About

Jason Farmer

I reverse-engineer restaurant recipes. Not "inspired by" versions, not "my take on" adaptations. The actual dish, rebuilt from scratch so you can make it at home.

I run the YouTube channel Farmageddon, where 420,000 subscribers watch me tear apart recipes from places like Panda Express, P.F. Chang's, Benihana, Chipotle, and Chinese takeout restaurants and figure out exactly how they're made. Every ingredient, every technique, translated for a home kitchen. This blog is where those recipes live in full written form with complete measurements, equipment lists, substitution notes, and step-by-step instructions you can pull up on your phone while you cook.

How I Got Here

I grew up on the east side of Houston in a neighborhood called North Shore. One of my classmates in elementary school, his family owned a chain of Chinese takeout restaurants called China Ko. My family ate there constantly, and I was fascinated by it. Chinese takeout seemed totally exotic to a kid in North Shore, Texas.

When my family moved to Sugar Land for middle school, my best friend across the street was from a Taiwanese family that also owned Chinese takeout restaurants. I spent years in those kitchens, watching and eating, absorbing a cuisine that most people only experience through a pickup window.

The moment I knew I wanted to cook happened at a Barnes & Noble. I was wandering around after high school, looking for a book that might tell me what to do with my life. A beam of light was coming through a window and landing directly on Thomas Keller's French Laundry Cookbook. I walked over, started flipping through it, and that was it. I cooked most of my way through that book.

I enrolled in culinary school and graduated second in my class. Then I spent almost a decade working in professional kitchens in Houston.

The Restaurants

I cooked under Randy Evans and Philippe Gaston at Haven, a Southern farm-to-table restaurant with deep Cajun and Creole roots. Randy is a legend in the Houston food scene, and Philippe is one of the most talented chefs in the city. Both of them shaped how I think about food.

From there, I helped Philippe open Cove, Houston's first ceviche and international raw seafood restaurant. Cove operated as a restaurant within a restaurant at Haven's bar. The Houston Chronicle voted us the seventh best restaurant in Houston.

I spent several years at Izakaya, a Japanese restaurant, which gave me a deep education in Japanese technique and flavor. Then I worked under Richard Knight at Hunky Dory, a British fine-dining gastropub named after the David Bowie album. Richard also ran Feast, my favorite restaurant Houston has ever had, heavily influenced by Fergus Henderson and the London restaurant St. John.

YouTube and this Channel

My very first cooking video was in 2006, on a completely different channel. My great-grandmother, we called her Granny, had passed away and left me her carrot cake recipe. It was everybody's favorite. Every holiday, 50 people in my family would call me asking for the recipe, so I filmed a video and told them to just go watch it. That video got 600,000 views. I didn't make another one for almost a decade.

In 2015, I posted a Benihana fried rice video that became the start of Farmageddon. That one got almost 700,000 views. And then, again, I didn't follow up. The channel sat there for five years.

During the pandemic in 2020, I remembered that old YouTube video I made. I started posting again, mostly as a hobby, and committed to it fully in February 2021. The channel took off because, I think, people could tell I was actually doing the work. I wasn't guessing at recipes or throwing together a "close enough" version. I was tracking down the real thing.

The Chinese Takeout Fried Rice video hit almost 14 million views. Several others have passed a million. There are 75 videos on the channel, which might seem low for five years of work, but that's by design. I'd rather spend weeks researching a single recipe and make the definitive video on that subject than publish three times a week and hope something sticks.

How I Reverse-Engineer a Recipe

My approach has more in common with investigative journalism than it does with most recipe development.

When I take on a dish, I try to find every piece of information that exists on it. I pull FDA filings. I dig up official restaurant ingredient lists. I order the dish enough times that the staff knows my face, then deconstruct it at home, one component at a time, until I can see exactly what's in it. I look at industrial supplier catalogs, nutritional disclosures, patent filings, anything that might reveal what's actually in the food and how it's actually prepared.

Once I've collected everything, I start testing. Not three times, not five times. I will test a recipe 10, 20, 30, sometimes 50 times until it tastes exactly like the restaurant version. Every industrial ingredient gets translated into something a home cook can buy. Every restaurant technique gets adapted for home equipment.

The approach was influenced by Robert Caro, whose book Working articulates a philosophy I try to follow: gather absolutely every piece of information on a subject, work every angle, and be more thorough than anyone thinks is necessary.

The reason I focus specifically on restaurant recipes is that those are the dishes people already know and love. The biggest complaint about copycat recipes online is that they don't taste anything like the restaurant. I aim to fix that. And in the process of learning exactly how Benihana makes their fried rice or how P.F. Chang's makes their Mongolian beef, you also learn fundamental cooking techniques that apply to everything else you'll ever make.

The Website

This site is the written companion to the YouTube channel. Every recipe includes the full ingredient list with exact measurements, equipment recommendations, step-by-step instructions, substitution notes, and tips from my testing process. If you've ever watched one of my videos and wished you could pull the recipe up on your phone while you cook, that's what this site is for.

Have a question, a recipe suggestion, or a business inquiry? Get in touch here.