eventually, though, I start to see these roadblocks as opportunities for improvisation and kitchen creativity—another form of “seasoning to taste.” It’s an attitude that several instructors on YesChef actively encourage.

“When I cook, I try to free myself from any restrictions. Not to cook with my head, but with my stomach,” Chef Erez Komarovsky says during one lesson. “It’s like being a jazz musician. You just do.”

Starting with the eggplant milanesa, I decide to go off-roading whenever the situation calls for it. Just before dipping my eggplant in yolk and bread crumbs, I feel a ridge of seeds somewhere inside. The texture is hard, almost sharp. There’s a chance I’m supposed to leave these rows of seeds in the fillet; that the heat from the pan will alchemize them into edibility, perhaps even succulence. This is how institutionalized I am with cooking—if the recipe doesn’t explicitly say to do something, I’m too afraid to deviate. Not this time, though. I strip out the four or five seedy ridges lurking within the eggplant and throw them away. Judging by taste, it was the right move.

Further snap decisions follow. When my first saag paneer isn’t spicy enough, I call an audible during my second attempt and sub in jalapenos instead of green chilis. I also pour heavy cream into the spinachy dish while it’s still cooking, rather than just before serving, which ends up giving it a more stew-like consistency. It’s still not restaurant quality, but it’s closer.

I’m no longer just listening to the tiny chefs on my screen, I’m also listening to my gut.

The Inexact Science of Culinary Forensics

As helpful as it is to see chefs use the extra space and dimensionality of video to expand on the how of a recipe, it’s nourishing to get more of the why. Although Mallmann can go off on poetic flights of fancy—describing the sizzle of butter and thyme as the two ingredients “laughing together”—he also tends to explain why he’s doing what he’s doing as he’s doing it. The potatoes in my tortilla should be cut thick, he says, so that they don’t overcook, and I need to keep adding ghee to my domino potatoes (which are exactly what they sound like) so that they remain moist. All of the chefs on the platform round out their recipes with similar insights to one degree or another.

Sometimes, their running commentary on the food reveals more about their personalities. As runny yolk sluices through tomato geysers in my shakshuka, I don’t think anything of the fact that Komarovsky prescribes burrata, an Italian cheese, for this classically Israeli dish. Being the so-called godfather of modern Israeli cuisine, though, he feels a need to get ahead of the question. The chef explains that Israel started importing good burrata in recent years, making it a trendy addition to menus all over the nation. Any viewers who don’t want to use burrata, he says, can try jibneh, a Syrian cheese that is more authentic to the Middle East. Even though he is a representative of his region, the chef likes what he likes. His tradition-bucking shakshuka ends up being the best dish I make during this experiment, its robust spice mellowed by the buttery burrata.

The cheese in this recipe is a salute to coloring outside the lines, which is something I have to do myself while making it. Sometimes on YesChef, a discrepancy will emerge between the amount of ingredients listed and the amount the chefs deploy. The shakshuka recipe, for instance, calls for “two kilograms of ripe tomatoes,” which is so much ripe tomatoes. I weigh the multiple bunches I purchased and it totals out to just over a kilogram. In the video, though, Komarovsky calls instead for “a good amount of tomatoes,” and uses roughly the number I have on hand—which turns out to be enough. Something similar happens with the olive oil in this dish. The recipe calls for two cups, which seems like too much, while the chef again recommends “a good amount” of olive oil. I have no idea how much I actually pour in, but miraculously it’s the perfect amount. I try to retrace my steps afterward, to remember how much to use next time.

This ends up being the only time where, after cooking with YesChef, I wondered where I went right. More often, I found myself performing forensic analysis on a culinary crime scene.

This is where I tell you about all the failures I experienced during the c