The next Jamie Oliver? It’s his 12-year-old son with pukka tips
Celebrity chef’s ‘best mate Buddy’ brings culinary career to the boil with Youtube channel
THE next Jamie Oliver? It’s likely to be his 12-year-old son, Buddy.
Videos the celebrity chef has shared on social media showing the schoolboy demonstrating his own recipes have gathered thousands of likes.
Uploading a recent video on Instagram for his 9.3 million followers, Oliver wrote: “Sharing another recipe from my boy Buddy that will make a great dinner tonight for you and the family that you can never go wrong with .... fajitas!!! These are always a big hit in our house!”
Buddy Oliver also has his own Youtube channel, Cooking Buddies, where he can be seen creating dishes including spinach pancakes, baked ricotta and barbecued ribs.
He teaches knife skills and various kitchen hacks, such as how to cut several tomatoes in half at once using two plates, and reminds the audience of culinary essentials including the best way to chop an onion, and how much seasoning one should add when cooking.
His Youtube channel boasts 133,000 subscribers and was created two years ago, when Buddy was just 10.
Oliver senior occasionally appears in the videos with his “best mate Buddy”, while renowned Italian chef Gennaro Contaldo, who counts Jamie Oliver as his most successful British protégé, also makes a cameo as Buddy’s “special guest”, assisting with spinach pici pasta.
In his pop-up kitchen in the greenhouse, Buddy keeps 74-year-old Contaldo busy as they slice the spinach and pasta, roast butternut squash and chop rosemary. Buddy’s knife skills impress Contaldo, who chuckles at the suggestion that the shallots, chilli and sage in the frying pan resemble the Italian flag.
The pre-teen – one of the chef ’s five children – also features on the Jamie Oliver website, with several of his recipes listed, including Buddy’s bolognese, Buddy’s super veggie burgers and Buddy’s tuna pasta.
Jamie Oliver has long enthused about cooking as a family and videos that he shot at the beginning of lockdown featured his children getting involved as he worked.
He writes on his website: “Getting kids excited about food, where it comes from and how to cook it, gives them a better chance of being healthier and happier in the long run. When cooking with kids, use your common sense to determine what jobs they can help you with, depending on their age and skill level. The more they cook, the better they’ll get.
“Most of all, have fun with it and encourage them to give things a go.”
Oliver, now 47, found stardom at the age of 23 with the 1999 BBC TV series The Naked Chef, where his blokey and relaxed approach in the kitchen has been credited with inspiring a generation of men to cook.
His 2005 campaign to introduce schoolchildren to healthier and fresher foods, chronicled in the 2005 TV series Jamie’s School Dinners, transformed what pupils ate for lunch. It led to certain foods, including Bernard Matthews Turkey Twizzlers, being banned from school menus and a £280 million government funding boost for school meals.
This week Oliver launched the Good School Food Awards in order to find the “unsung heroes” of school cuisine, and celebrate the “sheer brilliance, ingenuity and determination of those working in the education system to bring good food to our children”.
‘When cooking with kids, use your common sense to determine what they can help with. The more they cook, the better they will get. Encourage them to give things a go’