MrBeast arrived at the kitchen unable to name a colander, convinced a lime was a mango, and holding a chef’s knife the way someone grips a hammer. Nick DiGiovanni, the culinary creator who has cooked alongside some of the world’s best, looked at Jimmy Donaldson and issued a quiet but firm verdict: ‘I think it’s safe to say that we’re starting at Square 0.’ What followed was a single day of culinary bootcamp with a very specific deadline: at the end of it, MrBeast would cook a chocolate lava cake from scratch for his fiancee Thea. She had already been warned it might be burnt.
Three badges, one blindfold, and a badly diced onion
DiGiovanni opened with a blind taste test, feeding MrBeast common ingredients through headphones while music played. Ginger was guessed as ‘a raisin dipped in hot sauce’. A lime was called an orange, then a mango, then sour cream. The only correct answer in the entire round was chocolate, which MrBeast identified by brand. The kitchen tools test went similarly, with MrBeast referring to a colander as a ‘water drainer’ and a spatula as ‘the thing SpongeBob uses’, which DiGiovanni reluctantly accepted as a sign of hope.
To earn the Knife Skills Badge, MrBeast had to break down a whole chicken in 90 seconds, after DiGiovanni demonstrated the same task in 30. He emerged with two legs, two wings, and what DiGiovanni carefully described as ‘two very mangled breasts.’ The badge was awarded anyway. The Seasoning Badge came through a flavor-sorting exercise using red circles, a nod to MrBeast’s own challenge-video format, where ingredients had to be matched to the five tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. MrBeast’s working theory was that anything he disliked was umami, which turned out to be more accurate than expected. The badge challenge itself was making his mom’s teriyaki sauce from memory, using a recipe DiGiovanni had quietly obtained by FaceTiming her the night before. After adding soy sauce, garlic, ginger, and enough brown sugar to prompt a second round of additions, MrBeast tasted the result and went quiet for a second. ‘The brown sugar really hits,’ he said. DiGiovanni agreed it was genuinely, really good.
The Heat Control Badge required running six stovetop and oven tasks simultaneously: a fried egg, melting chocolate, toasted hazelnuts, popcorn, pasta, toast, and a batch of cookies in the oven. The judge was Gordon Ramsay, reached by text photo. The toast burnt once. The chocolate nearly scorched. The hazelnuts were pulled at the last possible moment. Ramsay approved. MrBeast ate a cookie in celebration.
Thirty minutes, liquid nitrogen, and one very important audience of one
The final challenge gave MrBeast 30 minutes to produce a chocolate lava cake, a raspberry sauce, and homemade vanilla ice cream. DiGiovanni had pre-measured some ingredients, but the ice cream presented a genuine logistical problem: there was simply no conventional way to freeze it in half an hour. The solution was liquid nitrogen, poured directly into the ice cream base with goggles on, producing a thick, finished scoop in under two minutes. ‘I didn’t realize you could use liquid nitrogen to make ice cream that fast,’ MrBeast said, which was the most technically impressed he sounded all day.
With three minutes left, he was still straining raspberry seeds. With one minute left, he was plating. With ten seconds left, he placed a Feastables Peanut Butter Cup on top of the ice cream and declared it done. DiGiovanni called time. Thea walked in, noted that MrBeast looked cute in the chef’s coat with his name on it, and sat down to eat.
She took a bite, paused, and said it was actually really good. Her favorite part turned out to be the peanut butter. MrBeast turned to her with the particular expression of someone who has just realized they may have created a new expectation. ‘Are you gonna expect me to cook for you now?’ he asked. Thea said yes.
The chef’s coat hanging in the corner
At the start of the day, DiGiovanni had held up a chef’s coat with MrBeast’s name stitched into it and told him he could have it if and when he earned it. By the end of the afternoon, MrBeast was wearing it over a plate of chocolate lava cake he had made himself, in a kitchen that still had a broken glass on the floor.
Thea called him probably the best chef in the room. DiGiovanni, standing next to him, did not argue with her. ‘Not even close,’ he had said earlier, when asked if MrBeast was now on his level. But he had also said that the teriyaki sauce was really, really good. Both things were true.
