Rick Stein has suggested that much of the food content available on YouTube “is actually not that good” while promoting his new cookery book.
The 79-year-old chef explained in a new interview that home cooks will still benefit from a traditional cookbook, despite the abundance of free recipes and demonstrations available online.
Rick Stein’s Cookery Course, out Thursday, brings together 150 recipes and techniques drawn from his six decades in the kitchen, covering everything from making homemade mayonnaise to filleting fish.
He told PA: “One question is, you could get all these techniques on the internet, on YouTube, why bother with the book? The answer to that would be that much of the stuff you see on YouTube is actually not that good.”
Stein went on to say that classic cooking techniques are simpler than we might think – like making soufflés.
“It sounds very grand, a twice-baked soufflé,” Stein said. “But actually, souffles are really easy to make. The problem is timing [if you’re in a rush].
“The reason they’re twice-baked is that you either put them in the fridge and bake them again, or you bake them later that day, which, if you’re doing a dinner-party event, makes them relatively easy.
“If you’re not pressurised by time, a twice-baked souffle sounds posh and is very easy to make.”
Stein made his name in the Seventies after co-founding The Seafood Restaurant in Padstow, Cornwall, and through appearances on BBC cooking and travel shows in the Eighties, before his debut series Taste of The Sea in 1995.
Since then, Stein has become one of Britain’s best-known television chefs, presenting a string of popular cookery and travel programmes that have taken him around the world in search of regional dishes and culinary traditions.
His career has also seen him champion lesser-known seafood, encouraging diners to look beyond familiar choices such as cod and try alternatives including hake, coley and whiting as a way of easing pressure on popular fish stocks.
Sardines, he remembered, needed to be renamed in the Nineties to get people to eat them. “They used to be called pilchards. That was the thing in those days, unless you made a big fuss about stuff that people didn’t know, you had to name them something else that people did.”
Rick Stein’s Cookery Course: Recipes and techniques from a lifetime in the kitchen is published in hardback by BBC Books, priced at £30. Available October 29
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