Ana Sofía Fehn, the woman who proved that not everything is pre-cooked in the universe of culinary influencers

The ingredients are chopped, the oven is heating up, everything is simple, every surface is clean. The result: a meal that you can almost smell and taste. Cooking is Instagrammable content par excellence. A reel (a video designed to engage the viewer and make them want to share it) is quick and enjoyable, a little capsule of escapism. Ana Sofía Fehn, 25, has managed to stand out from the hundreds of thousands of Instagram chefs from a small kitchen in Los Angeles, California.

Among the crop of cooking influencers who now dominate Instagram, the speed of Fehn’s success has been remarkable. She reached a million followers in a year and a half by cooking “a little bit of everything,” she says via video call from the apartment where she has lived for just under a decade. She moved to California to pursue an acting career — she hasn’t given up on that dream yet — but now balances it with her work as a content creator.

The influencer’s offering doesn’t follow a specific gastronomic line, but is rather a kind of catch-all. From a traditional American cheeseburger to Brazilian coxinhas, Galician octopus or different varieties of Italian pasta (her favorites, along with Italian agnolotti and Costa Rican casado).

Fehn speaks fluent Spanish, but with a distinct Anglo-Saxon flavor. She says that in her Ohio home there was “a Latin family kitchen.” “My mom is a great cook. When I was little and I went to play at my friends’ houses, I didn’t like the food they ate. I always wanted to eat my mom’s food.” Her family did not usually go to restaurants as there were seven children and eating at home “was always the easiest thing to do.”

Growing up in Cleveland, she explains, it was uncommon to see Asian or European restaurants, so moving to Los Angeles was a revelation. “It was the first time I had eaten in restaurants of any kind. Chinese or Thai food. Things like duck. I liked understanding more about how different cultures prepared their food and learning what ingredients they used,” she says.

Fehn studied Dramatic Arts at the University of Southern California and landed some small roles, such as on Modern Family in 2017. After completing her studies, everything came to a standstill when the coronavirus pandemic struck. During the lockdown, Fehn decided to upload recipe videos to social media: both the recipes she had known since she was a child and those she had been learning in recent years. “It started as a hobby. I had a camera that I used to record myself for auditions and I started making cooking content.”

Four years later, that hobby has become a profession to which she devotes, on average, 12 hours a day, time that requires her to “do the research,” buy the ingredients, prepare the kitchen, record, and edit. “Everything is always very planned, with my shot list to know exactly what I’m going to do. It’s almost like making a film,” she says.

On TikTok, where she has 442,000 followers, she uses practically the same formula as in her reels, but on YouTube (184,000 followers at the time of writing) she makes longer videos, not just about cooking, but also about her lifestyle, showing viewers her maternal grandmother’s house in Costa Rica, for example, or her summer vacations in the Italian Mediterranean.

There is, however, a lot of work that is not reflected in the videos. “Often, I don’t have time to record videos or cook. Sometimes they call me at 9 a.m. for an audition that I have to be at in two hours, and I have to drop everything else,” she explains.

Any kind of rush to get everything done could never be intuited from watching her work. Fehn maintains the pace of production required to keep a million people hooked. “I do everything myself. It’s a lot of work, but here I have everything I need: my lights, my camera, my tripod, and my kitchen.”

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