There are two things that Elias Dosunmu clarifies during the interview. The first, that in Ukrainian the city in which he was born is called Kharkiv, and not Kharkiv, the name in Russian. The second, that he does not like to refer to himself as influencer but as a “content creator”. And it is in these two corrections where a large part of the biography of this immigrant is condensed who arrived in Spain at the age of 14 with his family and now at 26 he has more than 14 million followers faithful to his recipes between YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. “Older people usually call me the Arguiñano of the new generation,” says Dosunmu, who is now launching his first book, Let's do better! (Oberon), and in which he compiles some of his most successful creations such as fried chicken wings or the club sandwich.
Dosunmu perfectly remembers the publications and figures that catapulted him into the universe of social networks, although long before that he had already begun to relate to cooking, specifically at the age of 14. Then, during one of his family's recurring summer vacations in China – for work reasons – he asked his mother to do something in an establishment where they usually went and the impossibility of understanding the customers in the room inevitably led him to the kitchen. “Everything was an illusion,” he says, of his time in that place where, after several consecutive years, he learned to “cut, wash vegetables… everything one can imagine.” In fact, he attributes to that experience, for example, the regular use he makes of soy sauce instead of salt in his recipes. “It's still salty, but it has umamione more flavor,” he explains.
After that first experience came others like bartender and in kitchens of neighborhood restaurants, a la carte restaurants and restaurant chains. There are no haute cuisine or Michelin-starred establishments on his resume, but far from embarrassing him, he honestly acknowledges that his level “doesn't reach there.” With a degree in Aerospace Engineering—which he finished in six years—his last experience in a regular kitchen was precisely for a well-known food chain that, after confinement, according to what he says, fired him, something that prompted Dosunmu to look for a way to reinvent himself without stop cooking. “I wanted to continue serving my dishes to people,” he confesses. And so, without a restaurant in which he could do it, he uploaded his first recipes at the end of 2020 and the first one that succeeded was for some potato chips made in the microwave. “I told myself, I'm going to look in the hashtag recipes and I am going to make the one that is most viral… and the potatoes came out chips”. This is how from having “literally” 18 followers, he went on to have about 8,000, thanks to the video going viral. “I was studying and I started seeing notifications… before I went to bed the video had 80,000 views. In three months it reached a million and a half and at that time it was much more difficult to reach that figure.”
But in social networks, it is not enough to “make a delicious recipe,” says Dosunmu from experience, but engaging users at the beginning is essential. So after the reach of his publications began to decrease, he began to think about the introduction of his videos and the one that truly marked a before and after arrived, that of the recipe for fried chicken wings, also included in his book. In it, you can see the cook, ordering food at a fried chicken fast food chain and then trying it in the car. “I ate the wings and the phrase came out by itself: 'It's not bad, but we're going to do it better.'” At that time he had 160,000 followers on TikTok — which he began using on the recommendation of his girlfriend — and in just one night he reached a million and a half views and 400,000 followers. Today there are 9.1 million.
Today, Donsunmu maintains his policy of not looking at statistics immediately, as well as his motto, “homemade always wins,” which is reflected in the book he has just launched. In it he shows how to make basics such as pasta, jams or butter, in addition to putting on paper recipes classified according to the structure of the videos he uploads to his networks: fast food dishes, recipes for world dishes, economical ones, hamburgers and of desserts. All made with ingredients “that can be found in any supermarket” and written clearly. “What I did was ask myself what book I would want to receive if I didn't know how to cook, if I were young or if I were older, but I was already tired of those books that have five pages per recipe.” In some of them, there is even a QR code that leads directly to the video recipe on social networks.
Staunch fan of Gordon Ramsay —”the person who said that cooking can be a Show”, he points out, “Dosunmu does not have vacation days or weekends and it has taken him time to demonstrate to his people that being a content creator for social networks is a job like any other. His mother didn't always take him seriously — something that hurt him at some point — and his father opened an Instagram account a little over a week ago. The reason? The collaboration of his son with Real Madrid goalkeeper Andriy Lunin.
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