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“When in doubt – put some patis in it,” Jeanelle recommends. Her eyes light up when talking about fish sauce, a traditional Filipino ingredient. She begins to list the dishes she’s levelled up with a bit of fish sauce: adobo, lasagna, meatloaf. “I always add a splash of patis.”

Soon it’s apparent that Jeanelle’s eyes light up whenever she talks about Filipino cuisine. It’s her passion and it shows. (And it’s proving to be infectious – her YouTube channel’s has gained over 5,000 new subscribers in the past few weeks alone.) But she wasn’t always so forthcoming about sharing her passion. She initially hesitated to post her recipe videos online, fearing that commenters might question the authenticity of her methods or ingredients. She doubted her credibility compared to lolas with decades of experience or chefs with formal training. Jeanelle took a chance and shared her videos anyway. It was a chance that paid off. Soon she discovered that her videos were enabling Filipinos across the world to re-discover the meals they grew up with. One comment from a user whose mother had passed away thanked Jeanelle for helping him relive the Mechado of his childhood. It was proof that authenticity isn’t in the methods or ingredients, it’s in how the meal makes you feel.

On this page, you’ll find Jeanelle’s video recipe for Tortang Talong. Traditionally prepared with ground pork, she uses crab meat instead. The inspiration behind the surprising swap boiled down to necessity: “There was crabmeat in the fridge that was about to go bad. That can was $20!”

By teaching, we learn. This Roman proverb from around 65 AD is proving to be relevant to YouTubers in the year 2020.

Nic and Rei started to learn how to cook Filipino food when they left home. “When we got married, we moved away from our moms who did a lot of the cooking,” Nic recalls. “We still wanted to eat Filipino food and cook homemade meals.” So they reached out to their parents to learn how to make the dishes they grew up with.

The couple began to film the recipes and post them on YouTube, teaching the process to their subscribers. Their eponymous channel, Nic & Rei, is full of video how-tos for the Filipino dishes and Kapampangan specialties passed on to them from their parents. “Ever since we started doing this, it’s fast tracked us as far as learning recipes,” Rei adds. “If we didn’t start this YouTube channel, we wouldn’t know as many recipes. So it’s kinda nice now – if we feel like eating pretty much any Filipino food we can just whip it up.”

One such recipe they can now whip up is Dinuguan, the video for which is featured on this page. “We just felt like eating dinuguan one day,” Nic says of the inspiration behind it. “And then we wanted to learn how to make it so we can eat it whenever. So we asked [my mom], ‘How do you make it?’”

Dinuguan is a pork stew of pig’s blood and vinegar. The cooked blood is what gives this dish its’ recognizable black sauce. This version also includes pig’s stomach, an ingredient that Nic and Rei were initially unfamiliar with handling. “It was new to us,” Nic says. “My mom taught us how to clean it with calamansi juice and salt and boiling it.” The cleaning process demands multiple rounds of vigorous scrubbing and squeezing and boiling. It may be the only Filipino recipe that calls for not just literal (pig’s) blood and also figurative sweat and tears – and it’s definitely one that’s worth every drop.

There’s a joyfulness that comes through in every video recipe from Just Eat Life. You can hear it in a giddy voiceover about beet juice or see it in a smiling sunny-side-up egg graphic. Behind the channel are partners in life and in business, Jen and Leo. Together they share their happy love of food, flavor, travelling, and teaching through the videos they create.

Their recipe videos are often inspired by either a discovery of a new ingredient or a craving of a dish they’ve had before.

“We’ll be in the market and – it’s my favorite hobby, we hang out with friends in different groceries and just try different things – we’d see a new product or something I haven’t worked with before,” Jen says. “Sometimes that will inspire a new dish.”

When inspiration comes from a craving, it’s often for a meal they’ve had on the road like a noodle dish from a work trip. “We went to shoot different places [in Thailand] and we tried prawn mee”, Leo remembers. “So now we crave that.” That craving has spawned the prawn noodle recipe on their channel.

Sometimes the craving comes from a childhood memory like Bibinkga for Jen. She remembers having the sweet, fluffy rice cake either ordered out or from family friends who made it themselves. When she set out to recreate the recipe, the project became a family collaboration. Her mom shared various recipes she’d heard of and offered ideas on what types of flour to use for a lighter cake. “My sister was the one who said ‘hey, why don’t you try ube and maybe make it smaller?’” Jen recalls.

“The whole time my mom was telling me ‘you need the clay pot, you need the charcoal, and you need to do it outside’,” Jen says. She eventually decided to use an oven to make the recipe more accessible. Jen and Leo hope that viewers will see it as a fun, entry-level Bibingka before experiencing the real thing later on. “Hopefully [viewers] get to visit the Philippines and be like ‘oh yeah, I’ve had that before. I’ve seen that and this is like the real deal. Now I can appreciate it more and understand it’. That’s our goal at least. Even with ourselves.”

“I think I’ve rolled a million lumpia in my life,” Philip says, recalling childhood memories of cooking with his mom. He learned the basics from her – making rice, handling a knife, and of course rolling lumpia. “We made lumpia a lot.”

Despite these memories, Philip only truly learned how to cook on his own when he moved away from his family’s home in California to Hawaii. He taught himself recipes he’d see on the Food Network. “It was the only channel I would watch,” he says, describing how he’d go online to find the recipe from a show, learn it, and then change it based on his own preferences. He would do the same whenever he’d discover a great dish from Oahu’s multicultural food scene – learn to make it at home and then develop his own version.

This echoes his mom Arlene’s own experience learning how to cook for the first time. She too only learned after she moved away from home, in her case from the Philippines to the US. She would ask her mother how to prepare the dishes she missed the most. Then she did what her son did decades later – she tailored them to her own preferences and to available ingredients.

On this page we share Philip’s video recipe of his mom’s pancit. He remembers her preparing the dish for parties and also remembers judging every other pancit by this standard. Whenever he came across one that didn’t quite cut it for him, he’d think “Oh, that’s not my mom’s.” This video is one of the many on his YouTube channel designed to help viewers get better at the things he’s passionate about: making great videos and cooking great food. With about 13,000 subscribers and counting, it’s increasingly likely that Philip will one day attend a random gathering where the home cooked pancit might just make him go “Hey, that’s just like my mom’s pancit!”

Jen is a professional YouTuber whose channel, Pagkaing Pinoy TV, has racked up over 80 million views and over 500,000 subscribers. Filipinos at home and abroad, even non-Filipinos, watch her videos to learn how to make classics like Beef Salpicao or trending dishes like Sushi Bake.

Despite this level of success, Jen admits she has critics – her children. She says that her eldest, now 11 years old, stopped eating Filipino food when they first moved overseas. But she has begun to win him over. “Now he eats a lot of Filipino food. His favorite is the silog recipes. He likes leche flan,” Jen says proudly.

“Yesterday he tried to make lumpia,” she recounts. “He was asking me how to do this, how to do that. He messed up the kitchen but he was able to do it.”

Talking about her son’s kitchen adventures reminds Jen of her own childhood learning from her mother. “Since I was a kid, I’ve been curious about cooking,” she says. “My mom was a great cook – I still remember her serving us delicious food during parties and family gatherings or even when there’s no occasion.” It was her mom’s family-oriented approach to cooking that motivated Jen to share her knowledge with others as well. “I was inspired by her. I thought that I should do the same with other people. I can teach them how to cook and they can enjoy it with their families as well.”

One of the recipes passed down from her mom is the Bistek Tagalog shared on this page. “[It’s] very traditional because that’s how I remember my mom cooking it,” she explains. Jen believes that when it comes to traditional recipes, you can adjust the flavor to your preferences but you have to respect the key ingredients. “With Bistek Tagalog you need to have the onions, they need to be sliced into rings. And the soy sauce, of course. So those things you have to stick on the traditional.”

What are two key ingredients for the perfect baking channel? Love and expertise. Weng, the woman at the heart of YouTube’s Savor Easy, definitely bakes with heaping portions of both.

“I really love baking,” Weng says with a warm smile. “[Even] when I was small, I really loved it.” She remembers a childhood surrounded by aunts who loved to bake. It was that time spent with them, learning to make Double Chocolate Cake, that helped inspire a lifelong love of baking.

In high school, Weng took basic baking classes. “[I learned] how to not overmix,” she says. “How to weigh and measure ingredients.” There she honed the essential techniques and recipes that would form the foundation of her expertise. She would later go on to build a cake artistry business, specializing in custom fondant cakes for birthdays and weddings.

Today she shares that love and expertise with her subscribers through weekly recipes on her channel. One of those recipes, the Special bibingka video with over half a million views, is featured on this page. bibingka is a sweet rice cake topped with slices of salted egg. “I grew up in Iloilo City where there’s two types of bibingka,” she says. “There’s the flat one which is sticky and the other one is the fluffy one.” As a true celebration of her hometown, her recipe is a unique hybrid of the two. “That’s a good combination of dessert,” Weng says about its sweet-savory blend.

When asked what she hopes to put her love and expertise into next, she pauses to ponder the question. “Maybe still sharing recipes or having a book,” she eventually says with a laugh. “I have a plan of making a dessert cafe, a coffee shop with cakes and desserts.”

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