Ms Yeah's creative approach to cooking in the office
7/12/2018




Ms Yeah [Photo provided to China Daily]

Check out this vlogger's creative approach to cooking.

One of the hottest food vloggers (video bloggers) in China right now, 24-year-old Chengdu native Ms Yeah (aka Xiao Ye) has a whopping four million fans on Weibo and two million subscribers on YouTube. There's not really anyone else doing anything similar – Ms Yeah is the master of using common office equipment (such as water dispensers, electric kettles, flower pots and even a computer's CPU) to cook meals that very often turn out to be mouth-watering feasts, shared and finished quickly by the entire office.

Ms Yeah likes to introduce local dishes in her videos, especially the spicy Sichuan style with which she's most familiar. In one popular episode,"Chengdu chuan chuan xiang", she cooks skewers (which usually require a large, hot surface) in an electric kettle. In another, "Tofu Feast", she makes tofu custard from raw soybeans, served in bowls with chopped peppers, chilli oil and peanuts – a traditional breakfast or snack in Sichuan cuisine. Besides these, she's also cooked crawfish in a popcorn popper, steamed buns with a garment steamer and made mooncakes from scratch with a few simple supplies at her office desk.

Ms Yeah studied video editing and directing in university. Her first video, published in early 2017, was inspired by one of her male colleagues, whom she discovered shirtless in the office using an electric iron. That gave her a strange idea to use the iron to grill beef – and it worked.

Each video takes about four days to produce, including brainstorming, scripting, purchasing ingredients and shooting. Ms Yeah never speaks in the videos, but it accentuates her deadpan-humour style. Now we can't help wondering about China's famous "office chef" – what will she cook next and how will she do it?