‘P“People often come up to me on the street and start conversations about food,” says Jamie Spafford (“Spaff”) of Sorted Food, a YouTube cooking channel he launched with three friends in 2010. “They say, ‘You helped me find the perfect restaurant for my first date with my girlfriend,'” says co-founder Barry Taylor (“Buzz”). “The classic,” says Spafford, “is, ‘Your lasagna got me laid.’ Um, I don’t know how to respond to that. Um… congratulations?”
Congratulations are definitely in order: Sorted Food now has just under 3 million subscribers (90 percent of whom are under the age of 44) who share their journeys with “a group of people trying to become great home cooks,” and has garnered 40 million views over the past 90 years. That’s more than double the number of days that Jamie Oliver’s channel lasted, which they helped launch in 2012.
Sitting around a coffee table in Sorted’s east London loft studio, Spafford and Taylor, both 37, talk, somewhat awkwardly, about how they rose to culinary fame and its impact on the nation’s love lives. “We didn’t expect this to go anywhere, but it will look good on your CV and maybe help you find work,” Spafford says.

Barry Taylor, Jamie Spafford, Ebbrell
Original Sorted members Spafford, Taylor, Mike Huttlestone (“Huttlestorm”) and Ben Ebbrell (“Ebbers”) were 11 years old when they met at Chancellors School in Hertfordshire in 1998. Taylor says: “We were all in the same year, and I don’t think we were particularly close. I sat in the same room as Ben from the first day of school, but it wasn’t until six years later that I noticed him.”
“We became really close in sixth form and the idea for Sorted started when we left school,” says Spafford. “We went to university and realised we couldn’t cook. Ben was training to be a chef so we were all emailing him for advice: How do you cook a chicken? How do you make £10 last until the end of the week? We thought this could be a way to help other people by working together and showing how we had improved. Our idea was, how do we make a cooking show with people who can’t cook?”
• From blenders to grinders, the most attractive kitchen gadgets
The answer was to gamify every aspect of cooking, from kitchen skills to using up leftovers, ingredient guessing, and recipe challenges that pit “regular people” against “chefs.” Fourteen years later, the regular people are actually great home cooks, while still creating enough chaos to entertain those who tune in to share the jokes. “People love to see us fail,” Taylor says. The worst example? Spafford’s awful dish for the 15-minute challenge, best described as pickled egg carbonara. “Creativity is Jamie’s weakness,” Taylor says. “Sometimes, we know we’ve messed up. Most people stop everything and start again, but with us the camera keeps rolling. Those videos are really well-received.”

The ThoughtFood team buys their own gadgets and stocks only the best.
Their best-selling videos are gadget reviews, testing everything from antique knife sharpeners to wine condoms, and often showcasing crowdfunded gadgets. “People are always trying to find shortcuts to make their lives a little easier. Some gadgets are useful, and some are a waste of time,” Spafford says. “We basically started doing gadgets for fun at the end of a shoot. We were shooting some recipe videos, which is our main job, and we had an hour left that day. We had some silly gadgets in there, so we said, okay, let’s do a silly gadget video. We called it ‘5 Kitchen Gadgets Nobody Needs.’ It was just a QVC-esque joke. It’s still our most popular video to this day.”
All gadgets require a fee, not free. After testing, the team can take home their favorites, with some being sent to the free community app Olio. “The real test is which ones stay in the studio,” says Taylor, as he places boxes of unwanted kitchen gadgets on the countertops of the Sorted studio: a pasta extruder, a sliding pizza peel, an ice cream curler, an automatic pot stirrer, an electric pot, and more. They prefer to feature positive reviews to help subscribers choose practical kit, but they also recognize the value of a laugh at more outlandish tools like a banana straightener or a cheese grotto.
The most entertaining are the tests conducted by Ebbrell and Kush Bhasin (the “Kushy Bear” chef, a former Michelin-starred chef who became Sorted’s head of food in 2021). Experts often seem to get irrationally angry at labor-saving devices. “Nine times out of 10, gadgets make Ebbrell angry,” Taylor says. “From a chef’s perspective, it’s like, you don’t need a gadget, you need to learn to do it yourself. He’ll say it solves a problem that doesn’t exist. From a normal person’s perspective, if you’re making dinner at 8 o’clock and you need to get a plate on the table, and this helps you chop an onion in 30 seconds instead of five minutes, that’s a win.”
Thought Food
Sorted’s favorite and worst gadgets
favorite
The best tests and favorite gadgets to use when cooking at home

The spoon leaves no stains
Supoon, from £5.99, lakeland.co.uk — A long-handled scraping spoon with a built-in rest to avoid messing up your work surface.
Hexclad Hybrid Pan by Gordon Ramsay, from £129.99, hexclad.co.uk — A luxury pan that combines the performance of stainless steel, the durability of cast iron and the convenience of non-stick coating.

Mike Huttlestone and Brown Multiquick Hand Blender
Braun MultiQuick Hand Blender, £139, reduced from £199.99, braunhousehold.com — A great stick blender for a range of tasks, from blending to chopping.
Thermapen Temperature Probe, from £52.80, thermopen.co.uk — A digital kitchen thermometer that lets you test if your food is cooked without the guesswork.

Ebrell reuses brazing torches
Rothenberger Super Fire Brazing Torch, £56 ex VAT, stuartplumbing.co.uk — So accurate and powerful, you can use it for welding, lighting the barbecue or making crème brûlée.
Microplane, from £29.95, johnlewis.com — The original stainless steel fine grater that performs well on everything from Parmesan to spices.
Vogue Speed Peeler, £2.19 ex VAT, nisbets.co.uk — Everyone has their own preference for the peeler, but the Sorted team say this is the quickest and best.
Vogue Plastic Dough Scraper, 99p (excl. VAT), nisbets.co.uk — An essential for making pasta, dough and pastries.
Failure
They don’t want to use the word failure, but these are the tools that nobody took home.
Duramitt Scrub Sponge Mitt, £5.75, amazon.co.uk — When tested, it’s less effective than a regular scrub sponge.
Banana Loca Banana Straightener, Corer and Filler, £23, bananaloca.com — If cupboard space is limited, tick this off your shopping list.

Taylor slides the pizza peel
Sliding Pizza Peel, £6.61, temu.com — Handy but unnecessary.
Stirmate, variable-speed automatic pot stirrer, $73.65, stirmate.com — Yet another gadget that solves a problem that doesn’t exist.
Mitsubishi Electric Bread Oven/Toaster, £330, yoyomono.com — You’ll need to buy a transformer for UK use and it toasts one slice at a time. For the avid toast lover.

For students: Hytric electric cooker
Hytric electric cooker, £29.99, amazon.co.uk — Does exactly what it claims, but its use outside of student accommodation is limited.
Pan-n-Ice Ice Cream Roll Maker, £39.95, amazon.co.uk — It works so well that it could easily become a favourite, but unless everyone in the family loves ice cream rolls, this is just another product that’s going to end up cluttering up your cupboard.

Ebbrel at Cheese Grotto: “A crazy concept”
Cheese Grotto, £68, cheesegrotto.com — Designed for single chunks, this cheese showcase is such an unusual concept that it almost slipped into favourites, but as Spafford says, “it’s a bit too much for the casual cheese snacker”.