Joshua Weissman is a well-known American chef, YouTuber, and cookbook author who inspires millions with his cooking skills and unique personality. While most fans know him for his viral recipes and entertaining cooking style, many are also curious about his personal journey, especially his weight loss story. Beyond the appealing persona, however, lies a more complex narrative involving allegations of plagiarism, a toxic work environment, and questions about the authenticity of his culinary expertise.
The Weight Loss Journey
Joshua Weissman lost around 100 pounds during his teenage years. He has openly shared that he struggled with being overweight as a child and faced bullying because of it. Instead of giving up, he decided to take charge of his health and made a huge lifestyle change. Joshua Weissman lost weight through a combination of healthy eating and exercise. He started cooking his own meals, focusing on fresh and wholesome ingredients rather than processed food. This helped him control calories while still enjoying delicious meals. Along with diet, he added consistent workouts to his routine, which played a big role in shedding excess weight. Joshua Weissman’s weight loss journey is proof that with the right mindset, healthy food choices, and consistent exercise, anyone can achieve their health goals. His transformation not only improved his appearance but also boosted his confidence and helped him pursue his culinary career.
Early Life and Career Beginnings
Joshua Weissman was born on January 9, 1996, in Los Angeles, California. He grew up with a passion for cooking and started experimenting with recipes at a young age. YouTube culinary star and 24-year-old chef Joshua Weissman is an expert in breaking down complex recipes into easy-to-follow steps, inspiring his audience to get excited about food.
Weissman's Culinary Style and Content
Joshua Weissman is loved for his homemade recipes that encourage people to cook everything from scratch. From burgers and pasta to bread and desserts, his recipes combine fun with professional cooking techniques. One of Joshua’s most famous recipes is his cinnamon rolls. Fans love how soft, fluffy, and delicious they turn out when following his step-by-step instructions. In this episode of Food Diaries, Weissman walks us through a day of eats, including the perfect avocado toast, his passion for all things cereal, and why a sous vide is one of the best kitchen gadgets. "Now, I know I do a lot of fancy things with my chef background and everything like that, but on a regular day, let's be honest, we all just want to chill and have something that's good for us and satisfies us quickly," says Weissman. On that note, for breakfast, he tends to go the simple route with a few pieces of toast accompanied by some fried eggs topped with grated cheese. He also identifies as a "big coffee drinker." "All I know is what I drink, I do not want it to make me sleepy," he says of his caffeine habits. "I want to feel it deep in my veins." By the time lunch comes around, Weissman says he either relies on microwaving something he's already meal-prepped or he simply orders through DoorDash.
Financial Success and Personal Life
As of now, Joshua Weissman has not revealed details about being married or having a wife. Joshua Weissman’s net worth is estimated to be around $2 million to $3 million. His income comes from YouTube ad revenue, sponsored collaborations, book sales, and his professional work as a chef. Joshua has shared in interviews that his parents supported his love for cooking from a young age.
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Community Interactions
On Reddit, Joshua Weissman often becomes a hot topic among food lovers. Fans discuss his recipes, cooking techniques, and unique humor.
Cookbook and Recipe Highlights
Joshua Weissman is also a successful author. His popular cookbook “Joshua Weissman: An Unapologetic Cookbook” became a bestseller and features a wide range of his favorite recipes. My beef short ribs recipe over a bed of cauliflower mash and a beautiful hearty pan sauce with chunks of aromatics. Seriously amazing and an incredibly relaxing and warming meal perfect for sitting down and watching a movie.
The Dark Side: Allegations of Plagiarism and Misconduct
More apt would be to describe Weissman as the head of a food media production company and the face of his company’s YouTube channels. Weissman’s brand was built through cooking videos. With over 10-million YouTube subscribers, the 29-year-old has been one of the 50 largest food-based accounts on the platform, and he has been big enough to support a full-time staff for cooking research and development, production, and video editing. A former employee told me, I would see him on his computer all the time, and a different employee said that he will pull up a recipe out of nowhere. Both quotes aligned with accounts from other staffers. I was told that Weissman instructed staff to change the ingredient quantities on recipes, but one employee assumed at the time that Weissman was interested in tweaking his own numbers. Weissman, labeled a control freak by one of his former staff, eventually became so detached from recipe development that he had to be walked through the cooking process by his employees, who he came to trust with finding recipes. I was told that Weissman gave sourcing instruction to his staff when they were first charged with coming up with a recipe: just look up whatever recipe, and change a few ingredients, so people aren’t saying we’re copying it.
Dubious Recipe Development
In Weissman’s early days with a full-time staff, video concepts were brainstormed by Weissman and his team, and once an idea was decided, Weissman would give a recipe to his defacto culinary director. The culinary director, along with an assistant, did prep work, and executed and tested the recipe. I was told that when doing a shoot, Weissman would go to the kitchen, make a video, and leave and that there wasn’t much cooking from Weissman outside of what was filmed for videos. Weissman’s recipe development process was described to me as a secret endeavor.
Hoagie Roll Recipe Controversy
Several of my Instagram followers told me that it seemed like Weissman’s hoagie roll recipe for the cheesesteak video was a copy of my How to Hoagie Roll recipe, and one person wrote that it seems tweaked just enough to plausibly deny plagiarism. Many pointed out similarities in the high fat percentage and other ingredient concentrations like the yeast, water, and sugar amounts. Weissman listed less salt than my recipe, but there is a thread on PizzaMaking.com about my hoagie roll recipe, and one poster talked about trying the recipe with less salt, and another offered their own variation on the recipe with less salt with a similar concentration to what Weissman published. Weissman’s salt concentration is 2.1% relative to the total flour amount, and the PizzaMaking.com is 2%. It does not surprise me to see the salt lowered in Weissman’s recipe, and Weissman may have found that PizzaMaking.com recipe. Weissman’s methodology for making the hoagie rolls was extremely similar to that of my own recipe, including the suggestion to flip a bowl over a stubborn dough and walk away for 15 minutes or to put shaped rolls onto a towel or couche dusted with rice flour. Weissman’s recipe also featured the same method for spraying water including the same spray time interval: spray at the start, spray at 2.5 minutes, spray at 5 minutes. Weissman even had his subscribers divide their hoagie dough into 400g dough balls, the same weight as with my recipe. It is exceedingly unusual to see another recipe with all of these similarities without any citation and without a path that establishes supporting expertise.
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Pastrami and Pad Thai Incidents
The cascading similarities of my hoagie roll recipe with Weissman’s pushed me to look into other cases of possible plagiarism by Weissman. I came across Weissman’s Perfect Homemade Pastrami Completely From Scratch video and write-up published on May 19, 2021. One of my Instagram followers pointed out Weissman had copied Meathead Goldwyn’s cure recipe at Amazing Ribs: Weissman’s recipe uses the same water, salt, and cure amounts but for a different weight of brisket. The cure amounts make no sense for Weissman’s meat amount, and it is clear that this recipe was stolen. For safety and quality reasons, cure amounts should be specifically calculated for a given brisket weight, and Amazing Ribs has published Prof. On March 3, 2021, Weissman published a pad Thai video, “Easy Authentic Pad Thai At Home,” along with the accompanying write-up. In an Appropriation 7 Instagram story highlight, Cooking with Cas pointed out that Weissman’s recipe features many similarities to The Woks of Life’s pad Thai recipe by Kaitlin Leung, published on September 28, 2020. The similarities included perturbed recipe amounts and a suggestion to substitute zha cai for Thai preserved salted radish. I spoke with Thai food experts who all established that zha cai is not a typical substitution for pad Thai. A user commented in response to the pad Thai recipe from The Woks of Life, and they noted the similarities between it and the Weissman recipe. They asked Leung, was yours first? The author replied, “check the posting dates of his video to this recipe, and I think you'll get your answer.” In his video, Weissman falsely claimed that using a fork to eat pad Thai is illegal, but pad Thai is commonly eaten using a fork and spoon. If you watch a bit earlier in the video, Weissman claimed his stolen pad Thai recipe to have bore one of the greatest pad Thais you’ll ever have.
Stolen Photos and Misrepresentation
Weissman’s theft of creative work was not limited to recipes: his channel published stolen photos from Brian Watson, Thee Burger Dude, a vegan recipe writer and video creator, and in one instance, Weissman misrepresented Watson’s vegan food as if it were his own food made with meat. On March 27, 2022, Weissman published the video Making The Taco Bell Cheesy Gordita Crunch At Home on YouTube, stating at 1:59, he showed Watson's vegan gordita photo on the screen as he said that Watson’s photo is what the Taco Bell offering is supposed to look like, and then he contrasted that with what he positioned as a disappointing cheesy gordita crunch obtained at a Taco Bell location. Nearly two years later, on January 3, 2024, Weissman released 47 Food Hacks To Make Your Food Healthier on YouTube. The video thumbnail featured Watson’s photo, which misrepresented Watson’s burger as his own. Watson confirmed that both his gordita and burger photos were stolen without permission.
The Importance of Attribution
For my hoagie roll recipe, I would be happy if a YouTuber used my hoagie roll in a video, noted any tweaks, cited my recipe explicitly, and linked to my article in the video description. It would be a win-win. Similarly, Weissman’s pastrami recipe used a stolen cure from Amazing Ribs, but the recipe could have cited Amazing Rib’s cure instructions, alongside his published pastrami recipe. As it was written, Weissman suggested a smaller proportion of cure than Amazing Rib’s corned beef recipe, and a different meat volume and surface area. If Weissman cited Amazing Ribs’s work, it would have made his pastrami recipe safer for his subscribers. With Weissman’s pad Thai recipe, there’s no culinary contribution from Weissman. His video is entirely stolen without any credit. In other cases Weissman’s own staff told me that he used personal recipes from his employees without credit. In these cases, it was beyond a substantive portion of a recipe that was stolen, it was the entire recipe. Across each instance of stolen content, every recipe and his stolen photos, Weissman misrepresented the work of others as his own. Weissman did not have subject-matter expertise for Thai food. He did not have subject-matter expertise for Jewish cured meats. And he did not have subject-matter expertise for hoagie rolls or yeasted doughs in general. If an influencer like Weissman has broadly covered food with frequent recipe releases, and they do not cite sources, without any demonstration of related subject-matter expertise, it is likely that they’re taking recipes from others without credit. It’s unclear to me what he created himself.
A Toxic Work Environment
…threats of violence soon followed. Those who worked with Weissman described him as quick to anger and prone to abusive behavior. I was told that he would throw shit all the time, and that he often had fits like a child. Weissman threw food and other items so often, asking employees about specific instances of something thrown sometimes felt like asking people to describe a specific sound during rush-hour traffic: they all might remember different things, but everyone heard a lot of noise. A former employee talked about Weissman’s violent behavior and said that he would throw pots, pans, equipment, the food he made, and added that he’d throw it anywhere. They told me that Weissman threw a hot dog at a dishwasher for buying the wrong meat. Someone else described Weissman berating them for not buying the precise ingredient Weissman requested and that getting the wrong thing was the quickest way to get him mad, and threats of violence soon followed. On the other hand, another former staff member told me that Weissman would become angry if employees spent too long looking for a specific item and didn’t just buy a generic alternative. There was no winning for Weissman’s staff. Another former employee told me that Weissman once got annoyed with them for making noise, and he threatened to stick a gun in their mouth and pull the trigger, a threat made more disturbing in the context of the regular violent outbursts that Weissman’s employees described. A former staffer felt that if you were his employee, you were beneath him, a sentiment that was broadly echoed by his employees.
The Breaking Point
Weissman’s studio is in Round Rock, Texas, just outside of Austin, but prior to moving to the Austin area, his videos were filmed at his home in Houston. Weissman bought a home in Los Angeles as an additional shooting location, and it was purchased in part for making videos with collaborators. While on a 2022 trip to Weissman’s LA home, former employees told me that Weissman became enraged when he made a pizza too big for his pizza oven. He allegedly threw a pizza at the culinary assistant who had purchased the oven, and then they said Weissman threw knives into the sink. Weissman was said to have stormed out, and he did not return for hours. The culinary assistant was left to cleanup Weissman’s mess. I was told that the next morning, Weissman decided that he wanted a large table moved upstairs, three flights, and that his employees would be the ones to move it. It was heavy enough that the employees believed it would take several of them to move it. The staff did not want to move the table; they noted that the table was heavy and unsafe to move and that there was no workers’ compensation or health insurance. They wondered what would happen they dropped it or if someone got hurt. When staff told Weissman they couldn’t move the table, they say he flipped. They told me he threw a tantrum, and he threw things on the floor. That table incident was the breaking point for Weissman’s staff, and soon after, on October 8, 2022, they wrote a letter to Weissman and his second-in-command Vicram Chatterjee, known to Weissman’s audience as Vicram, outlining their issues with production planning, scope of work, lack of overtime pay, and Weissman’s anger and abuse toward employees. Sources told me that with exception to Vicram, all of Weissman’s staff who worked entirely on-site signed the letter. Employees told me that remote workers were insulated from Weissman’s toxic behavior as he did not manage them directly. The experience between the two groups of workers was so different that when in-studio staff interacted with remote members of the team, they said that they often joked about how they worked in two different companies. The letter held back from discussion of Weissman’s sexual misconduct. There was a belief that his tendency to sexualize the workplace was immutable and that bringing it up would only anger him, and it risked him taking the rest of the letter seriously. One employee told me that we figured if we put that in writing, the response would be beyond bad. A former employee told me that they were working 60-to-70 hours a week without overtime pay, despite being contracted to work for 40-hour weeks with eight-hour days, and someone else described working 80-hour weeks for Weissman despite their claim of being contracted for 40-hour weeks. They claim that they never received additional pay for that work. In addition to those examples, a separate employee with whom I spoke described working 80-hour weeks long after the letter was delivered. None of those employees were paid more than $55,000 annually.
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Post-Letter Changes and Continued Issues
A former employee gave some additional context as to why the staff wrote the letter: The editing department was frustrated about Josh’s consistently shifting demands and expectations that was burning us out. And the on set crew was being treated like garbage. And the behind the scenes people were dealing with the same stuff the editing team was while also having more personally targeted malice thrown at them. It was just a storm with Josh at the center so we knew we needed to come together and try to do something. Staff had described Weissman as sometimes erratic, and he would abruptly change plans for videos. I was told a couple of completely finished videos were scrapped entirely. Weissman’s last-minute changes wasted weeks of effort and disrupted the shooting schedules. One employee said that from start to finish, the entire process of making a video could take two-to-three weeks. Weissman’s former staff have told me that after they delivered the letter, Weissman had meetings with individual signatories, but things became different rather than better. Weissman cut the signatories out of the collaborative staff brainstorming process that typically bore video concepts, and he shifted to leaning on Lawrence Weibman, who was a primarily-remote producer who was flown in for the filming of larger-scale videos. The shift toward leaning on Lawrence took staff by surprise: Josh would talk about how shitty of a guy he was to us… how overpaid [he was], [how he] doesn’t do his job etc. But Josh would then turn around and call him to implement and oversee every process that wasn’t working. Weissman often complained to hi…