Not all of us are great cooks IRL, but we can all dream of escaping to the French countryside, or hitting the road in the U.S. for some top notch food porn. And you don’t even have to leave for couch for this binge.
Nadiya’s Time To Eat
True foodies will know Nadiya Hussain from The Great British Bake Off, when she claimed the 2015 title. It also earned her the task of baking the Queen’s 90th birthday cake. No pressure. In her new Netflix series (which I binged in one sitting), she reveals all the cheats to creating meals that look and taste fab, but with much less time and effort. And I can attest, the peanut butter and jelly traybake is both easy and damn delicious, if you can be bothered. Or you could just enjoy watching Nadiya’s colourful kitchen and wardrobe. I want all of it.
Bon Appetit Test Kitchen
If you’re hungry for more of a massive food porn rabbit hole, jump on the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen YouTube channel and say goodbye to the rest of your day(s). The presenters have a cult following all of their own, so much so that they have a series of cooking challenges in which they take on celebrities ranging from Natalie Portman to Troy Sivan and even Gordon Ramsay.
Chef
Jon Favreau serves up an absolute feast of celeb cameos in this 2015 food porn flick. It follows a high-end chef with a short fuse trying to regain his passion again by serving toasted sandwiches from a food truck. Favreau not only wrote, directed and produced the movie, he also turned it into a Netflix spin-off series, titled The Chef Show, featuring all of his real-life celebrity friends.
Julie and Julia
Amy Adams, Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci combine in this 2009 movie that pays quite the tribute to early noughties blogging. Julie Powell spent a year cooking every recipe in Julia Childs’ Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, all for a blog that turned into a book and eventually a star-studded film. And now that we know Stanley Tucci can cook in real life, it all seems rather fitting.
The Hundred-Foot Journey
The French feast continues – enter Helen Mirren as the head of a very posh French restaurant up against a family-run Indian eatery that’s just set up across the road. Never has the humble omelette been so integral to a plot. The gorgeous country scenery and bustling farmers markets are just the icing on top of the cake.
Mostly Martha
This story may sound familiar – a celebrated and driven chef, Martha, is thrown together with a carefree Italian sous-chef, who she doesn’t much care fore until, of course, romance eventually bubbles to the surface. This German rom-com was turned into a US version, titled No Reservations, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones. Much like a knock-off Cronut, the original is the best.