The best food influencers from Germany

Stefano Zarrella grew up in his parents' pizzeria and never trained as a chef. His repertoire runs from pasta alla Norma through Turkish köfte to sushi tacos regardless. Since 2025 he has been examining industrial cooking on SAT.1's “Fertiggerichte-Check”. For his own frozen pizza he went to Naples to see mozzarella producers and tomato growers.

What Steffen Henssler puts on Instagram are short recipes under the title “Hensslers Schnelle Nummer”. The difference is what runs alongside: in Hamburg he keeps the sushi restaurant ONO, the cooking school Hensslers Küche and the GO in the Schanze quarter going. He has fronted “Grill den Henssler” on VOX since 2013, having started out as a sushi cook long before that was unremarkable in Germany.

Before Achim Oecal wrote his two cookbooks, he assembled pumps on a production line. These days the full method sits under his videos, usually for dishes that are done in a quarter of an hour. What carried him furthest, though, was a sushi lasagne, an outlier from that very principle.

Every recipe Michaela Vais publishes has to meet two conditions: vegan and gluten-free. She has been vegetarian since the age of six, fully plant-based since 2011, she has run her blog since 2016, and her German cookbook sold out on the day it appeared.

Sturmwaffel rarely cooks, he tastes. Under “Ich TESTE” he works through supermarket launches, drinks and kitchen gadgets off TikTok Shop almost daily, and under “Ich BESTELLE” the delivery places of Mönchengladbach. He started out in 2013 with Minecraft videos. Today he runs the cooking brand FIVI and competes on the Joyn show “Dinner Duell”.

The account is named after a cut of beef fillet, and the cooking then turns out to be plain home fare, braised beef with onions and Kaiserschmarrn, fifteen consecutive episodes about nothing but potatoes. Manuel Struck is a trained chef who worked his way through hotel kitchens before he quit. His debut “Von Null auf Lecker” took second place in the readers' award of the German Cookbook Prize in 2025.

Mara Hörner was a specialist employment lawyer before she moved fully into baking in 2016; the push had come two years earlier, when she won the cooking show “Das perfekte Dinner”. Cinnamon buns, cheesecake gateau, Christmas biscuits, every recipe measured to the gram. A second subject runs alongside, her garden with its fig trees and hardy yuccas.

“No time today, but even so …” — that is how almost every one of Simon Traver's videos begins, and what follows is a vegetarian dish, often out of a single pan, with nutritional values per portion underneath. He taught himself to cook; his actual training was in retail. His 2026 cookbook arranges its sixty recipes not by course but by how long they take.

Rosa Roderigo is a master pastry chef who nonetheless cooks mostly savoury, vegan comfort food with a strong Asian lean, bún chay, bánh mì, tofu in tomato sauce from a Vietnamese recipe. Her cookbook “Rosa kocht vegan” appeared in 2022, the same year her own cooking show started on funk. In her series “aufgetischt” she serves friends a multi-course dinner.

Anyone looking for a recipe from Merle Diercks finds it in the same shape every time, a title, an ingredient list and a method, often with calories and protein underneath. Her series “10x 10 Minuten Fingerfood” runs across several editions. The profile names a whole family, yet every one of these texts was written by her alone, signed off with “Eure Merle”.

Anna Elisie has been vegan since 2009. Her recipes are built around protein and nearly all of them are done in under half an hour, from the ten-minute pasta pan to the dips. Pulses turn up so often that she now calls her readers the bean community.

“Eat the Rainbow … and never skip Dessert” is the title of Gina Marie Grimm's cookbook, and it describes her cooking fairly precisely: vegan, colourful, dessert included. In the series “Orient vegan” she cooks together with Berivan Dilan Kaymaz, and for Easter she produced a seven-part run of recipes with ALDI SÜD. Since 2026 she has also been organising trips for FLINTA* groups.

Ragù napoletano, scarpariello, pesto di limoni: Claudia Bastone cooks her Neapolitan family's kitchen and writes the quantities out in full in German underneath. She became known through a lemon pasta video that went round on TikTok and earned her the name “lemon pasta lady” there. Her first cookbook appeared in March 2026 and was launched in Naples.

Ari makes pasta by hand, without a machine — the dough goes under the rolling pin and is cut on the chitarra. Alongside carbonara and cacio e pepe stand shapes you rarely get to see: culurgiones, balanzoni, agnolotti del plin, gnudi. For the provenance he travels, to a Parmigiano producer near Parma, to the stove of a Bologna trattoria, into a Milanese kitchen.

The same mascarpone cream, seasoned differently every time, once as Raffaello, then as Lotus, mango or Bueno. Nermin Kapisiz works in series, and a run of cheesecakes that need no oven at all goes alongside. What has carried furthest so far is a strawberry tiramisu. Her kebab she rebuilds in the oven, with no rotating spit involved.