Do you want to make your own cooking videos at home? If you love whipping up mouth-watering meals, cooking videos are a great way to enhance your food blog and share your ideas, recipes, and step-by-step tutorials with other home cooks. 

Another advantage of making online cooking videos is that you can use them across different platforms. If you have a YouTube channel or Instagram account, you can upload your videos there to generate more viewers and subscribers, whom you can then direct back to your food blog. 

Do you use affiliate marketing links on your site? Cooking videos are a great way to tell your readers about any ingredients or equipment that you want to showcase and promote!

All in all, if you’re a food blogger then you should consider making cooking videos as they can engage your audience and build your presence across different platforms. In this post, we’ll show you how to make cooking videos at home to share your recipes and love for food. 

How to Make Cooking Videos at Home For the First Time

Are you interested in making cooking videos but are concerned you don’t have the right equipment or technical know-how? Don’t worry; you can make a great video with your iPhone and limited editing skills. Whether you’re creating a casual food vlog or are spending the time to video the perfect cooking tutorial, you don’t need to be a professional filmmaker to produce good and effective cooking content. 

Let’s look at how to make cooking videos at home as a novice. 

Step 1: Choose your recipe

Start by choosing the right recipe. This means choosing a recipe that is simple enough for the average home cook to prepare and one that doesn’t take hours of work. The longer it takes to cook, the more editing you’ll need to do (and the harder it is to cover up mistakes or start over). Choose a recipe that you are very familiar with so that you can approach your first cooking video with confidence. 

Make sure that the recipe serves its purpose. If you are using your cooking video as an affiliate marketing tool, incorporate the product you are promoting. For example, if you are promoting an immersion blender, you could make soup. If you want to promote a tabletop grill, Korean barbecue is a better option. 

As this is your first video, use it to set the tone for your brand. Choose a recipe that’s your signature dish or in your signature style (e.g., salads, vegan, Paleo). Monique from Divas Can Cook, for example, focuses on making Southern recipes accessible to a younger audience. 

A video embedded on the Divas Can Cook blog

Step 2: Plan your video

While the cooking shows and videos you see on YouTube or TikTok seem spontaneous, they are usually scripted and planned well in advance. Create a basic script for your video so your monologue will be flowing, without awkward pauses. 

You should also plan out your camera shots. Decide whether or not you want to use close-ups to showcase the ingredients you’re using, or just mention them in your bio or video description. 

Will you present the finished dish after you’ve filmed? How will you present it? How many angles will you need to film? Do you want to add a voiceover later or narrate as you cook? All of this will impact the way you film and edit your video, so preparing a script is a great way to prepare a framework you can use to guide your requirements before you film. 

You also meal-prep for the video ahead of time. You should shoot the cooking video in one go, so make sure all of your ingredients and appliances are ready to use. This may include preheating the oven, chopping or parboiling vegetables, or asking your butcher or fishmonger to debone your meat or fish. 

 Step 3: Shoot the video with the best camera you have

Unless you are a professional filmmaker or videographer, you probably don’t have access to a professional camera. We wouldn’t recommend going all out and buying one straight away either – an iPhone or other smartphone camera with a high resolution is good enough. There are a few tips for shooting a cooking video you should keep in mind, though: 

  • Make sure that all of your shots are well-lit and in focus. Pick the part of your house that has the best light and the least amount of noise. Shoot during the day to achieve the best possible video clarity. 
  • If it’s within your budget, invest in basic equipment like a tripod and lights. This will ensure that your video is steady and well-lit. Tripods will also enable you to shoot from better angles and are great for overhead shots, which is perfect if you don’t want to appear in the video yourself and just want to focus on the food. 
  • If you want even more angles and variety, use two cameras so that you can get multiple shots from different angles. It’s more visually appealing in an online video.

Before shooting your video, mentally run through the steps – or practice if you can. This will help you identify any points where you might get stuck, stumble over words, or need an item that isn’t readily available. 

Filming a chef slicing meat

Make sure that you have enough ingredients available for a quick do-over. You might burn a few onions while you set up your camera for the next shot, so it’s best to be prepared. Dress in something simple and comfortable that won’t show off spills or stains that might happen during the cooking process.

Speaking of burnt onions – don’t be afraid of messing up. You can always edit the parts you don’t like later. You can even share these mistakes in a blooper reel or cooking “fail” compilation later! Your viewers might appreciate your content more if you don’t take yourself too seriously.

While you are cooking, don’t forget to share a few tips about your recipe. Showcase your expertise or what makes the ingredients unique. You could mention where you source your products from, what your favorite brands are, or cooking and baking hacks you’ve picked up along the way.

Pro-tip: Close off your video by plating your dish in an appealing manner with the right garnish. White or wooden plates provide the best aesthetics. Take shots of the dish in motion as well, e.g., cutting a slice of cake, drizzling sauce over a piece of meat, or decanting your soup into a bowl. Study cooking shows and magazines for inspiration. 

You can also showcase yourself (or your family) by taking a bite at the end. The shots should be relevant to the dish, so if you have made something crispy, capture the crackling sound it makes when someone is cutting into it. If you want to show off the texture, zoom in with a close-up shot.

Step 4: Edit your video

Video editing is probably the most crucial aspect of creating your video because it stitches it all together (and leaves the mistakes on the cutting room floor). 

Filming food after it's been cooked

Here are a few video editing tips to keep in mind:

  • Add text and narration wherever you need to to make the video easier to understand, e.g., displaying the quantities and ingredients used, the steps to follow, etc.
  • Keep your video as short as possible. Cut out all the unnecessary parts. 
  • Add background music if your video doesn’t have any narration. It keeps text-based videos upbeat and engaging. 

You do not have to be an expert video editor. You can easily perfect your video using some simple editing apps like Canva, Vimeo, and Inshot if you’re editing on your phone or Apple’s iMovie or Adobe Premiere if you’re editing on your computer. 

Step 5: Post the video on the relevant platform and optimize for it

Now that you know how to make cooking videos at home, you need to start promoting your cooking content. If you use Youtube, make sure that your bio contains all of the relevant information, including ingredients, links to your social media pages, website, etc. 

For Instagram, make sure that your caption contains the same information mentioned above, so foodies know where to find you and your content and to help establish yourself as a food influencer

You also need to promote your videos on your own website. Showcase the recipe clearly, with a good introductory description, a list of ingredients, detailed written instructions, pictures, portions, and nutritional information. 

The easiest way to do this for your WordPress website is to use a WordPress recipe plugin like WP Recipe Maker

Embedding videos to recipe cards with WP Recipe Maker

You can use WP Recipe Maker to create stylish recipe cards to share with your fans and site visitors. These cards contain all of the recipe steps, ingredients, nutritional information, and prep work – and you can add your videos and a rating as well. This makes your cooking content more engaging and helps you gather feedback from your visitors. The great news about WP Recipe Maker is that it will automatically optimize your cooking content for SEO so your cooking videos and recipes become more discoverable. 

The WP Recipe Maker plugin is very versatile and customizable, so you can edit your cards to look like anything you want. You can choose from templates, edit fonts, and adjust the colors. Your site visitors can adjust the portion sizes and quantities automatically, making it very practical for amateur home cooks. 

An example of a recipe card on HonestandTasty.com, made with WP Recipe Maker.

You can choose your template from a variety of layouts, such as Chic, Classic, or Compact.

Here’s an example of just a few of the templates you can use:

The Premium Poster template in WP Recipe Maker
The Premium Poster template
The Blend-In template in WP Recipe Maker
The Blend-In template

How to add videos to your recipes with WP Recipe Maker

Using WP Recipe Maker, you can easily add cooking videos to your online recipes. You can add videos to any template available with the plugin, and place them anywhere you want in the recipe card using the Template Editor.

Let’s look at how it works:

1. You can upload or embed a video for a recipe in the Media section when editing a recipe. To upload a video from your computer, simply drag the files into the Media section or click Select Files. You can insert your video file into the post later. 

Uploading or embedding a video in WP Recipe Maker

2. To embed a video from a link, you can use video embed codes from sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Mediavine, or AdThrive. Click Add Media in the post, and then choose Video. Choose Insert from URL and paste your link into the field in the popup. 

3. WP Recipe Maker will retrieve the video markup and add it to the recipe. We recommend embedding a video, but if you use the option to upload the video, make sure to add a description and poster image in order to complete your metadata and optimize your posts. Just click on Edit File and type your description and caption into the text boxes provided. On the left side of the menu, simply click Select Post Image to set your metadata thumbnail image. 

Adding a video to a recipe with WP Recipe Maker

4. Use the template editor to ensure that the video appears exactly where you want it to. Videos that you upload will be shown in the recipe box by default, but you can remove the video field from the recipe template in the Template Editor. Then add the [wprm-recipe-video] shortcode where you would like the video to appear. 

A blog post from Contemplating Sweets, where WP Recipe Maker is used to display the cooking video right above the recipe.

Add cooking videos to your recipes today

Creating home cooking videos can increase traffic to your website, promote your brand online and help you earn a passive income from affiliate marketing. It’s also a great way of sharing your creativity and love for cooking with other home cooks from around the world. 

You can use videos two ways: either to drive traffic from other sites to your food blog or to increase the quality and SEO potential of your food blog by adding videos directly to your site. 

If your food blog is on WordPress, using WP Recipe Maker is a great way to showcase your recipes and embed your videos to enjoy improved SEO results. The drag-and-drop interface and useful customization tools make it easy to create a professional multimedia food blog. 

Install WP Recipe Maker and start your next cooking video today.

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