Tini Younger Learned How to Cook and Changed Her Life. Now She’s Sharing Her Skills.
12 min readBack in 2021, when Tineke “Tini” Younger was beginning her culinary education, she came home one night and asked her then-boyfriend Antoine Wright Jr. what he wanted to eat for dinner. He requested steak and mac and cheese and, on a whim, Younger decided to film herself preparing the meal, with Wright rating it at the end. She uploaded it—her very first cooking video—to TikTok, where she had about 1,800 followers at the time, and went to bed; by morning, the video had over 14 million views.
The following week, she learned how to fry in class and made Wright a chicken sandwich that night for dinner. That video got 25 million views. “I was like, ‘What do you mean? It’s just a fried chicken sandwich,’” Younger says of her overnight popularity. Next up was a chicken alfredo video; it got 22 million views. “So then from there I was like, ‘Okay, I guess I’m just going to film myself cooking everything from culinary school and show people what I learned,’” she says.
Younger had met Wright through mutual friends at a McDonald’s in Frederick, Maryland, where they were both born and raised, in March 2019, on her best friend’s birthday. (“She got to say in her maid of honor speech at our wedding that we met because she was born,” Younger notes.) They officially started dating that November, and by the spring of 2020, Wright had moved in with Younger and her parents and siblings during the early days of the pandemic. “My parents call him a bonus son—they’re literally like, ‘We have three sons,’” Younger says. “He’s been part of the family for almost seven years now.”
In those early days, money was tight and her kitchen was cramped. She sometimes spoke in her videos about how she longed to have a spacious workspace one day, complete with green cabinets, but it seemed like a far-flung dream. But she kept cooking and filming the results, with Wright continuing to serve as her official taste-tester. And thanks to an incredibly viral mac and cheese recipe and an appearance on Gordon Ramsay’s Next Level Chef, she has now amassed 12.5 million followers on TikTok, 2.6 million on Instagram, 55,000 subscribers on YouTube—and earned enough to buy her own home last year, at age 23, outside of Augusta, Georgia, where she now lives with Wright and their infant daughter and dog (both of whom I hear in the background making noise during our conversation). “I was able to make myself a beautiful, green kitchen,” Younger tells me, marveling. “It’s really insane how the internet can do that.”
In learning how to cook, Younger says she “accidentally” built a life and career for herself, and she’s grateful to her supporters for their help along the way—the fans who bought things she needed to film videos from her Amazon wish list, the followers who Venmoed her so she and Wright could make rent. “That’s why I really, really try to give back as much as possible because it’s like, ‘Because of you guys, I’m able to be in my own house. …I’m looking at my kitchen right now and I’m like, ‘Wow, she is beautiful.’”
Younger sees teaching others to cook as her way of paying it forward; she’s done it for years in her videos, and now she’s gearing up to do it more formally with the publication of her first major cookbook, Today We Are Cooking: Recipes That Teach You to Think Like a Chef, on November 3. (She self-published her very first cookbook, Cooking for My Boyfriend, in 2023.) “Cooking is a life skill and I just want everybody to be able to do it,” Younger says of her goals for the new book. “It’s so important these days when everyone is ordering in to be able to feed yourself. And I also want women to know that they can make money from cooking—they can have a whole career from it, like me.”
When you see Tini in her recipe videos, with her diminutive stature, soft smile, and platinum ringlets, she seems sweet as pie. But as a kid, Younger tells me she was always getting in trouble at school—“all the way from kindergarten on,” she notes. Her grades were bad; school just wasn’t her thing—she couldn’t sit still at her desk all day, she’d get distracted and act up. “I had a mouth on me,” Younger explains. She was often sent home with notes to her parents about her misbehavior and spent many days in Saturday detention.
But then she discovered the food world, and everything changed. As a junior in high school in 2018, Younger enrolled in her first culinary course at a local trade school (after shadowing the class as a sophomore). “Cooking really helped me,” she says. “I’m not sitting at a desk; I’m standing; I’m doing 10 million things at once in the kitchen, and learning at the same time. It just really clicked for me—I finally felt like this is my niche.”
After graduating high school in 2020, she continued her culinary education at a community college, completing an associate’s degree in May 2022. She envisioned herself working as an executive chef in a restaurant one day; she liked the idea of creating menus and getting to talk to diners about the food. “I never wanted to own my own restaurant. I know for a lot of people, that’s their main goal, but that was never my goal,” Younger says. “To me, it was just to cook some really good food and get my name out there.”
She started working as a prep chef at age 18 and as a line cook at 19, and says she developed a thick skin from often being the only woman in the kitchen. “I learned to voice my opinion,” she says. “I had to use my voice a lot in the kitchen and be like, ‘No, I am right’ and stick up for myself.” (Skills that she says continue to serve her well today on social media.) That helped bolster her as a chef, too, and it came through in the videos she posted online. “It went from videos of me cooking for my boyfriend, to teaching videos once I became more confident in the kitchen,” she says.
By August 2022, those videos had helped her build a sizable following—about 1.6 million on TikTok—and land a spot in Disney World’s culinary program. But two weeks before she was set to move to Florida, she got an email from a casting agent for season 2 of Next Level Chef. A casting call was set up for the very next day, and though they said they loved her, she didn’t hear back right away. Coincidentally, she was at Disney World celebrating her 21st birthday in September when she got the call. “They’re like, ‘Okay, what airport do you want to fly out of?’” Younger recalls. “And I was like, ‘Wait, so am I going on the show?’ They’re like, ‘Yeah, no one told you?’”
Of 18 contestants on the competition show, Younger placed in the top eight before being eliminated in the 11th episode. Her proudest moment on the show was the episode where she won best dish for cooking cow tongue. “I love making things that I’ve never made before,” she says. “It was the first time I cooked cow tongue. I’ve always heard of cow tongue tacos, but I’d never had them or made them. But that was where I was trying to go with my dish on the show and it worked.”
After the show aired in the spring of 2023, and Younger emerged as a fan favorite, she started working as a content creator full-time, signed with an agent, and began charging more for sponsored posts and partnerships. Her big break, of sorts, came in November of that year when her now famous mac and cheese recipe went viral.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was Younger’s mac and cheese. “Mac and cheese is one of Antoine’s favorite foods, so obviously I wanted to master it,” she says. “It seems so dumb that I worked on a mac and cheese recipe for this long—but I worked on it for four years.” Wright was a tough critic. “I would make him mac and cheese and he’d be like, ‘It’s good, but it’s not the best mac and cheese I’ve ever had,’” Younger says. “And as a chef, you’re a perfectionist, you want it to be the best mac and cheese that person’s ever had.”
She used what she learned from her classes and working in restaurants to tweak the measurements of the flour, butter, and cheese. There were versions with and without roux. One recipe had cream cheese; another, whole milk; the final recipe features both two cups of heavy cream and a can of Carnation evaporated milk, which she says is the secret to creating that “nice, creamy, cheesy” sauce. She experimented with different types of shredded cheeses; mozzarella, Colby Jack, and cheddar ended up being the winning combination. “I like to use cheese that’s easy to find in stores,” Younger says. “Don’t get me wrong, I love a fancy mac and cheese with all these fancy cheeses, but I tried to use cheeses that are simple to find and not hard for people to use.”
One of the key ingredients is Dijon mustard. “People are always like, ‘Do I need to add the Dijon mustard? Why Dijon mustard? That’s so weird.’” She learned the trick from one of the restaurants she worked at, where the recipe called for whole grain mustard. “At the time, I didn’t know why we were adding it, and so I asked the chef, and he was like, ‘Oh, it pairs very well with the cheese—that’s why there’s whole grain mustard on charcuterie boards.’ It is a natural emulsifier too, to give you that nice silky smooth cheese.” But instead of whole grain mustard, Younger added Dijon. She learned to bloom seasonings (gently heat them in oil before adding) in a lesson on South Asian cuisine in her international cooking course, and began infusing the butter in the mac and cheese with garlic and smoked paprika. “It helps wake them up and gives the dish more flavor and gives it kind of a toasty feel,” Younger explains.
“Oh, one more thing,” she adds, “the cavatappi pasta.” Somewhere along the way, in a restaurant or in one of her classes, Younger saw a chart of all the different types of pasta and what they paired well with. Cavatappi, a tubular corkscrew-shaped variety, jumped out at her as a good match for a thick, creamy sauce. “When I say the cream gets in the hole, people think I’m trying to be dirty, but literally underneath the description on the chart, it was like, ‘The cream gets in the hole,’” Younger says, laughing. “So when you bite down, you get all that creaminess, and so that’s why I used cavatappi.”
The pasta shape has since become her signature—she shows me a tattoo she got on her right forearm three days earlier of a blue crab holding a single cavatappi noodle. Between 2022, the year before she posted her video, and 2024, the year after she posted it, sales of cavatappi increased by nearly 50 percent. “It’s crazy how one video made cavatappi—specifically cavatappi—sell out. It was even on the news. People were blaming me. They were mad at me and making angry videos like, ‘I can’t find cavatappi because this girl posted a recipe.’” Younger couldn’t even find cavatappi herself for a while, but has since learned to stock up early and often. “I was like, ‘Where’s my money? Where’s my check?’” Younger jokes of spurring the pasta’s popularity.
Finally, between the Dijon, the cheese trio, the cream blend, and the cavatappi, she did it. “It was a bunch of different steps, and I don’t think people understand how much I really put into this mac and cheese,” Younger says. “Eventually, I had Antoine taste it and he’s like, ‘This is the best mac and cheese I’ve ever had,’ so I was like, ‘Perfect. We’re not doing anything else. We’re done.’”
When I ask Younger what she thinks the secret to her popularity is, she speculates it has to do with the way she explains her recipes. “In other food videos they’ll be like, ‘throw in this, throw in that,’ but they won’t really do the measurements or anything. I like to explain things how I would learn. I have a learning disability, so I need things to be broken down step by step by step, and a lot of other people need that too,” she says. “I also like to give tips that I learned in school or in restaurants. So I think people gravitate toward me because they actually get to learn from me.” She says she “gives the old-school Food Network vibe.”
“And I give you the recipe,” she adds, “you don’t have to pay for it, you just get to make really good food.”
Part of her appeal surely lies in her relatability as well. “I try to leave the fancy equipment out of it. And if I use fancy equipment, I’ll give you a substitute,” Younger says. “I like to build confidence in the kitchen too, so I’m like, ‘If you don’t know how to boil water, it’s fine, you just need to watch my videos.’” She uses her husband as an example: last Thanksgiving, Wright was in charge of the turkey for the first time—“Antoine watched my videos and he made this perfect turkey after never having made a turkey before,” Younger says. “So he is proof that I can teach people how to cook.”
Younger has a gentle, encouraging presence on screen. “I give some reassurance in my videos. I’ll be like, ‘Don’t worry, it looks hard, but trust me, you can do it,’” she says. “I like to make it easy. I try to not talk too much when it comes to my videos. I don’t like watching intros or any of that—just get to it. And then I feel like once people start getting into it, they’re like, ‘Okay, it’s not that hard. I’m just throwing things in a bowl and putting it in the oven.’”
Her cookbook is “me in a book,” she says, like her YouTube feed, but more organized and on the page. The cover is the same hue of green as her kitchen and the pages have splatters, just like the ones she uses at home. “I wanted to make it look like this cookbook was loved, so some of the pages have stains,” she says. “Because if you open up any of my cookbooks, they have splatters because of me.”
The book was inspired by the two-inch-thick textbook she worked with in school to learn the elements of cooking, but rather than simple recipes that call for little more seasoning than salt and pepper, Younger puts her spin on the fundamentals. “I teach you how to sear steak and do all the basics like that, but I also add some funk. I call it a Tini Twist.” No skill is too small: her book instructs readers on how to boil water, cook plain rice, dice an onion, and mince garlic; she also decodes the terminology used in culinary schools and restaurant kitchens.
It’s also a personal book. Rather than a posed photo shoot in a studio, she opted for more candid shots in her actual kitchen and in her swimming pool. “I just wanted it to be very personal, and I didn’t want it to be like a cookie-cutter food blog,” Younger explains. It’s also personal because she views the cookbook as the last thing she did with her daughter Arya, who died after Younger experienced a placental abruption at around 36 weeks of pregnancy. (Arya’s twin sister, whom Younger refers to as “Baby L” online, survived and is a healthy, happy 6-month-old.)
Younger found out she was pregnant with twins right around the same time as she landed her book deal and started writing. “So literally, every single step, they were with me,” Younger says. “It makes the book a lot more special to me because this is something all three of us got to do together. Hopefully, her sister will read it one day and be like, ‘Oh, I was in mommy’s belly here with my sister, and we were helping her write the book.’” The book includes a dedication to Arya; Younger also has her name and footprint tattooed on her left tricep.
She loves being a mom, but don’t expect her to start churning out “mommy content.” She plans to keep motherhood separate from her job and keep the focus on cooking in her videos. “This is a me thing,” she explains. “I love my audience, I love my supporters, but ultimately, this is for me.” And just as she learned from watching her own mom have nontraditional jobs when she was growing up (as an entertainer and face painter at children’s parties, for example), she hopes her daughter will be similarly inspired. “I love being a mom, and I also love being a working mom,” she says. “My daughter will grow up seeing her mom being a girl boss, and know that she could do that too if she wants to.”
After the book is out in the world, she’ll go back to creating new recipes and filming her videos. And she won’t stop giving back. Eventually, she’d like to open a soup kitchen—one that serves high-quality, restaurant-style food. Having relied on food pantries herself at times, she knows the dignity that comes with quality food. “People deserve to eat a good meal,” Younger says. “That’s one of my goals. I don’t know when it will happen, but that’s something that I really want to do. I just feel like it’s kind of the bare minimum for someone with my platform to try to help as much as possible.”