The art of chaotic cooking content
'Food doesn't need to be perfect, you don’t need to go out and buy a bunch of specific ingredients – it can just be slop.'
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter produced in partnership with Boring Oat Milk. Written by me, Charlotte Muru-Lanning. It’s lovely to have you here!
Whenever social media purports to shed its softly-lit, idealised vision of what food, eating and cooking should look like and embrace something a little more realistic, I tend to get a bit cynical. Every time we’re told that perfect is out and laissez-faire is in, the food always seems to remain self-consciously rustic, with intentionally messy flourishes and faux-casual scatters of dill and Italian parsley. Try as we might to peel away the facade of fancied-up food, the algorithm usually has other ideas.
But local TikToker Fudgeywudgeychef is none of that, instead taking a more oddball slant to what food looks like in 2023 – think goblin mode meets cooking content – and it’s taking off online. Fudgeywudgeychef’s recipe videos are replete with plentiful frozen veges, discount bagged spinach, post-onion-cutting runny noses, borderline-looking produce and mistakes that still, importantly, get eaten. The cinematography is jarring too, with unholy soundscapes made up of blaring sound effects and startling jolts of anything from drum and bass to Adele.
I spoke to the 21-year-old Auckland-based creator behind the perfectly chaotic videos about the beauty of being a little bit feral with food.
CML: How did all this start?
FWC: I used to edit videos for my friends on a private Instagram. Then I started doing it on TikTok and one of the videos just blew up. I remember feeling like it was a bit weird because everyones watching you, commenting on you. Now, when things get more views, I've learnt to embrace it. People think my lifestyle’s a bit strange. I find that kind of funny, because I suppose it is, but it works for me. When I go to work and talk to my coworkers, I realise that I definitely do things that they wouldn't do.
What determines the kinds of food you end up making in your videos?
It’s really just whatever's in the pantry. I can't be bothered going and getting more food, it’s too expensive. Sometimes they don't taste the best but I'll eat it, I'm not gonna waste it. Because I live by myself now, I don't have to cater to anyone, I can just eat whatever I want – no matter how shit it is, I still eat it and it's fine.
What’s your relationship with cooking like?
I've always loved cooking because my mum is a terrible cook. Like absolutely awful. She knows that as well – we always joke about it. She would buy microwave pizzas, put Chesdale cheese slices on top, then she'd put them in the oven and the plastic cheese on top would burn. So it'd be this chargrilled, fucked-up-looking mess. I remember eating it with my sister one day and I looked at her and I was like “this tastes like a sneaker, like if a sneaker just came fresh out of the box, like plastic and chemicals”. We ate it though.
Your videos have a pretty avant-garde style, do you have background in editing or sound?
I've got no official background but I've always enjoyed editing little things. I feel like I have a good sense of that stuff. For me, the more noise the better. I don't like things to be calm and quiet. I like things to be blaring – the louder it is, the funnier it is. My style of editing or filming is that I want it to be the worst thing ever for someone to watch. I want them to think this is awful.
Is there anything specific that’s inspired your videos?
Leigh Hart’s Speed Cooking from Late Night Big Breakfast. I suppose I took a little bit of inspiration from that because it's so chaotic and it's really fast and loud – he pulls out a chainsaw in one of them. There's just so much going on.
Your videos feel so different to the flawless images of food, cooking and eating most of us are more used to on social media – is that on purpose?
Yeah it’s definitely oppositional. Sometimes I’ll try to point out the worst things I do. On social media everything's always perfect, but things are more fun when everything is strange. Because everyone is a bit strange, it’s just people don't really show it on their social media. I make these videos because food doesn't need to be perfect, you don’t need to go out and buy a bunch of specific ingredients – it can just be slop.
Are there any ingredients that you always have on hand?
Rice, frozen vegetables and bread.
Do you have a favourite frozen vegetable?
I love them all but probably peas and corn. If I have peas and corn on hand, I’ll put them in absolutely everything.
Has the rising cost of food impacted what you’re cooking and eating?
Definitely. Way less fresh ingredients. Anything that's on special I'll get and I’ll stock up on that one thing and try to think of a bunch of things I can make with it. So this week I got a $3 bag of apples and I was like, “I should just stew them and then have stewed apples on toast with peanut butter or something like that”. Just to spread everything as far as I possibly can.
Are you quite careful about food waste?
I'm really conscious of that. I don't like wasting food at all. I will use my leftovers in a meal the next day. Everything costs a lot so I want to make sure I'm getting absolutely everything out of it. I don't like creating waste for environmental reasons as well.
Has making these videos sparked any ideas about where you might go in the future?
I’d really like to start streaming video games and I’d like to start editing things that are a bit longer, maybe on YouTube or even making content with other people. Maybe getting a job within the video editing industry. I really love making videos and using sound, so just anything to do with that’d be my dream. Other than that, I really want to be a cyborg – that's the end goal.
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Weekly bites
This week, workers in the hospitality industry took a major step toward gaining a Fair Pay Agreement. After six months of waiting, their application was approved by MBIE – making them only the second industry after bus drivers to progress to the next stage where bargaining will begin. It’s not the most glamorous piece of food news, but it’s an important development in what will likely be a transformative shift for our country’s hospitality industry.
Fair Pay Agreements or FPAs for short are essentially agreements to create a “floor” of minimum rights for employees in specific industries (not unlike the “awards system” that exists in Australia) and they’ve been met with cheers from workers unions and overwhelming boos from business associations. At its passing, it was described as one of the most significant changes to New Zealand’s employment relations landscape for a generation and in the hospitality industry in particular, there's hope it will bring liveable wages and better working conditions for workers and relief to the industry's staffing woes.
The most ambrosial-looking Basque cheesecakes, gooey cookies, layered brownies – in a colourful array of flavours like matcha, yuzu, black sesame, Thai milk tea, and most importantly, filled with chewy mochi. Everything Auckland-based baker Fankery makes looks squishy, saucy and deliciously tactile. Chris Schulz spoke to the woman behind the cheesecakes.
Small bites, neo bistro-style fare, unusual cocktails and natural wines occupy the menu at Horses, one of the trendiest restaurants in Hollywood, described by Vanity Fair as a place where “the vibes are as good as the food”. But its two co-chef-owners are now embroiled in a divorce case involving a series of extraordinarily dark allegations against each other – a saga outlined in this comprehensive investigation by Grubstreet.
It’s a story that’s frankly the most bewilderingly weird and disturbing thing I’ve ever read about a restaurant and it really should be emphasised how dark this is – loaded with allegations of domestic abuse, animal cruelty and more. Part of me wonders whether there’s a sense of familiarity that makes this type of story all that much more haunting. I’ve never been to Horses, but it could be any number of similar spots where impossibly cool co-owners pose for bracingly cool portraits to go alongside gushing magazine write ups – exactly the kind of restaurant that would end up on local best-restaurant lists, with plenty of fanfare, that I’d unwittingly make a trip to.
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The weekly snack
Dorval sour power straws pink lemonade flavour, $4.99 from US2U: When life hands you pink lemonade, you spend a silly amount of money on a relatively tiny (just 50g!) packet of lollies. It seems fairly reasonable to expect that something described as a “straw” might have some kind of hollow quality – a claim that in this case is upsettingly misleading. To save you any disappointment, I’d more accurately describe these as batons or wands, albeit bendy versions. Anyway, technicalities aside, let’s discuss the most important elements. Any initial suggestion of synthetic lemon I might have smelt was really just an illusion which gave way to a rather complex sugary tartness, with just the slightest brush of citrusy bitterness. Happily, the promised “sour” is bold, but not aggressively so. Really, it’s everything you want in a lolly: all at once whimsical, familiar and just grown-up enough. I’ve found myself sneaking back to the packet relentlessly and have quickly come to realise that these ridiculously perfect lollies are my new favourites. Unfortunately, they’re also ridiculously expensive.
Talk next week!
Hei kōnā mai, Charlotte
