The secret to French onion ramen and other life lessons from 'The Mythical Cookbook'
Earlier this month Josh Scherer cooked a corned beef sandwich and a few gelatin-encased shrimp in a nod to foods that have been to space. Earlier this year he served Gordon Ramsay a beef Wellington, a deep-fried Mars bar, an In-N-Out burger and everything else the chef decreed would be his ideal last meal on Earth. He’s re-created the McDonald’s McRib sandwich using $456 of high-end ingredients, he’s cured salmon to taste like Doritos, and he’s cooked Terry Crews a skillet of turkey testicles (which Crews loved, to his own surprise).
For his next trick, the face of web cooking show “Mythical Kitchen” is coming to your home with a new cookbook, and he’s bringing some of his most unhinged recipes.
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The journalist turned web series producer, chef and host can be found cooking — sometimes shirtless, sometimes yelling, but always delighting in his most bizarre concoctions — across various series and segments overseen by YouTube megastars and "Good Mythical Morning" hosts Rhett James McLaughlin and Charles Lincoln "Link" Neal III, known more colloquially as Rhett & Link.
After founding their web channel in 2006 and garnering millions of followers across multiple platforms, resulting in one of YouTube's most successful media enterprises, the duo turned their attention to food content and tapped Scherer to helm it. It’s a decision that’s paid off, spurring millions of new subscribers and a handful of “Mythical Kitchen” offshoots such as “Last Meals” and “Snack Smash.”
A large part of the “Mythical Kitchen” appeal, apart from its rotation of A-list celebrity guests and attention-grabbing dishes, is its demystification of cooking. Scherer spends a lot of time studying science and technique to figure out which rules to break, resulting in recipes that can handily cut corners for the home chef (see: blender Hollandaise) or eliminate food waste or make minimal-effort meals tastier (see: frozen French fry and leftovers hash, French onion ramen).
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“I think a lot of us grew up in this era of the rock star chef, and grew up with these authorities on Food Network saying these hard-and-fast rules like ‘never wash your mushrooms because they'll get waterlogged,’ and then you go to grandma's house and she washes her mushrooms and her pasta is delicious,” Scherer said. “So how do you square those things? A big thing that I try and do is sort of decentralize authority; the great chefs are not the only people that know how to cook in the world.”
After nearly five years of planning, in March the Mythic team released a cookbook by Scherer and writer and cooking show host Noah Galuten — and while “The Mythical Cookbook” is every bit as colorful, personality-driven and flat-out deranged as its web-TV counterpart, there are real culinary lessons to be learned, whether it’s how to wash Japanese rice, how to prevent a cheese sauce from breaking, or the benefits of resting breaded chicken before it’s fried.
There’s good reason for this. Scherer, an established food writer with a cookbook of his own, is far from the only cook in the kitchen; he regularly works alongside other culinary producers, or “Mythical chefs,” such as Lily Cousins, a vet of Michelin-starred Kato (the L.A. Times best restaurant of 2023). The team’s pastry specialist, Trevor Evarts, came from Dominique Ansel Bakery.
When it comes to deciding what to cook, the chefs tailor content to what the internet seems to click and devour, balanced with whatever whims their own crew might dream up for a pitch meeting.
In the kingdom of YouTube, where the Mythical team reigns, algorithm is the law of the land. Sometimes Scherer and his colleagues begin by conceptualizing recipes that are craveable and classic — which tend to click well — like fried chicken, mac and cheese or pizza. Then they turn it on its head, but even the most bizarre of Scherer’s creations tend to educate, such as the mac and cheese laced with Phuket-style crab curry in an ode to the signature dish at one of his favorite restaurants, Hollywood’s Luv2eat Thai Bistro.
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“How do we teach them about something that I really love?” he asks himself. “You're talking about the differences between Southern Thai, Northern Thai cooking, all the different regions, and [saying] ‘Actually papaya salad is a Lao dish.’ You're talking about all of that within the framework of mac and cheese. Sometimes you want to wrap a pill in Jell-O, so to speak.”
Some dishes, he says, are made for pure shock value (see: the pumpkin spice pig’s foot). To Scherer, who grew up watching conventional television’s cooking shows and views new media as its evolution, food is educational and thrilling, but it’s also another form of entertainment. The act and necessity of eating is, to him, secondary to the delight and the joy of it. As a chef, he’s equal parts whimsy and determination.
“Our process is: The worst way to make something go viral is to try and make it go viral,” Scherer said. “It’s almost trying to prove people wrong.”
When asked what would happen if someone were to swap a fried chicken sandwich’s buns with peanut butter and jelly Uncrustables, they tried it — and it was horrible. But Scherer was encouraged by the failure, and he saw the promise: Savory peanuts, often found in Thai and West African cuisines, among others, could be turned into a sauce that helps balance a sweet-spicy grape-jelly glaze. The peanut butter and jelly fried chicken sandwich was born, and is what Scherer believes could be the best-tasting recipe in the cookbook.
Whether it’s that, the Nashville-hot-style lamb brains, the birria de res soup dumplings or the crab cake corn dogs, the Mythical chefs have dreamed up something bizarre and oddly delicious for you — though there are no turkey testicles in mac and cheese. (Sorry, Terry Crews.)
Find Josh Scherer at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Saturday, April 20, making orange chicken parmesan from "The Mythical Cookbook" on the Cooking Stage at 2 p.m. See the full schedule of Festival of Books demos, signings and discussions events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks.
The Recipes
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
