- Hi I'm Alvin and today I'm gonna show you
how to make some of my most viral recipes.
(optimistic music)
One thing that I was really lucky enough
to be able to do was to work a lot
with our Tasty international teams
and one particular trip I remember was
actually with Rea and we went to Japan
to work with the Tasty Japan team.
So one of our biggest goals in Japan
was to just find this amazing viral food
that they sort of do and try to see
if we can recreate it.
One of the dishes that definitely caught our eye
was these jiggling pancakes
that were a lot thicker than they normally were,
but apparently were a lot fluffier and a lot lighter
than your traditional American pancake
and we sort of went to the source and went to this cafe
that just served them and were known for them.
There's a lot of transparency into the cooking process
in Japan with a lot of glass windows.
It was such a pleasure to be able to just see
how things were done.
Rea and I sort of put our heads together
to figure out how to recreate this.
I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out.
It maybe wasn't 100% as jiggly or as fluffy
as the ones we ate in Japan,
but I would say it's pretty close.
It was just such an amazing experience
to travel to a country and to explore food culture
with someone that knows it so well such as Rea.
Appreciate it, respect it, but also put our own spin on it.
I think that's something that I really, really loved doing.
When I was in college,
I really didn't know how to bake at all
and I really wanted to save money,
so I would actually take ingredients from my dining hall
from the ice cream bar where they had chocolate chips
or Nutella or peanut butter
and bring them back to my dorm and throw them together
with a little flour and try and come up with a baked good
that was edible that I could feed my floormates
that could get friends finally
and one thing that I really found was that
people just absolutely love cookies
whether it's eating them, whether it's making them.
Cookies became the thing that I just really wanted to nail
and this is a recipe that I'm really, really proud of.
Coming up with this recipe, I knew it had to be better
than store bought cookie dough
or things that people are used
to taking home and baking and getting at the store,
and I really looked into using different kinds of chocolate.
I used to work at a bakery in New York
where I was just absolutely in love
with their chocolate chip cookies
and I knew it needed to be chewy on the inside.
I knew it needed to be a little crispy on the outside
and it had to be this thing that you crave
over and over and over again.
One secret that I did learn was that
the dough should be resting for at least 24 to 36 hours
because what that does is that helps the flour absorb
all the egg and the sugar and the butter
and really allow certain processes
to start developing flavors inside the fridge
that you would lose if you baked the cookie dough right away
because I think it gives it a more caramel,
toffee like flavor which I absolutely love.
Mozzarella stick and onion ring was one
of my more proud creations.
One thing that I really love to do when I'm coming up
with ideas is just think of two really,
really delicious things that people love
and somehow combine it into something
that's even more delicious.
I really wanted to combine mozzarella sticks
with something else, kind of lay awake at two A.M.
Thinking what can I make with mozzarella sticks?
As I was about to fall asleep,
I think my brain just drifted off and thinking about Shrek
and I was like, oh, onions!
Like onion rings, like oh my God, that's so cool.
And I was like wait, is this even possible?
To quote the famous green ogre,
orge's are like onions.
Onions have layers and I just started
to picture cross section of an onion
with all it's co-centric ring.
I mentally isolated two of them.
Turns out if you use sliced cheese,
it's almost a perfect width.
It still looks like an onion ring after it's been fried
and it did taste like a mozzarella stick
and it did taste like an onion ring.
It was a very fun day.
Five layer brownie cheesecake,
that was probably one of my greatest architectural feats
if I would say so myself.
I was actually starting engineering in college.
Not really a good student to be honest,
but one thing that I definitely did pick up
was the ability how to approach a problem
and how to look at it from certain angles
especially when things don't exist.
A lot of times we are asked to do hypothetical questions
like if you wanted to accomplish this,
how would you go about achieving it?
And I learned that the easiest way
is to break down the problem into it's parts
and kind of almost work backwards.
Cookie dough, Oreos,
and brownies are a very common combination
and I wanted to take that further.
I really wanted to turn the flavor profile
of a triple stacked brownie into something else.
I wanted to turn it into more of this spectacle dessert
that you could really wow everybody at a party with
and I just absolutely love layers and clean layers,
so that was something that I set out to do was
to turn a triple decker brownie into a cheesecake.
The challenge with this recipe
is that all of these elements all bake at different times,
different temperatures, and have different thicknesses.
I kind of wanted to go after the vibe
of when you go to the Cheesecake Factory
and they sit down this slice
of this beautifully cut and assembled cheesecake.
I really didn't know how this was gonna go until I made it,
and I had to do a lot of pre-planning and thinking
and being able to try to predict
how the food would behave
in a way that I had never done before.
I was hoping that the brownie batter would not get dry.
I guess that the cream cheese in the mixture
would give the brownie moisture.
It was really gratifying to pull something like this off
especially when you have never really done this before.
I guess I felt really happy
and relieved that it actually worked.
After the brownie and cheesecake were set,
that's when I put the Oreos and the cookie dough on top.
I don't try to do recipes a lot of times
because I think I really enjoy the challenge
of getting it right on the first or the second try.
Kind of nerve wracking to cut it open
because you really don't know
how it's gonna turn out until you actually slice it open
and see the layers and to my luck it really worked out well.
I was able to see all four elements in their entirety.
I love to spend time just thinking about the food
and really just trying to guess and predict
how food is going to behave
and sometimes I really just sit down
and write things down and try to map out
or draw out how certain foods before and after
and so for this one I thought about it a lot
and made some decisions
and that's the sort of approach that I like to take
because there's something really cool
about trying something that's completely new
and then somehow landing it on the first try.
When I try to come up with an idea for a recipe,
what I really wanna do is be able to make people
go like wow and really show them something
that they are familiar with but maybe in a new way
or maybe something that is new to them,
but in a familiar way.
It's always about taking the element of something
that people know, twisting it and making it cooler,
making it different, combining it with other things.
The end result is to make people go wow.
That's sort of usually the approach I take
when I want to really showcase food to people in a cool way.
So for the eight desserts in one sheet pan,
it kind of came from a time where it was the holidays,
I had seen a lot of videos kind of pop up
around desserts and baking and pie
and Food Network actually released
this one video that was pretty cool.
It was like four pies baked in the same sheet pan
and to myself I was like wow, that's really smart,
but can I take it even a little further?
I know that pie is just one dessert.
There are a lot of desserts out there
and a lot of baked goods that people like to eat.
My hunch was that around Christmas time,
around the holidays usually at these potlucks or parties,
there would be a widespread of desserts
and a range of cookies to brownies to cheesecakes to pies.
I think this crazy idea came about because in my head
I was like, man, what happens if you just put all
of those desserts together?
Is there a way to take every single dessert
that everybody loves and turn it into just one thing?
I think that's how the idea was born
is I basically thought of what can I use
to serve this giant dessert?
And how do I make sure
that everybody gets a piece they want?
Because sometimes when you bring a dessert to a party,
not everybody likes brownies,
not everybody likes cheesecakes,
but is there a way to make sure that no matter
who you are at the party,
you're gonna have one piece that's gonna speak to you?
And that's how I sort of designed
this eight desserts in one sheet pan.
I wanted to build it in a way
where if you cut in the precise manner,
you would end up with just a bunch of different flavors.
You wouldn't really cut it just along where the flavors met,
but you'd be able to get pieces or bars that would have
two flavors, three flavors, and the golden crown
is when you get that piece with all four flavors in them.
The challenge with designing this was that
no matter what piece you'd get,
the flavor should still go together.
So you kind of have to play
this weird math mix and match game
of do these two flavors go together?
Okay, if this goes together with this,
then this must be next to here.
There was a lot of me drawing things on a piece of paper
and crumpling it up like you do in the movies
and throwing it in the trashcan.
After a lot of trial and error,
I managed to get a certain layout
of which desserts should go in which area in the pan,
so that no matter which piece you got,
it would always taste great.
(gentle music)
That I was going to attempt something
as crazy as this a couple years ago,
I would of never imagined that.
I feel like once I started to do more
and more videos for Buzzfeed did I realize
that food is pretty much everything to me.
Not only am I someone who loves to eat,
but it does make me happy and it does make me proud
when I'm able to pull of a certain dish
or a certain thing that I see on the internet
because I'm not classically trained.
Everything is really just approaching something
and trying to apply certain rules and properties about food
to see if I can actually make this crazy thing happen.
This mirror cake, I literally just saw it
when I was scrolling through Instagram
and I was like man, this cake is so cool.
How do they do that?
It's like some crazy, beautiful technique
and I wanna figure it out and after doing hours
and hours of research and a couple
of tests, I was able to pull off
something that looked very close to what these professional
pastry chefs and these cake
decorators would make on Instagram.
No matter what I do, I know I will always love
to showcase food in a beautiful way
and in a way that people have been seeing it before.
No matter whether it's recipe videos
or whether it's a story,
I just want to be able to make people
feel a wide range of emotions, excitement,
happiness, joy, craving,
and I don't think that'll ever change.
We're pretty fortunate that we've been able
to make an audience of millions of people.
There's nothing like being able to feed someone.
I think that's really what I believe,
and that's why I love to cook.
It's not only that I'm able to make fun food videos
that can touch a lot of people on the internet,
but also be able to actually create food with my hands,
share them with people that I care about
or people that I wanna hang out with.
It really fosters a great sense of companionship,
friendship, and just a stronger connection between people,
and great that we have to eat everyday
because otherwise I might get bored.
It's funny because when I started out,
I was really just borrowing a camera
from my floormate that I had made friends with
because I gave them a cookie one time
and just recording whatever I was baking that day
or whatever I took from the dining hall
and posting them on who knows where.
One day I was connected with a frozen yogurt chain
because they wanted a little amateur videographer to come in
and do these short little froyo videos.
One day a Buzzfeed manager saw these videos
and reached out to me and was like hey,
would you ever wanna come and make a couple
of food videos for us?
And at that time Tasty did not exist.
The food internet situation was really nothing.
When Tasty was born, I was along to see it grow
and to really see how much it touched people's lives
and I was really proud of that.
We all love food and we all support each other
and we all love to showcase with video in a way
that is very unique to our styles.
It's really cool to see people tag each other
and being like oh my God, this reminded me of you.
Oh by the way, how's it going?
I haven't talked to you in five years
and it was like that's kind of crazy
is that this random cake got someone
to mention someone else
because they knew that someone
would love this piece of content.
I think that was really what resonated with me
and why I strived to push
to make even better food videos day after day.
I never ever think to myself like oh man
like I gotta go to work today.
It's always been like, oh, I wanna make this cool thing.
I wanna get there as soon as possible.
Food just really brings people
together no matter who you are.
I can honestly say that 99% of my friends
are my friends because I have given them food.
I love making these videos not for myself,
but for other people because I really love
how food is cool and I wanna show them that.
(optimistic music)