The Internet Thinks You Need to Be Rescued From Cooking

Convenience has always had a place in the kitchen. The problem begins when convenience becomes the measure by which we judge cooking.

I’ve become increasingly irritated by a cooking ideology that’s everywhere on the internet: that cooking should require as little effort as possible. Spend a few minutes browsing and you’ll find the promises everywhere.

Three ingredients. Ten minutes. One pan. No chopping. No kneading. Practically cooks itself.

We’ve become very good at promoting food by how little cooking it requires. Somewhere along the way, cooking stopped being presented as a skill worth loving and learning and started becoming a burden from which the home cook needed to be rescued.

I think that quietly disrespects the home cook.

Convenience sells. It always has and always will. I’m not suggesting people shouldn’t want it. I’m asking what happens when we begin to see effort, patience and complexity as undesirable characteristics. Convenience as a tool isn’t the enemy. The world has always found ways to reduce labour: pressure cookers, preserved ingredients, microwave ovens, food processors, prepared pastry. Chefs use convenience too. A chef who removes unnecessary work is simply creating efficiency.

But there’s a difference between reducing unnecessary work and removing endeavour.

I’ve often called the microwave one of the worst inventions in the kitchen—not because reheating something quickly is a culinary sin, but because it perfectly represents our growing intolerance of waiting. We’ve taught our food to become a metaphor for the speed at which we live our lives. Faster preparation. Fewer ingredients. Instant gratification.

There is nothing wrong with needing dinner in fifteen minutes. The problem is the assumption that anything taking longer than fifteen minutes must somehow justify its existence. And somewhere between convenience and the social-media algorithm, we began forgetting that cooking was never simply about getting food into our stomachs.

Social media has turned food into content. A recipe now has to compete for attention before anybody has tasted it. On recommendation-driven platforms, what people choose to watch and how they interact with it helps shape what gets shown next. But an algorithm cannot smell rosemary and garlic focaccia baking in the oven. It cannot taste the contrast between the sweetness and acidity of a lemon meringue pie. It cannot feel the crust of a loaf crack beneath a knife or decide whether a sauce needs another minute on the stove.

Good food and good content are not the same craft.

Food is experienced through flavour, texture, aroma, temperature, balance, ingredient quality, technique, seasonality, restraint and context. Much of that cannot be seen on a screen. Content operates under different pressures. It needs attention, visual impact, novelty, recognisability and shareability.

Sometimes those two worlds align beautifully.

Sometimes they don’t.

A dish can be spectacularly successful as content and utterly mediocre as food. This is what happens when we begin designing food for the camera rather than the people. When food has to perform before it can be eaten, the camera becomes another diner at the table—and increasingly, the most important one.

Perhaps the question is not whether social media is changing our food, but whether we are allowing it to change our definition of good food.

Good content asks us to look.

Good food asks us to eat.

And beneath the endless simplification is a subtle message: cooking should require very little of you.

Five ingredients. One pan. No prep. Ten minutes. Three steps. No technique.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those promises. The problem is their repetition. Hear the same message often enough and it begins to shape what you expect cooking to be. Time becomes an inconvenience. Preparation becomes unnecessary labour. Technique becomes an obstacle rather than something worth learning.

The question quietly shifts from:

What can I make?

to:

How little do I need to do to make it?

That’s where convenience stops being merely useful and starts becoming an ideology. Eventually the selling point becomes that the cook hardly has to cook at all. I reject the idea that less involvement in cooking is automatically progress.

There is something quietly patronising about it too.

In our eagerness to make cooking accessible, have we confused accessible with effortless? The home cook may want an easy dinner tonight. That doesn’t mean they lack the curiosity or ambition to learn something more demanding tomorrow. Learning to cook shouldn’t mean removing every challenge. It should mean acquiring the knowledge to meet one.

Why should a home cook not understand an emulsion?

Why shouldn’t they learn what fermentation does?

Why shouldn’t they make stock once?

Why shouldn’t they understand why a sauce reduces?

Why shouldn’t they tackle pastry?

Why shouldn’t somebody want to become extremely good at feeding their family and friends?

Don’t tell people they have to cook like professionals. But don’t convince them they shouldn’t want to become better cooks. When accessibility becomes the systematic removal of knowledge, it stops being generous. It becomes condescending.

This does not mean I am arguing for complicated food. Quite the opposite. Consider the Caprese.

Tomato. Mozzarella. Basil. Olive oil. Salt.

Five ingredients. Almost no cooking. No elaborate technique. No complicated preparation. If simplicity were the problem, the Caprese would be guilty on every count. And yet an indifferent Caprese and an extraordinary one are nowhere near the same dish.

The difference isn’t complexity.

It’s understanding.

The ripeness of the tomato changes its sweetness, acidity, texture and aroma. The mozzarella contributes richness, moisture and softness. Basil brings aromatic freshness. Olive oil carries character and richness. Salt sharpens and amplifies what is already there.

Then there is proportion. Temperature. Seasoning. Ingredient quality. None of it is particularly complicated. None of it is accidental either. That’s the distinction our obsession with ingredient counts can miss. Culinary sophistication does not necessarily announce itself through complexity. Sometimes it’s almost invisible.

It exists in the decisions the cook makes.

A cook who understands can remove. They know what doesn’t belong, what distracts and what serves no purpose. That isn’t cooking with less ambition.

It is restraint.

There’s an enormous difference between removing something because it serves no purpose and removing it because we never wanted to make the effort in the first place. The first is refinement. The second is reduction. Complexity is not measured by the number of ingredients. It’s measured by the depth of understanding.

Simplicity should be the result of understanding—not the absence of ambition.

And understanding teaches us something else that our culture of immediacy has become uncomfortable with: Some things cannot be hurried without becoming something different.

Time is sometimes an ingredient.

A dough fermenting slowly is not simply sitting there doing nothing. A stock simmering on the stove is not wasting time. Resting, reducing, fermenting, curing and steeping are not inconvenient gaps between the important parts of cooking. They are often the important parts. There is a difference between waiting and wasting time. If something takes an hour, we look for the thirty-minute version. If it takes thirty minutes, somebody promises ten.

But faster isn’t automatically better. Sometimes faster is simply faster.

A thirty-minute pizza dough may be useful when you want pizza in thirty minutes. That doesn’t make it the same as a dough given time to ferment and develop. They solve different problems. The mistake isn’t choosing the quicker one. The mistake is pretending there’s no difference. Efficiency is the removal of waste. It’s not the removal of everything requiring patience.

Professional kitchens understand this distinction. We work quickly because we have to, but speed is not the same thing as rushing. Some processes can be streamlined. Others have to be respected. A good cook learns the difference. And effort itself is not always a defect.

Sometimes effort is where the pleasure begins.

Make bread often enough and you begin to understand texture, resistance, hydration and fermentation. Make stock, roll pastry, emulsify a sauce or learn to cook over fire and something happens beyond producing dinner.

You begin to understand the food. That knowledge accumulates. The first time you make something, you need the recipe. Eventually you begin noticing things the recipe never told you.

At some point you stop asking only, What does the recipe say?

You begin asking, What is the food telling me?

That’s where cooking becomes interesting.

And that’s what genuine accessibility should encourage.

My job as a chef is not to make cooking mysterious. Nor is it to make difficult things appear impressive simply because I know how to do them. The point of professional knowledge is to transfer it. Show somebody why an emulsion holds together. Explain what fermentation is doing. Teach them why a sauce changes as it reduces. Explain what went wrong when something fails.

A recipe shouldn’t merely teach somebody to obey instructions. At its best, it should gradually make those instructions less necessary.

Not:

Don’t worry about understanding this.

But:

Here is what is happening. Here is why it matters. Now you know too.

Ambition in cooking does not mean tasting menus, obscure ingredients, tweezers or restaurant techniques unnecessarily transplanted into somebody’s Tuesday evening. Ambition can be much quieter. It can mean wanting to make the roast better than last time. Understanding why your bread behaves the way it does. Learning to balance a dressing without measuring everything.

Taking five ingredients and understanding them well enough to know exactly what each one contributes. That is ambition too. And there is another reason this matters.

We do not cook only because human beings require calories.

We cook for birthdays. We cook when somebody comes home and when somebody is leaving. We cook to celebrate, comfort, welcome and gather people around a table. Food carries intention.

This doesn’t mean love can be measured in preparation time. A fifteen-minute dinner made for somebody who needs it can contain far more care than a six-hour culinary performance made entirely for the cook’s ego. But efficiency isn’t the only value available to us.

Sometimes chopping is worth doing.

Sometimes kneading is worth doing.

Sometimes waiting is worth doing.

Cooking is an emotive language. Technique is part of its vocabulary, ingredients are its words, and judgment allows us to say something worth hearing.

Which brings me back to the internet.

Social media has done extraordinary things for food. It’s introduced people to cuisines they may never have encountered and given talented cooks an audience they might never otherwise have found.

But we should be careful about allowing the demands of content to become the values of cooking.

The algorithm is designed to decide what deserves another second of our attention. It shouldn’t decide what deserves a place in our kitchens. Use convenience. I certainly will.

Use the food processor when it saves pointless labour. Buy the pastry when making it adds nothing. Open the tin of tomatoes. Make the fifteen-minute dinner. Order a pizza when you cannot be bothered to cook.

There is no virtue in making life unnecessarily difficult. But we shouldn’t confuse convenience with excellence simply because convenience is easy to sell.

Do not assume fewer ingredients make a dish more intelligent.

Do not assume less technique makes a recipe more accessible.

Do not assume every minute saved is a minute improved.

And do not let anybody convince you that wanting to become genuinely good at cooking is somehow excessive. I reject the idea that the highest achievement of modern cooking is to require almost nothing from the cook.

The home cook deserves more respect than that.

Cooking deserves ambition. Not complication for the sake of complication. Not technique for the sake of showing off. Not three hours where thirty minutes produces something just as good.

The ambition to understand.

The ambition to improve.

The ambition to know why something works rather than simply knowing that it does.

Convenience should remain what it has always been at its best: A tool. It should never become the purpose. Because cooking is not simply the fastest possible route between hunger and being fed. It is knowledge. Craft. Memory. Pleasure. Generosity. Curiosity. Culture. It is one of the ways we speak to one another without saying a word.

Cooking is an emotive language.

And some things are worth taking the time to say.