The Rise of the Viral Recipe and the Struggle for Authentic Cooking
There is a specific kind of cooking video that now dominates the internet. You’ll know it when you see it: a camera hovering overhead, hands moving fast, ingredients piled high, cheese stretching into oblivion. It might promise dinner in minutes. It might look irresistible. You save it, perhaps send it to a friend. And then, when you come to cook it, something quietly falls apart – often just as you’re frantically pausing and rewinding because there aren’t actually written instructions to follow. “Comment ‘LUSH!’ for the recipe!” Instead, you swipe up.
That disconnect between what we watch and what actually works is what increasingly troubles John Gregory-Smith, a bestselling cookbook author, BBC’s Morning Live regular and, by his own admission, “90 per cent” a content creator. “They look really cool, especially on camera,” he says of viral recipes. “But they often don’t really work and don’t taste very nice.”
Gregory-Smith is not speaking as a cynic on the sidelines. Social media has built his career; he has more than a million followers, considers himself “a dinosaur in this industry” and develops recipes daily. But from inside the system, he has watched the shift in what gets rewarded – and what gets lost.
“What I’ve noticed in the last couple of years is Instagram pushing the same stuff over and over and over,” he says. “If that one went viral, just copy it again and again and again.” The result is a feed dominated not by good cooking, but by repeatable spectacle – recipes engineered to perform rather than to be cooked.
And when they do go viral, they rarely stand up to scrutiny. “With the viral recipes, the ones that go insane, the only one that is any good is the feta pasta bake,” which peaked in lockdown and resulted in sold-out feta in some shops. “That is so good.” Everything else, he suggests, is less convincing.
A yoghurt cheesecake that is, in reality, “just essentially frozen yoghurt with a load of rank biscuits in it”. A watermelon “sandwich” that, to him, is “just a bit Atkins”.
“It might look cool, but there’s a strong chance it probably won’t work and there’s a very strong chance that it’ll taste absolutely gross.”
Spend long enough on social media and the effect compounds. “You get stuck in a doomscroll, where you’ve clicked on it once and then it serves you 10,000 of them.” The loop feeds itself: more clicks, more spectacle, less substance.
Even recipes that appear more grounded can be misleading. Budget cooking videos, for instance, often promise to feed a family for a fixed sum, but rarely reflect how people actually shop. “Cost is very hard,” Gregory-Smith says. He saw this first hand recently while developing a Szechuan chilli beef recipe. It was, he says, “so yum”, but relied on a range of Chinese condiments he wouldn’t normally include. On paper, it might look inexpensive per portion; in reality, a home cook would need to stock up first. “It can be quite misleading,” he says.
The same disconnect applies to technique. While researching his new cookbook, The Greatest Traybake Cookbook Ever – a title that marks a shift from his earlier, more niche Middle Eastern and North African work – Gregory-Smith spent what he calls “an unhealthy amount of time” watching traybake videos online. Many followed a familiar formula: throw everything into a tin, roast for 40 minutes, dinner done. “Immediately, you’re like, well, it wouldn’t be nice, would it?” he says. “The potato won’t be cooked, the chicken will be like bullets, and the broccoli would have just burnt.”
If much of what we see doesn’t work, then what does?
For Gregory-Smith, the answer is disarmingly simple. “It’s the slow and steady that people really, really love,” he says. “It might just be a one-pot or a traybake or a lovely pasta dish… that’s real cooking and real food and really what people are making at home.”
It is a philosophy that underpins the new book. The aim was not to create showstoppers, but staples. “When I started writing it, I read a stat about cookbooks that for the majority of them, people cook like two or three recipes from them, then just put them back on the shelf,” he says. “So I wanted to try and do something that people would genuinely be able to use on a Monday or Tuesday night.”
The choice of traybakes was deliberate. It was, he says, a direct response to what he was seeing online – and what was actually landing with his audience. “It was always things like a really solid chicken traybake everybody loves. It’s not always like the sexiest thing ever, but it’s the one that you will actually cook every week because you know you absolutely love it.”
Behind that simplicity is a level of rigour rarely seen online. Every recipe is written, tested, adjusted and tested again before it ever appears. “If somebody who I’ve never met before takes the time and effort and money to go and cook one of my recipes, it has to work.”
His cooking may be simple, but it is far from dull. Much of it is driven by a longstanding fascination with global flavours, one that began in childhood. Growing up in Surrey in the 1980s and 1990s, he describes a fairly standard British diet – roast chicken, spaghetti bolognese, scrambled eggs for dinner if things were rushed – until travel changed things. Family trips further afield, to Africa and Southeast Asia, opened up a different world.
A formative moment came with a bowl of tom yum goong soup in Thailand. “It was sweet, spicy, sour, tangy, hot, all at once,” he says. “I remember thinking it was one of those things that has changed my palate forever… how can I go back to boiled ham and pie?”
Television played its part, too. Alongside the functional cooking of Delia Smith, there were glimpses of something more expansive: Madhur Jaffrey cooking on the streets of Penang, Ken Hom wokking up dishes in China. Later, figures like Anthony Bourdain and Keith Floyd would shape his outlook even further – less about perfection, more about chasing something delicious, wherever it might be found.
That curiosity still drives him. While researching recipes, he became obsessed with a YouTube channel featuring a woman cooking outdoors in a village in Azerbaijan. “It’s all shot really beautifully… sometimes it’s sunny and sometimes it’s snowy,” he says. “And I was just like, oh my God, I love you and I want to live with you.” The dish she made – khingal, a rustic pasta with lamb and garlic yoghurt – chimed with a Turkish pasta recipe that had recently gone viral. Sensing an opportunity, he shared his own version, nudging followers from the trend towards something with deeper roots. The response from Azerbaijani viewers was so strong that he travelled there soon after to explore it further.
Travel has shaped his cooking in quieter ways, too. One of the standout dishes in his new book – a saffron and preserved lemon tagine – is rooted in repeated trips to Morocco. “I’ve been to Morocco loads, I love Morocco and I love Moroccan food,” he says. “Quite often, as a tourist, you’re given a very set roster of meals… You can get a bit sick of it.” The real revelation, he found, came not in restaurants but on the road. “Often, the best restaurants in Morocco are little cafes at service stations.” One in particular, Bladna, on the drive from Marrakech to the Atlas Mountains, stuck with him: a deeply spiced tagine, heavy on garlic and onions, that he has since reworked into a traybake that takes just 15 minutes to prepare. “It was so amazing,” he says.
Social media is not entirely the villain. It can flatten cuisines and strip context, certainly, but it can also spark curiosity. “You can totally see something on social media and be like, oh that looks really nice… and you might have no idea where it’s come from,” he says. “What I would hope is, if somebody’s really interested in something, they might go that step further.”
He points to the familiar debates around Jamie Oliver – whether it’s jerk chicken or paella – as an example of that tension. On the one hand, altering traditional dishes can spark backlash; on the other, it can open doors. A non-traditional paella might not pass muster in Valencia, but it has helped introduce the dish to a wider audience. “What he’s done is introduce the UK to a Spanish dish,” Gregory-Smith says. Now, he adds, you’re as likely to find tapas restaurants on British high streets as you are a pub.
Still, he is realistic about how most of us engage with food now. Where cookery shows once filled British television schedules – from Delia to Floyd – they have largely been replaced by competitions, while the act of watching someone cook has migrated online. “People are consuming more and more and more food content online,” he says. “But what would be the conversion rate to dishes you’ve actually cooked?”
That, perhaps, is the crux of it. We are watching more than ever, but cooking less of what we watch. The gap between inspiration and action has widened, filled with recipes that look good, travel fast and rarely last.
Gregory-Smith is still part of that world. He still films, posts and plays the game. But he does so with a clear sense of what matters. “I’d rather be known as the guy you can go to if you want that nice, easy, midweek or easy entertaining meal that actually works.”
In a landscape built on clicks, that feels almost radical. The recipes worth holding on to are not the ones that stop the scroll, but the ones that make it to the table – again and again.
Cumin-spiced Lamb Chops with Roasted Squash
“When you’re short on time but want something that feels a little fancy, this Indian-style traybake is a lifesaver. Tiny cubes of butternut squash – small enough to roast quickly – go golden and crispy in the oven with some hearty chickpeas. Spiced lamb chops and cherry tomatoes are layered on top, and their juices marry together to create a lovely, mellow sauce. To finish, I love a generous dollop of lime pickle yoghurt that melts so satisfyingly over everything on your plate.”
Serves: 4
Prep time: 15 minutes | Cook time: 30 minutes
Ingredients:
– 1 squash, cut into 0.5–1cm cubes (about 550g in total)
– 4 tbsp olive oil
– 1 x 400g tin of chickpeas, drained and rinsed
– 300g cherry tomatoes, halved
– 2½ tsp garam masala
– 4 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
– ½ tsp ground cumin
– ¼ tsp ground fenugreek
– 8 lamb chops (about 700g in total)
– 300g Greek yoghurt – I use 10 per cent fat
– 2 tbsp lime pickle
– A handful of roughly chopped coriander leaves
– Salt and pepper
Method:
1. Preheat the oven to 220C/200C fan/gas 7. Chuck the squash into a 30x40cm roasting tin and add 1 tablespoon of the olive oil and a good pinch of salt and pepper. Toss together and roast for 10 minutes to start softening the squash.
2. Put the chickpeas, cherry tomatoes, 1 tablespoon of olive oil, 1 teaspoon of garam masala and a good pinch of salt and pepper into a mixing bowl and toss together. Add to the tray with the squash. Mix well and return to the oven for 10 minutes.
3. Meanwhile, put the remaining 2 tablespoons of oil into a large mixing bowl. Add the garlic, the remaining 1½ teaspoons of garam masala, the cumin, fenugreek and a good pinch of salt and pepper. Mix well, then chuck in the lamb chops and mix together.
4. Arrange the chops on top of the squash in the roasting tin and roast in the oven for 8 to 10 minutes or until the lamb is cooked on the outside but still pink in the middle.
5. While the lamb cooks, mix the yoghurt with the lime pickle and a good pinch of salt and pepper.
6. Scatter the coriander over the lamb, chickpeas and veg and divide between four serving plates. Serve immediately with big dollops of yoghurt on the side.
Saffron and Preserved Lemon Tagine Traybake
“This easy chicken traybake is flavoured with some of my favourite Moroccan ingredients, including sunshine-yellow saffron, perfumed preserved lemons and warming ground ginger. These big flavours marry together with the joyous chicken juices and melting soft onions to create a magnificent sauce that’s both comforting and complex. Pair it with buttery couscous to soak up every last drop of this divine dish.”
Serves: 4
Prep time: 15 minutes | Cook time: 1 hour 25 minutes
Ingredients:
– A pinch of saffron
– 2 tbsp just-boiled water
– 2 preserved lemons, deseeded and roughly chopped
– Large handful of coriander, leaves and stalks, plus a few extra leaves, to garnish
– 4 cloves of garlic, peeled
– 2 tsp paprika
– 1 tsp ground ginger
– 2 tbsp olive oil
– 1 kg chicken thighs, skin on and bone in
– 2 onions, peeled and finely sliced
– 300ml hot chicken stock – from 1 stock cube
– 100g pitted green olives
– Salt and pepper
Method:
1. Preheat the oven to 200C/180C fan/gas 6. Put the saffron into a little dish and add the just-boiled water. Stir and leave to infuse for a few minutes.
2. Put the preserved lemons, coriander, garlic cloves, paprika, ginger, olive oil and a big pinch of salt and pepper into a mini chopper. Pour in the saffron water and blitz into a smooth paste.
3. Pop the chicken into a 24x32cm roasting tin and add the spice paste. Mix well, really massaging it into the thighs. Add the onions. Mix well again and arrange the chicken thighs skin side up. Pour in the stock. Scrunch up some baking paper and spread it over the chicken. Cover the whole tray with foil and roast in the oven for 1 hour to let the flavours develop and the chicken cook.
4. Remove the foil and baking paper and scatter the olives over the chicken. Shake the roasting tin so they sink into the juices. Return to the oven for 20 to 25 minutes or until the chicken skin is nice and golden. Scatter over a few coriander leaves and serve immediately.
Creamy Harissa Sausage Casserole
“This speedy traybake is a delightful fusion of flavours, blending British classics with Moroccan flair. British bangers, one of the most versatile quick-cook ingredients out there, are cooked in a warming Moroccan-inspired butter-bean stew flavoured with ras el hanout spice mix and rose harissa. Now, if you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know I have a medium-to-mega obsession with rose harissa. It literally makes anything taste delicious. One tablespoon gives a nice hum to this dish, but if you’re craving a kick, try adding an extra tablespoon into the sauce.
“The cream is an optional extra for when you feel like you need a little more comfort in your life. It’s equally lush without, so I’ll leave that bit up to you. It’s your call!”
Serves: 4
Prep time: 5 minutes | Cook time: 35 minutes
Ingredients:
– 8 pork sausages (about 500g in total)
– 1 onion, peeled and finely chopped
– 1 tbsp olive oil
– 2 x 400g tins of butter beans
– 1 x 400g tin of chopped tomatoes
– 100g pitted Kalamata olives
– 2 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
– 1 tbsp rose harissa
– 1 tsp ras el hanout
– Optional: 50ml double cream
– Salt and pepper
Method:
1. Preheat the oven to 240C/220C fan/gas 9. Pop the sausages, onion, olive oil and a pinch of salt and pepper into a 24x32cm roasting tin. Mix well and put into the oven to roast for 15 minutes to get some colour onto everything.
2. Remove the roasting tin from the oven and reduce the temperature to 220C/200C fan/gas 7. Drain one tin of butter beans and add them to the roasting tin. Add the other tin of beans with all its liquid and the tomatoes, olives, garlic, harissa, ras el hanout and a good pinch of salt and pepper. Mix well and return to the oven for 20 minutes until everything is bubbling. Add the double cream, if using, stir together and serve immediately.
‘The Greatest Traybake Cookbook Ever’ by John Gregory Smith (Penguin Michael Joseph)
