In 2020, it felt like Bon Appétit’s test kitchen was everywhere. The video series, populated by a group of quirky chefs preparing beautifully photographed recipes in the food magazine’s office, caught the attention of the food-loving public like a Friday night series.
They were a blockbuster for the magazine until revelations about Bon Appétit’s working conditions – marred by wage inequality and racism – led to several layoffs and the very unspectacular departure of the editor-in-chief in the summer of that year.
Since then, the magazine’s video arm has brought more diverse personalities to create food content, but a relic from the past has continued to cause problems for the brand. In his Bon appetit series It’s Alive, chef Brad Leone shows off his rugged, down-to-earth personality as he demonstrates methods of food preservation and fermentation. Leone and her former colleague Claire Saffitz were the stars of the magazine’s earlier era, attracting millions of viewers and followers with their impromptu instructional videos.
His fast and easy style is fun to watch, but the negative reception to his latest work, an April 4 demo of home-made pastrami, speaks to the sometimes conflicting relationship between popularity and food media credibility. In the video, Leone walks through the process of making pastrami at home, with results that have many speculating if the recipe could make her sick.
Comments below a photo of brown pastrami on Leone’s Instagram page widely criticized the video as “a botulism party,” “extremely dangerous,” and “scary.”
In the video, Leone brines beef brisket in a mixture of water, kosher salt, celery juice, and whole spices. Celery juice, which contains sodium nitrate, is its substitute for pickling salt, a mixture of table salt and sodium nitrite essential for preventing bacterial growth in canned meat products. Leone also adds some sauerkraut liquid, claiming that his microbes will convert the celery’s nitrates into nitrites.
When I asked culinary scientist Ali Bouzari for his opinion on the video, he noted a nuance in the process that kept it on the verge of a full-blown “botulism party.” He noted that the celery juice thing doesn’t work for a brine because “just like every peach varies in sugar content or lemon in acidity, every celery stalk is susceptible to different levels of nitrate exposure depending on how it was grown.”
Adam Rosenblum, an East Coast native and co-owner of San Francisco’s Little Red Window, has perfected his pastrami technique over the past 16 years. He sticks with pickling salt for his brine, but can see why celery juice would be appealing as a substitute. “In my mind, a nitrite is a nitrite is a nitrite — as long as you can control the amount you put in. I’ve heard horror stories of someone using the wrong nitrite and too much of it and people getting sick. ”
A good recipe is reproducible, which is why food publications invest so much in testing. With all the variables home cooks can throw into the process, you don’t want to end up printing something potentially deadly. What keeps the video from becoming a weapon for mass indigestion for Bouzari is the fact that Leone keeps the pickled meat in a refrigerator at a temperature that inhibits bacterial growth, at the expense of the fermentation that Leone claims it does could take place.
“It is not impossible “Something really insanely dangerous could happen here, but this process is about as risky microbially as refrigerating a fall festival turkey for a week and then cooking it,” he wrote in a follow-up email. However, pickling salt is as close to a guarantee as you can get when canning meat. So why make a video telling viewers to use something as variable as celery juice in a brine for no reason other than to pass off the technique as something “more natural”?
Even with these nuances, which are not explained in any way in the actual video, the unabashed reception of “It’s Alive” shows that considerable damage has already been done to Bon Appétit’s reputation. For a food publication, I would say that losing readers’ trust that your content isn’t making them sick is a big deal.
When asked to comment, a Condé Nast representative responded with this statement: “Our security practices are paramount at Bon Appétit and we have many processes in place to ensure that all content is accurate, fact-checked and available to the public viewers are safe. Our culinary production team extensively reviews all of our video content to confirm it adheres to safety protocols. Additionally, we have a fermentation expert overseeing our recipes for this series, including this video.”
Still, this isn’t the first time Leone and Bon Appétit have shared potentially dangerous advice in cooking videos. In February 2021, Food Magazine removed an “It’s Alive” episode about canning seafood in a double boiler from its YouTube channel after canning experts sparked a spate of backlash. According to many reputable sources, including the Food and Drug Administration, the only safe way to preserve seafood and fish is by pressure canning; anything else puts you at great risk for botulism.
Bon Appétit didn’t remove this latest video, although it did add a note suggesting that viewers interested in making pastrami should try a recipe that actually meets “food safety standards.”
It’s wild to see a mainstream media company with 15 million social media followers posting cooking videos that suggest you’re not following their advice, and I’m not sure exactly what sets this action apart from teens who are TikTok -Post videos of yourself doing back flips into dumpsters.
This is one of digital media’s darker outcomes: a Faustian bargain where you trade audience engagement for potential people causing. It doesn’t look good that Bon Appétit continues to uphold Leone as a culinary expert, let alone one of its stars.
Meanwhile, the Condé Nast publications staff, which includes Bon Appétit and its video arm, have recently done something pushed for unionization amid persistent wage inequality and racial discrimination. The fact that the company continues to focus resources on sparsely researched, white-run content like It’s Alive is troubling given the Condé Nast Union-led layoffs and wage issues that have still not been acknowledged by company management.
At its best, the presence of charismatic mediocrity at the top sucks a lot of oxygen in a publication likely filled with people wanting things to change for the better. At worst, it could one day seriously harm an unfortunate reader.
Soleil Ho is the food critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: soleil@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hooleil