Food Wishes

Food Wishes is the long-running channel of Chef John, one of the original YouTube cooks, filming since the late 2000s with the same recognisable format: the camera on the board, his voice off screen, and a gentle stream of jokes about the recipe’s name. The videos are calm, practical and very rewatchable.

His burger catalogue is broad and home-cook friendly. He bakes hamburger buns and sweet potato slider buns from scratch, cooks burgers to a pink medium in a pan, and works through regional and historical burgers such as the Minneapolis Juicy Lucy, the Mississippi slugburger stretched with bread crumbs and Hawaii’s loco moco on rice with gravy. He also invents freely: a triple-seared whiskey burger borrowed from a Japanese steak technique, a chicken parm burger on garlic buns, a banh mi burger dog, a fajita cheeseburger inspired by a viral Mexican cheeseburger and his own bigger, better version of McDonald’s Big Arch.

Several of his recipes are part of this site’s collection, and they link back to the videos they came from.