Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Greenlee.
Hi Michael, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I have always considered myself to be a teacher. I started my career as an elementary school classroom teacher and now I work for the University of Texas at Austin in a job where I work with teachers and educational leaders on helping them to improve their craft. That passion for instruction and helping others has always been engrained in everything that I do.
In addition, I also love to cook. When the pandemic hit and we were spending a lot more time at home, I began playing around with cooking outdoors more. I decided to try something new and purchased myself a Blackstone outdoor griddle. This is essentially a large flat-top like you would see in a diner. I started experimenting with new recipes and was having a lot of fun creating new foods, which I liked to share on social media. It didn’t take long for some friends and colleagues to begin reaching out and asking questions, expressing an interest in possibly getting a griddle themselves after seeing what I was able to make with it. They had many questions about best practices for cooking on a griddle as well as how to make some specific recipes they had seen me make.
My instinct for teaching immediately kicked in and I started trying to figure out ways that I could help them get started in this new hobby that I was having so much fun in. Since there was a worldwide pandemic happening at the time, and therefore I could not just invite them over for some cooking lessons, I started playing around with making some very amateur cooking videos that I could send them. It was never my intention for these videos to be seen by anyone other than my own friends and family. In order to make them easy to share, I created a private group on Facebook and uploaded the videos there.
It didn’t take long that I began getting requests from complete strangers asking to join my little private group. Out of sheer curiosity, I began slowly letting new people into the group. The reaction to my videos was overwhelmingly positive. They praised the short and simple format and the recipes themselves.
See, one of the things I really hate about cooking blogs/shows is that they are overstuffed with unnecessary information that makes them too long and difficult to sort through. I just want to get to the recipe and I want to see a few tips on how to cook it. I don’t need a history lesson on how this recipe was passed down from your grandma and I especially don’t need you to try and entertain me or make me laugh between all the important information. I just want you to get to the point. Therefore, I made my videos with this in mind. They are short, most are 2 minutes or less, and direct. This is what everyone seemed to enjoy about my videos. They could come to my page and watch how to cook something and get the recipe without having to sort through all that additional stuff.
This feedback made me begin to think I should throw these videos out on YouTube and see what it gets me. So, I did just that. I made a YouTube channel and I began uploading my videos there. The support I received on YouTube was overwhelming. Before long, I had thousands of subscribers and I began to get noticed by the Blackstone Griddle company. They introduced me to what they refer to as the Griddle Nation, a group of people who have a passion for cooking outdoors on their griddles. I was invited to be a guest on their own company cooking show CJ’s First Cooking Show where we made my recipe for homemade chalupas.
The pandemic was an ideal time for me to grow my channel. I was working at home and was going to be cooking anyway, so why not film it? For about a year, I was able to release a new video almost every day. Since returning back to the office that production has slowed, but I continue to put out new videos with new recipes whenever I can. My channel continues to grow and I continue to be an active member of the Griddle Nation. I simply can’t believe that this all stemmed from a simple hobby that I picked up to get me through the pandemic.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
While I definitely feel like I was blessed to gain so much attention so quickly, I would not say that it has been easy. To begin with, coming up with recipes is a challenge. Like I said earlier, for a while there I was pumping out a video a day. This means that I would have to sit down (often with my wife) and think about what we were going to make each day at the beginning of the week. We would research recipes and plan meals, but in order to make a video, it needed to be something new and unique each day. This creates a challenge when you start to run out of ideas.
One of my favorite things to do to help with this problem was to look for foods that you wouldn’t traditionally think of being made on a griddle. I would then try to work the recipe in such a way that I could make it on the griddle. I have had a lot of fun making things like lasagna, beef stroganoff, bread pudding, and bean burritos just to name a few. My lasagna recipe was even a finalist in Blackstone’s Great Griddle off contest and is now featured in one of their cookbooks.
In addition to coming up with the content for each of my videos, learning to navigate YouTube itself presented quite a challenge. I spent many evenings researching how to make the best videos and what are the best ways to share on YouTube. Something some people may not know is that YouTube restricts many of its features until you hit a certain number of subscribers. So I also spent many evenings sharing out my content on social media and working to build up my subscribers in order to reach these minimum subscriber numbers so I could access more features.
Also, in order to release a video a day, I needed to prep the meal’ ingredients, cook it while filming, and then still edit the footage each day before I could even post it online. I do all my filming and editing on my phone. This forces me to keep the content simple and makes it easier to share later. I also kept my videos as short as possible. This makes it simpler to film since I don’t need more than a few seconds of each step to make the final video. While these things help make the process easier it could still be very time-consuming and would result in my working on it most evenings after putting the kids to bed.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I am a YouTube content creator. I make cooking videos specializing in cooking on an outdoor flat-top griddle.
I think I have become known for my simple, easy to follow recipes as well as recipes that I have created to be made on a flat-top griddle that you would normally think would be made on a griddle. I am very proud of my lasagna recipe in particular because I feel it was one of my most original ideas and it was even a finalist in Blackstone’s Great Griddle Off contest. The challenge to making a lasagna on a griddle top is figuring out how to hold all the ingredients together. I came up with the idea of rolling the cheese mixture into a lasagna noodle to make a kind of lasagna roll-up. Then I decided to bread the lasagna roll on all sides and fry it on the griddle top with a little bit of oil. This gives you a nice crust on the outside to help hold everything in while also making the cheese on the inside melty and gooey. I would then serve it in a shallow bowl with some of my homemade meat sauce and top it with a splash of garlic cream sauce. It is so amazing and delicious and rich. You will never want lasagna made the traditional way again.
There are so many great food content creators out there with an almost endless supply of recipes you can look up for a great weeknight dinner. What sets me apart from them, I think, is my simplicity. I can not tell you how many times I was coming home from work, looking on the internet for something simple I could throw together for dinner, only to have to sort through reading a huge blog entry or watching a 30-minute video just to get to the recipe. I found it so frustrating. So when I began making my videos, I decided to do the extreme opposite of that. I make simple quick videos that last around 2 minutes or less just so I can show you the basic steps you need to follow to create a meal. I then include the recipe right in the description of the video so you don’t have to go hunting for it. My unique dry delivery to many videos has been a hit with my subscribers adding what they say is just a little bit of humor to the video while not bogging it down with needless stories and jokes.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
I don’t know that I would call it luck, but I have been blessed with a very supportive wife who helps me to plan meals, takes all of my pictures for posting on social media, and has probably burned every hair off of her arms helping me film while I am cooking. I also have a wonderful family who is very patient with me and tolerates me taking an extra few minutes on making dinner in order to film the steps or to get the right picture. I am honored to have been supported by and had my work acknowledged by the Blackstone company who has done an amazing thing in creating this community of cooking content creators and supporting them in every way possible. I feel like I have become part of the Blackstone family and everyone that I have interacted with that works for that company has been nothing short of amazing. It is through them and the amazing fans of my content that I have been able to grow as a content creator the way that I have.
Contact Info:
- Email: mrgreeniee@aol.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blackstonecooking/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BlackstoneCooking
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MichaelGreenleeBlackstoneCooking
