YouTube’s King of Fermentation

How a chef obsessed with foraging and carpentry built a new kind of cooking show

WHEN I FIRST TRY TO reach Brad Leone in May, I’m told he’s “off the grid.” While a pandemic raged outside, Leone retreated to the wilderness. “I was foraging for a delightful spring vegetable,” he explains over Zoom a week later.

The outdoor excursion is peak Brad. He’s a chef obsessed with mushroom foraging, pheasant hunting, beer brewing, carpentry, and spearfishing, who’s gained a large, swooning audience on YouTube in recent years, thanks to a boisterous enthusiasm for fermentation.

As traditional TV moves ever-further online, cooking shows have gone with it. Leone got his start at Bon Appétit, a magazine traditionally known for its elevated recipes, that’s now leading the charge with a collection of unlikely faces. Leone’s show, It’s Alive, isn’t Food Network fodder. On YouTube, though, it’s only growing.

The premise is simple: Leone ferments anything he can get his hands on, including mushrooms, garlic, and hot sauce. He works at his “fermentation station” — essentially a table where he lets things rot — then hunts for co-workers to try the results. The 35-year-old has the affable charm

(and build) of a high school football lineman, often tossing out catchphrases (“niceee,” “bingo bango”) in a thick Jersey accent. When It’s Alive began in 2016, most internet food shows prioritized quick-recipe how-to’s; It’s Alive was long and laissez-faire, peppered with jokes about how Leone may, at any point, give himself botulism.

Since the pandemic, Leone has rebranded his show It’s Alive: Home Video Edition and shoots it from the comfort of his kitchen. Instead of banter among co-workers, his new co-hosts are often his toddlers, who run into frame and ask for snacks.

After working as a carpenter and finishing culinary school, he was an intern at Bon Appétit. After a few years, though, “I kind of hit a plateau,” Leone says. “Thank God video started to blow up. It was a door with blinking lights that said, ‘Brad, enter.’ ”

Leone is hesitant to describe himself as famous, or even successful. “I’ve had a lot of terrible jobs,” he says. “And now I don’t.” CHARLES HOLMES