David Seymour, recipe 'mythbuster' on social media, utilizes Lower Hudson food culture
In one of his most recent videos, David Seymour is slightly shocked as he watches another YouTube channel, called Chefclub, stack pancake batter, raw eggs, cooked bacon and breakfast potatoes into a glass pan. After some time in the oven, the torture ends.
Voila, a breakfast lasagna.
“In a world where I thought every possible food monstrosity has already been done, Chefclub continues to one-up themselves and drop everybody’s jaws in the process,” Seymour said.
Through the rest of the video, Seymour, 27, re-creates the dish step-by-step following Chefclub’s instructions.
Over the last five years, his style of recreating and reviewing recipes, from the weird to the world-class, has racked up 130 million total views and 560,000 subscribers. YouTube’s food mythbuster, who is from Cortlandt, said he’s loved making his unique brand of content in the Lower Hudson Valley.
In his videos, Seymour seeks to save viewers time and frustration before they try recipes that are designed purely for spectacle and with little consideration for flavor. The process of making “chocolate noodles,” for instance, may look fascinating and cause a recipe to go viral, but that does not mean it’s good.
“It’s all TikTok,” he said. “If you can get people to stay for longer than 5 to 10 seconds past that initial scroll, which is muscle memory, then they got you.”
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He called Chefclub’s videos sometimes frustrating, baffling and nonsensical, but admitted they’re good at what they do. The more ridiculous, the more viral. The Harvard Business Review came to a similar conclusion about videos in general in 2015, writing that the more intense a feeling a video elicits, the more people will share it.
So far, the strategy has worked for purveyors of video recipes. Between its six TikTok accounts, ChefClub has over 16 million followers. On YouTube, Buzzfeed Tasty’s main channel has over 21 million subscribers. Reddit page “StupidFood,” a forum spotlighting dishes similar to what Seymour’s reviewed, has over 1 million members.
To try so many dishes, Seymour has to buy a lot of unique, sometimes hard to find, ingredients. When he started, he would purchase many of his items on Amazon, but he's been weaning off the mega-site and instead utilizing Westchester's many specialty markets.
“This area’s just so rich and diverse in options to eat,” he said. “There’s not a cuisine in the world that you can’t find a specialty market for here.”
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Seymour is not the only one who has taken advantage of the area’s specialty stores for video production. Stephen Cusato, who runs the channel Not Another Cooking Show, which has over 1 million subscribers on YouTube, lives in Yonkers and says his style of cooking is similar to a modern Italian grandmother.
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Cusato considers himself more of a New York City YouTuber, but raved about the benefits of working and spending time in the Hudson Valley. He said he has both access to the energy of the city and all the great cooking resources in Westchester, noting how many towns in the county have their own farmers markets. He can easily access everything he needs from a fishmonger to specialty stores, naming H-Mart as a favorite.
“To do that in the city is just so much harder unless your neighborhood has everything,” Cusato said. “The outskirts of the city is where you go to find the businesses that couldn’t afford to be in New York City. There’s an energy here, it’s definitely different, but it still exists.”
Both Seymour and Custao emphasized the ease of getting into the city from where they live.
“For many years, the assumption was if you’re a YouTube creator, you’re going to live in Manhattan or L.A. There’s no other option,” Seymour said. “Now that’s definitely changed."
Similarly to how Chefclub pumps up the ridiculousness to increase pageviews, Seymour has adapted to the whims of YouTube’s search algorithm as well. YouTube’s metrics increasingly value retention — or the percentage of a video that viewers watch.
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“You just have to learn as you go, always toeing the line between making what you want and playing (the platform’s) game or else you risk falling behind,” he said.
While he declared it a monstrosity, Seymour did his due diligence with Chefclub’s breakfast lasagna. He told The Journal News/lohud that he was pleasantly surprised by the dish. After adding much-needed additional syrup, he gave his video audience a lukewarm appraisal.
“Is it bad? Absolutely not. I have enjoyed the few bites I’ve taken,” he said. “Would I make this again? Also absolutely not.”
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Westchester's David Seymour judges internet recipes in YouTube videos