Joshua Weissman

Joshua Weissman is a Texas-based chef and author whose channel turned “make it from scratch” into a genre. He is obsessive about bread, and it shows in the burger videos: almost every one starts with homemade buns, usually his cross between brioche and Japanese milk bread, before the patty is even mentioned.

His best-known series is But Better. Each episode takes a fast-food icon, tastes the original and rebuilds it at home with better ingredients and more work: the Big Mac, the Whopper, In-N-Out, the Baconator, the Filet-O-Fish, the McChicken, the Popeyes and Chick-fil-A chicken sandwiches, the KFC Double Down and many more. But Cheaper does the opposite and asks how good a burger can be for two dollars.

Around those sit bigger projects: thirty ways to cook a burger, a national tour of fast-food burgers and chicken sandwiches, a cook-off where fifty home cooks compete for the perfect burger, and sessions with burger historian George Motz. The recipes behind most videos are published in full, and his cookbooks collect many of them.