If you are a user of TikTok, chances are you’ve been sucked into a cooking video a time or two.
The popular videos usually show an at-home chef moving briskly around their spotless kitchen, rapidly cutting produce, blending ingredients and roasting something that makes a satisfying sizzle sound. Videos generally end with a picture-perfect plating, a bite and a nod of approval.
Annai Gonzalez, or
@flickofthewhisk on TikTok, has over 225,000 followers on the app who follow along with her lighthearted and cheery cooking videos.
Gonzalez takes viewers through every step of her cooking journey, and scrolling through her videos is like flipping through a visual cookbook.
“What pushed me to do content was to show people, hey, cooking is not that hard. Like if I could do it, and I learned through just watching TV and Food Network, I’m pretty sure anybody else can do it,” Gonzalez says.
While Gonzalez makes a wide range of dishes, she especially enjoys sharing traditional Mexican recipes with her followers while bolero music plays in the background.
Gonzalez says she often chooses songs she grew up listening to for her videos as a way of tying her cooking back to her family’s roots.
“Music that my grandma played while she cleaned on Sundays or cooked big meals, even music that my parents would blast on the weekends,” Gonzalez says.
In one video, which had over 730,000 views, Gonzalez cooks chilaquiles verdes. It is one of several videos that show Gonzalez making her salsa from scratch, and her followers salivate in the comment section.
“Girl, you just made me hungry,” one follower commented.
“That’s all I ate for breakfast in Mexico,” said another.
Gonzalez says she often uses her videos to show Mexican recipes because she thinks the cuisine can be intimidating for some. Recipes passed down through generations are usually based on intuition and verbal instruction, which can be difficult for beginner cooks.
“You know, if you’d ask your grandmother, she’d be like, ‘Oh, just a little bit of this and a little bit of that, eyeball it,’” Gonzalez says. “So I kind of wanted to jump in and show people like hey, it doesn’t have to be difficult. Let me show you how easy it can be for you to enjoy this traditional food.”
Gonzalez originally worked at a law firm, but after she received an apron on the 11th season of the popular cooking competition MasterChef, she gained the confidence to pursue content creation and cooking full time.
“Being someone with not much culinary background and just being a home cook, it was pretty exciting and kind of intimidating,” Gonzalez says. “Not going to lie, having to meet Gordon Ramsay and all these other chefs, it was kind of a big break for me.”
Gonzalez says she had never spent much time watching MasterChef before going on the show and had no idea what to expect when she joined. So when she was the second person sent home in her season, she wasn’t disheartened. She says she cooks with “passion and love,” and she felt the timed element of the competition discouraging.
“I always say cooking is a dance in the kitchen,” Gonzalez says.
In the last two years, Gonzalez says her love for cooking has only continued to grow, as has her fanbase.
“I like to romanticize food,” Gonzalez says. “I mean, I wake up every day and just think about food. A lot of people ask me, ‘How do you come up with these recipes?’ And I’m just like, well, I’m always hungry all the time.”
