These 13 Oddly Satisfying Food Videos Will Hypnotize You

Whether you love to cook or just eat, watching food videos can be a fun way to while away an hour or so. (Or the better part of a day, to be honest.) Unlike shows on the Food Network, they're generally not competition-based, nor are they full of people panicking in crowded kitchens. Instead, many involve just a single cook (who usually remains pretty calm). Others show hardly any human involvement, just food, glorious food at its photogenic finest.

The word "satisfying" means different things to different people, so we've tried to provide a variety of videos, but all are oddly satisfying in their own way. Some of them are more ASMR-oriented, while others showcase a single technique or walk you through a recipe. All of them, however, lack distracting voice-overs, so it's easy to lose yourself in the culinary magic. Ranging from cake decorating to campfire cooking, these videos are sure to entertain and relax you (and may make you hungry, as well).

A Boston-based ice cream mini-chain called The Scoop N Scootery offers a pretty unique kind of sundae, one where a scoop of ice cream is hollowed out and filled with frosting. Whether or not you'd want to eat such a sugar bomb, you're sure to be mesmerized by the video which shows different flavors of frosting being squirted into perfectly symmetrical ice cream tunnels.

Many cake-decorating videos feature a baker who's clearly putting in a lot of work with the offset spatula and frosting tips, but this one shows hardly any human intervention at all. Instead, to the soothing sounds of Brazilian bossa nova, a cylinder is placed atop a three-layer cake and filled with five colors of glaze. As the cake plate turns, the glaze flows out from evenly spaced slits at the bottom of the tube, forming a gorgeous, glossy rainbow swirl.

This video of a cook chopping herbs is satisfying on several different levels. First, there's that ASMR "snick-snick-snick" sound punctuated by an emphatic "thwack" or two. There's also the way this chaotic bundle of vegetable matter is transformed, stems and all, into a neat pile of finely minced greenery in just a few seconds. Nothing goes to waste, no-one gets hurt, it's pure kitchen magic at its finest.

This video actually serves an instructional purpose. In just a few seconds, it will likely convince you that a pineapple corer is really easy to use and well worth having. Even if you don't regularly eat pineapple, simply watching the corer being inserted into the fruit, twisted a few times, and then pulled out to show a perfect, spiral-sliced pineapple is something you can easily find yourself watching over and over again.

Watching beer getting poured tends to be pretty satisfying even if it's not your beverage of choice. This Korean video, however, takes things a step or two beyond. The bartender begins by flipping a bottle of soju (if you're not using soju in your cocktails, you're missing out), then pouring an even amount back and forth over four glasses without even measuring. She tops off each glass with a stream of super-fizzy beer, somehow without spilling a drop. This isn't mixology, it's pure poetry.

At a little over three and a half minutes, this video is a bit longer than some, but the entire thing is well worth watching multiple times. It begins by showing what has got to be the world's fluffiest omelet getting cut open so you can see the soft, spongy interior. Unlike IHOP's fluffy omelets, there's no pancake batter involved. Instead, as per the video, the secret is beating the egg whites. This isn't revealed via intrusive narration, though, since apart from music and cooking sounds, the video is silent. (There are a few subtle subtitles, however, in case anything's unclear.) The quiet lets you focus on how beautiful every step in the process can look (who knew?) as well as the fact that a plain, unadorned omelet can be (almost) too pretty to eat.

This video has all the summertime vibes as it takes place inside the kind of fresh-squeezed lemonade booth you'll see at every fair and festival. The person operating the lemon squeezer toggles a switch, which in turn raises and lowers a great big muddler that stomps the juices out of a cup of lemon wedges. Presumably, water and sugar are subsequently added to make the drink, but we don't see that in the video. Instead, it's all about the easy-peasy lemon squeezy, which is all we really want to see.

Sushi chefs don't just spend their time slicing and dicing fish, they are excellent at chopping vegetables, too. Here we see such a chef turn his talents to a slender Japanese cucumber which he first trims and then effortlessly slices into perfectly-shaped wedges, strips, and rounds. The highlight of the video, though, comes about halfway through when he demonstrates a technique called katsura-muki, or "thin peeling," by slicing a super-thin strip, laying it out like he's dealing a deck of cards, then rolling and folding it into a flower-like shape.

This quiet cooking video starts out good and just keeps getting better. Watching the eggs and sugar get beaten and the cream whipped is plenty satisfying, but when blue spirulina powder comes into play, the batter turns breathtaking. The excitement ramps up as the pale blue sponge is sliced and topped with blue curacao-flavored syrup then layered with white cream and a shiny blue glaze before being topped off with a sprinkling of blue-tinted sugar. While we can't speak to the taste (it looks like it would be amazing), this is undoubtedly one of the loveliest desserts you're ever going to see.

In a fast food world, some cooks still like to take their time, and none more so than YouTuber Alvin Zhou. Even a simple cheeseburger takes him six hours. This video has been edited down to eight minutes, but it walks you through all the steps. He starts with grinding the beef before caramelizing the onions (this alone takes two hours). He then makes a special sauce, fries the patties, and melts the cheese. Zhou doesn't talk, but instead adds his own quirky commentary via subtitles while relaxing music plays. According to one commenter, he's "the Bob Ross of cooking; he deserves his own TV show." We wholeheartedly concur, since these videos are the kind of thing you can watch all day.

We couldn't resist one more Alvin Zhou video, this one for a Japanese-style soufflé pancake. The recipe actually doesn't take all day (rare for Zhou), but it does contain an unexpected ingredient: vanilla ice cream. He whips it into soft-serve with a hand blender (after indulging in a few bites, that is), then stirs in pancake batter made from a mix. The mixture gets poured into the pot and baked in the oven where it rises to jiggly, gorgeous perfection. The grand finale, where he adds butter and syrup and then slices into it, might actually make you cry. It's wonderful to know that moments like this are still possible even in a flawed world.

If you need to get away from it all but can't afford a vacation, check out AlmazanKitchen for the ultimate foodie escape. This YouTube channel shows a man preparing food over a campfire in the forests of Serbia — he neither talks nor plays music, but instead you hear the sounds of nature and cooking. Any of his videos will soothe and delight you, but we're particularly partial to this one where he spends eight minutes building a fire, chopping herbs, scrambling eggs, frying bacon, and toasting bread. He then puts everything together into one whopper of a breakfast sandwich which he eats to the accompaniment of rushing water and birdsong.

This relatively quick video is all about ASMR cooking sounds — no music or words, just potatoes chopping, pots clanking, water pouring, and the sizzle and pop of the potatoes boiling. We then get to hear (and see) the potatoes being seasoned with a few grinds of pepper before getting mashed, mixed with egg, rolled into balls, and filled with string cheese. Dipping them in flour and egg produces some satisfying sounds and visuals, as does coating them in crushed Pringles. (Such a beautifully, crunchy noise they make!) The air frying is uneventful, but the fork scrape finale followed by a cheese pull ends things on a high note