Do you have any suggestions for channels that are good for beginner cooks?

I just got my first job in a new city and realized I have no idea how to cook anything other than eggs & chicken

Adam Ragusea is a goldmine of well explained recipes that you could actually cook on a regular basis, even for things like weeknight meals. He tends to emphasize understanding and intuition and using your senses over exact measurement, this is how people are able to cook quickly and with lower mental overhead. Often you have to measure the first time you make a dish to get calibrated, and then can just wing it after that.

Yes, this.

Adam loves to go into various details and explanations along the way. I'll even see comments from experienced cooks saying they learned something new.

Just one exception to this comment, I've found weight ratios to be very important when baking. Recipes that go by weight tend to be of much higher precision and overall quality.

Lastly, as a beginner, don't be afraid to get things really hot! As long as you don't see smoke (especially from oil, oil should never release any smoke), heat is your friend. I ditched nonstick for stainless, using heavy fats/oil (ghee, tallow, olive oil) + high heat — and never looked back. And don't forget, even as Adam would say, better ingredients make for better results!

> when baking

Yeah, that's pretty important. Cooking is an art, bakery is a science.

Like, for real, it's significantly more chemistry than most cooking, so the proportions do matter.

j-kenji lopez-alt is great for beginners and experienced cooks alike. very science forward into the why and he generally shows you how to cook what he's going to eat for dinner. https://www.youtube.com/@JKenjiLopezAlt

helen rennie is a cooking teacher and is also good but the recipes can shuffle from esoteric to mundane so you have to pick and choose. https://www.youtube.com/c/helenrennie/videos

https://www.youtube.com/@EthanChlebowski is a solid and practical channel to pick and choose from. though the more recent videos are more of a deep dive into the science. the older videos are more about single recipes with some tangents on technique.

finally pro home cooks is a more beginner friendly format generally https://www.youtube.com/@ProHomeCooks

as an addendum:

serious eats and americas test kitchen are good reliable recipe factories but require a lot more steps and effort generally. but at the end of them you will have a very well tested and usually tasty dish. so once you have your chops from the above you can branch out a bit with some more complicated dishes.

avoid any of the big recipe aggregators as they are so low quality recipes that aren't worth your time. all recipes etc.

ProtoCooks with Chef Frank.

"thatdudecancook" (terrible name, I know!) has shown me some amazingly simple techniques that have radically improved my cooking:

https://www.youtube.com/@thatdudecancook

If you're into Chinese cooking, then the Chinese Cooking Demystified channel is excellent. This is not your lemon chicken from the mall food court… They deep-dive into all the regional cuisines and present non-mainland-China-friendly recipes and techniques. It's a real eye-opener.

https://www.youtube.com/@ChineseCookingDemystified

+1 for Adam Regusea and J-Kenji Lopez-Alt.

For coffee, as others have said, James Hoffman, but also check out Lance Hendrick if you want crazy amounts of detail:

https://www.youtube.com/@LanceHedrick

Aaron & Claire regularly produce ultra-simple, fast, imaginative Korean dishes:

https://www.youtube.com/@AaronandClaire

Ann Reardon does some interesting baking-oriented stuff, but even better, her debunking videos are the real gold:

https://www.youtube.com/@HowToCookThat

I'm getting into BBQ & smoking (bought a Kamado) and found SmokingDadBBQ informative:

https://www.youtube.com/@SmokingDadBBQ

For something really out-there, Wilderness Cooking (again, a terrible name) is intriguing. It's this guy living in what looks like a pretty remote village in Azerbaijan doing traditional outdoor feasts. Warning: not even remotely vegetarian-friendly.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj4KP216972cPp2w_BAHy8g

For authentic Cantonese cuisine that is quite easy - Made with Lau https://www.youtube.com/c/MadeWithLau/videos

Chef Jean Pierre