Cream-Filled Crullers

Plus, where do creators go when platforms make creating impossible?

Last month, cookbook author and former Bon Appétit editor Carla Lalli Music published a post on her Substack explaining how much she made from her Youtube channel, and why it had to end. Titled “The True Costs of Being on YouTube,” the post blew up a bit on Substack’s Twitter-like feed Notes in the past two weeks thanks to Carla’s unflinching account about the financial and personal cost of running a weekly YouTube series.

The True Costs of Being on YouTube

[I was going to put this in EGO Recommends for my last post but I simply had too much to say about it.]

What can I say — people love to know how much creators make! Despite a large, dedicated fan base garnered through her time at the scandal-embroiled food magazine, views in 50 thousand to hundreds of thousands range, and brand sponsors, she couldn’t make her (professionally-produced, shot and edited videos) profitable. According to Music: “$14k going out. $4k coming in. Net loss, month over month: TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS.” The article started a lot of important conversations and spurred pieces like this one from Embedded, “YouTubers are getting priced out”, where Kate Lindsay points out Carla isn’t alone — even the extremely successful Youtubers The Try Guys are also moving their popular videos to their own platform, citing poor pay from Youtube. (I also recommend this longer video interview about the subject between Carla and Substack’s Austin Tedesco.)

As for myself, I have recently considered what it would take to make long-form, landscape-format videos for YouTube. After reading Carla’s article, I’m both extremely scared and yet slightly more intrigued? I don’t have the capital to really hire anyone, but I still see many creators (maybe not always in food) making it work (tens to hundreds of thousands of views) on an iPhone camera and with little to no crew.

That being said, for many creatives, writers, foodies, etc., being a one-person show isn’t super desirable. It’s a ton of work. You’re doing the job of recipe developer, writer, social media manager, photographer, videographer, video editor. And that’s why, for those who can hack it, it has proven to be a good way to make money: You don’t have to pay practically anyone, operating costs are relatively low, brands are willing to pay big creators a lot. Income streams (like Substack) are easily scalable — you don’t have to open a new store, purchase more inventory, hire more people.

It’s odd because, for the past two years, I’ve increasingly heard many of my fellow food creators whispering the same thing: I gotta get on Youtube. Now, I don’t know if it would be worth it to create a whole new wing of production, because you can’t really retrofit your other videos (Youtube is long-form and horizontal not short-form and vertical like most of the other platforms). Maybe examples like Carla and the Try Guys don’t speak for everyone on the Youtube. Like other platforms, the people at the top are still making a killing.

But it does make me wonder, if Instagram and X are now just openly burying content that includes links away from their platforms (one of the few ways many creators, writers, businesses make money on them) and Youtube’s deal with Youtubers keeps getting more unfair, where do all the creators go? Do we go back to a time where there was no well-produced video or photos on social media, where real people with full-time jobs post for free, and the job title of “creator” goes the way of “travel agent”? Does AI just swoop in and do those seven jobs I listed above that no sane person has the time or will to do for such dwindling returns? That kind of slop is already happening.

For the last two years (this newsletter is about to turn two!) I hoped that Substack might be an antidote to these sorts of problems. But after reading this and this, I’m pretty wary about that now, too.

EGO Recommends

Oh my gosh I have many recommends this week and all of them are from Substack. Sorry! I’m not going to give them blurbs you can use context clues this week.

Gangster Party

I spent 5 months cooking the NYT’s 50 most popular recipes on TikTok—3.5 million views later, here’s what I learned

This Week’s Recipe

When I was last working with choux pastry, while making this croquembouche for Kerrygold, I started thinking a lot about crullers. Instead of baking little mounds of choux, like you do for profiteroles or croquembouches, crullers are donuts made from frying rings of essentially the same rich, eggy batter. I’ve made crullers before, but I wondered if I could take them a step further and stuff them with whipped cream, or pastry cream, or maybe raspberry jam — or maybe all three?

It took a lot of trial and error (like 6 batches of choux) to get a recipe that puffs up nice and tall, with cavernous pockets of air inside perfect for flooding with filling, and crisp ridges that would hold their shape when fried. If we were in other times, I would have just kept an all-yolk pastry cream recipe because it’s a bit more fool proof and richer. But since eggs are still pricey, I want to reduce as much waste as possible so we’re using two eggs and one egg yolk. That being said, if you find that your choux pastry is too stodgy and not glossy, you can use that reserved egg white to thin it out a bit. So now, the most the recipe will use is 6 whole eggs.

There are a few elements to this recipe: The pastry cream, which is folded with whipped cream to create créme diplomat. The choux, which gets piped out in rings onto little parchment squares and fried at a high temperature. And the glaze — I made one raspberry and one vanilla bean. And as if we haven’t already gone completely overboard, I also piped some raspberry jam into half of them. Ideally, you’ll want both a large star piping tip and a filling (Bismark) tip or small plain circle tip for this recipe. However it works perfectly fine if you want to forgo the filling and the cruller’s signature ridges: Just snip about a half-inch off the corner of a zipper bag to pipe them out. And by the way, you could fill them with whatever you want — jam, whipped cream — or nothing at all and they’d be just as good.

Because of the various elements, I recommend preparing the choux and the pastry cream a day or two before. Then, when ready to fry and assemble, pipe out the crullers, fry them, allow them to cool, fold the whipped cream into the pastry cream, fill the crullers, dip them in glaze and allow to set for about one hour. That being said, this could all be done in around 4 to 5 hours, which includes chilling/setting times. It’s a project!

Cream-Filled Crullers

Makes about 12 crullers

Ingredients

Créme Diplomat