Ethan Chlebowski

Ethan Chlebowski teaches cooking the way an engineer would: by breaking a dish into its parts, testing each one and explaining why the result changes. His channel, and the Cook Well app that grew out of it, aims to make home cooks more confident and creative rather than hand them a recipe to follow blindly.

Burgers are a natural subject for that method. His perfect-burger video runs experiments on lean meat against beef fat, a chicken burger enriched with beef fat and what burger juices actually are, and a long smash burger video tests how thick or thin to smash, which beef to buy and which bun holds up. He has a smash burger manifesto, a smash burger checklist and a head-to-head of Bon Appétit’s and Kenji López-Alt’s smash burgers.

He also tests himself against fast food, trying to make Chick-fil-A’s original sandwich and the Big Mac faster than ordering them, builds lower-calorie smash burgers that still taste good, and uses Gordon Ramsay’s viral TikTok burger as a case study for what he calls Burger Craft Theory.