How People Actually Hunt Down "What Was He Cooking" Memes
The "What Was He Cooking" meme format takes off from a video of someone preparing something that looks absolutely unhinged in the final product, paired with the caption asking what in the world that person was actually trying to make. It spread across TikTok, Twitter, and Reddit around late 2023 into 2024, and the hunt for original sources became a whole subgenre of meme archaeology. I got pulled into this rabbit hole when a coworker forwarded me a screenshot of what looked like burnt chocolate pasta with gummy bears, and nobody could trace it back past three retweets. So here's the practical reality of tracking these down. The format usually starts as a viral clip on TikTok or Instagram Reels — someone filming their cooking process where the result is either disaster or unrecognizable. The meme template then layers the "what was he cooking" text over that footage. But the original source gets lost because the content farms and repost accounts strip watermarks and re-upload within hours. By the time a video hits mainstream meme pages, it's nearly impossible to find the real creator. The core mechanic of these memes is the dissonance between the confident cooking process shown and the clearly failed result. You'll see someone using proper knife skills, following a recipe step by step, and then pulling something that looks like it came out of a chemistry lab accident. That's what makes them shareable. People love speculating about intent. What were they actually going for? Was this supposed to be a deconstructed lasagna? A molecular gastronomy experiment gone wrong? The ambiguity is the joke.
I spent about two weeks in early 2024 trying to track down the original source of a specific variant showing what appeared to be a soup made entirely of canned beans and chocolate syrup. I started with reverse image searches on Google and TinEye. That got me nowhere because the meme had been cropped and compressed so many times that visual matching failed. Then I tried searching for the audio track on the original video. Turns out some of these use trending sounds, which helped narrow it down to a handful of possible creators. I ended up finding it on a now-deleted TikTok account by cross-referencing the exact timestamp of a comment that mentioned the username before the account got banned for community guideline violations. That experience taught me something most people miss about these hunts: the audio is often more searchable than the visual content. TikTok and Instagram's algorithm prioritizes audio clustering, meaning videos using the same sound get grouped together. If you can identify the original audio track, you can usually trace back through the "most used" or "recently added" sorting on that sound page to find the earliest uploads. It's not foolproof, but it beats staring at a mangled screenshot for forty-five minutes. Another thing that trips people up is assuming these memes are always about actual cooking fails. Some of them are stock footage or AI-generated clips dressed up as cooking videos. I've encountered at least three variants where the "cooking" footage was clearly generated — the hands didn't match the utensils, ingredients appeared out of nowhere, and the physics of liquid pouring defied basic reality. Reverse image searching those leads you on wild goose chases because no real person ever made that video. The workaround is checking whether the audio matches a real kitchen environment or if it's overly polished with no ambient sound. Real cooking videos have background noise, sizzling, clattering. AI-generated ones are eerily silent or layered with stock sound effects.
When you're doing this research, you're going to hit dead ends constantly. A lot of the original content creators are anonymous or operate under burner accounts. Some videos get taken down and reuploaded to different platforms within the same hour, and the watermark tracking doesn't help because most of these accounts don't even put visible watermarks on their content. The content farm ecosystem that amplifies these memes operates faster than any individual researcher can keep up. You will lose track of your leads. That's normal. The most useful tools I found were the Wayback Machine for archived versions of meme aggregator sites, and Reddit's search operators using site: and date ranges to filter results. Setting up a Google Alert for specific phrases from the meme captions can also catch new posts before they get re-uploaded without attribution. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing. One counter-intuitive insight: the meme format has actually spawned some genuine culinary curiosity. A few times I've seen people look up the original videos and realize the "disaster" recipes were actually intentional — elaborate dishes that looked wrong to casual observers but were legitimate culinary techniques. Like one case where someone was making clarified butter and the separation process looked like garbage but was actually the correct method. Or another where someone was demonstrating a carbonization technique for desserts and it looked like they'd just set the kitchen on fire. The meme format strips away context, so what reads as incompetence is sometimes genuine expertise.
Get the Full Details
If you want to contribute to these hunts rather than just consume them, start a shared document or spreadsheet. Log the meme variant, approximate date found, source links, audio details, and status. The community that tracks these things is scattered across Reddit threads and Discord servers, and information gets duplicated and lost constantly. A centralized log saves everyone time. I've seen people spend days reproducing work that was already documented in a thread from six months prior simply because they didn't know where to look. There's also a dark side to this that doesn't get discussed enough. Some of the original creators of these videos are people who didn't sign up for virality — they posted amateur cooking attempts, got laughed at, and then had their content stripped of context and turned into a meme format that mockingly frames their genuine effort as entertainment. I've felt guilty about participating in some of these hunts after realizing that. Not every funny meme is harmless fun, and sometimes the person at the center of the joke is just someone who had a bad day in the kitchen and needed the clout boost that comes with going viral, whatever the reason. The technical side of downloading and archiving these memes has its own headaches. TikTok and Instagram both strip metadata when you download through third-party tools. You lose the creator username, upload date, view count, and engagement data that could be useful for tracing the original source. If you're serious about this kind of research, you need browser extensions or scripts that grab the full metadata before the content gets diluted through reposts. Otherwise you're working with fragments and guessing games.
I still check in on this occasionally even though I've mostly moved on. The cycle repeats — a new wave of these memes surfaces every few months, usually tied to some trending cooking show or celebrity recipe failure, and the hunt resets. The format is durable because it hits on something universal: we've all cooked something that didn't turn out right, and we've all wondered what the person in the video was thinking. That's the actual mechanism behind the meme's longevity, not just novelty or shock value.
