“I obviously made this pasta, and it needs a little bit of cheese,” Martyn Odell says in one of his TikTok videos, hunched over a plate of glossy spaghetti. He runs to the freezer and pulls out a block of feta. He whacks it against the counter a few times to show just how hard it is before grating it over the pasta. As the cheese showers the spaghetti in tiny shreds, very unlike room temperature feta, Odell bursts into a wheezy laugh. “Oh, that’s so good,” he says.
Over the last month, the professional chef has gained an audience on TikTok for freezing foods and grating them onto dishes. He’s frozen and grated garlic cloves, olives, plums, and peppers. Everything he grates tends to have the same consistency as the feta’s small, snow-like shreds.
It all started when he froze a knob of ginger from a hack he had heard. “And the ginger just turned into this like Parmesan cheese,” he told me in a video interview. “And then I just rolled with it.” That video now has over one million views.
From there, Odell has taken suggestions from commenters for videos, and regularly receives views in the hundreds of thousands. He’s grated frozen olives over braised fennel for a salty kick, a frozen pickle (or gherkin as the London-based creator calls it) into a burger sauce so it melts in seamlessly, and frozen peanut butter and nutella over a banana for a quick dessert. And he does all of them with a cheeky laugh and innocent amazement.
TikTok is full of sophisticated food videos—pretty desserts, crispy fried chicken smothered in Nashville hot oil, and glistening pastas. Odell’s videos don’t have fancy production value or glamorous moving shots. But that’s not why you watch them. Just a few seconds in, you’ll probably find yourself chuckling along with him and his infectious giggle and childlike sense of wonder. Odell’s commenters are filled with people saying that they love his personality and how much joy these videos bring them.
“I don’t act, it’s just me,” he said. “I’m genuinely like, ‘This is mental; it’s really fun.”
But the videos are also instructive, with many comments like, “the best tip I’ve seen on this app” and “I now freeze all my leftovers and grate them over my meals for the next day.”
“I cook a lot at home and I get quite bored,” he told me. “Freezing things opens up these doors that I’ve steered away from.” His main goal is to prevent household food waste, which he said can be a boring topic but doesn’t have to be.
“People are just like, ‘Let’s talk about seasonality or the doom and gloom of the world ending,’” he said. “If we eat the food we buy, that can eliminate food waste in the simplest way.”
“I just want to get people pumped and excited about finding new things to do and being creative,” he said.
