The story
Welcome to Chefs Binge
Chefs Binge is my kitchen corner for food lovers - recipes developed with professional discipline, written clearly, and photographed to show you exactly what to aim for.
Executive Head Chef · Food Photographer · Founder
About the Chef
Chef Łukasz Babral
I’m a UK-based chef and food photographer behind Chefs Binge - recipes built on professional technique, tested for real kitchens, and photographed with intention.
What I do
- Professional recipes + testing
- Food photography + content
- Menu development + consulting
Cooking style
Thai, Indian, Italian, Mexican, Polish & British - grounded in French and Japanese technique, with a practical, “works every time” mindset.
Based in
United Kingdom · originally from Kraków, Poland - inspired by seasonal produce and simple, honest flavours.
In the kitchen
Eighteen years in professional kitchens
I have cooked professionally for more than eighteen years, working up through every section of the brigade: five years as a commis chef, two as a chef de partie, six as a sous chef, two as a head chef, and the last three and a half as an executive chef in contract catering.
Day to day that means catering for around 1,000 people, alongside the hospitality side: sit-down meals for up to 180 covers, and weddings. Cooking at that volume is what teaches you which recipes hold up when the pressure is on, and which ones only work in a photograph.
Career
The roles
5
Commis Chef
Five years learning the brigade from the bottom up.
2
Chef de Partie
Two years running a section through service.
6
Sous Chef
Six years second in command, leading service.
2
Head Chef
Two years responsible for the menu, the team and the costs.
3.5
Executive Chef
Contract catering. The role I hold now.
Training
Qualifications
02
NVQ in Professional Cookery
Level 2 · foundational professional kitchen craft.
03
Chef de Partie
Level 3 · BaxterStorey Chef Academy.
04
Kitchen Management
Level 4 · operations + leadership.
Outside the kitchen
What I grow
I keep an allotment, and a lot of what ends up on this site starts there. Cucumbers by the crate in high summer, far more than I can eat fresh, which is why there are so many pickling recipes here. Tomatoes for sauce, potatoes, strawberries and rhubarb, and beetroot that tastes nothing like the supermarket kind.
I do most of my warm-weather cooking out there too, on a charcoal grill with an offset smoker. Growing the vegetables changes how you cook them. You learn what a cucumber is supposed to taste like in July, and you stop reaching for things that are out of season.
How I work
How I develop and test recipes
Every recipe here is cooked in my own kitchen before it is published, and cooked again when something needs checking. I write in metric with US conversions, because a recipe that only works in one measuring system is only half written.
Where a dish is traditional I check it against Polish sources and against the way it is actually cooked at home, and I say plainly when a step is my own preference rather than the classic method. When readers' questions show something is unclear, I go back and fix the recipe rather than leave it.
The tools
Why I build recipe tools
A recipe is one fixed set of quantities for one fixed set of choices. Real cooking is not like that. You have pork and not beef, a slow cooker and not an oven, six people coming and not four.
So I build the tools I wanted and could not find. Five of them are free on this site: calculators for fermenting brine, sourdough feeds and pizza dough, and two recipe builders, for bigos and Japanese curry, that ask what you have and generate a scaled recipe from there.
The builders are the part I am proudest of. They do more than the arithmetic. Every choice explains what it changes and why: what more sauerkraut does to the pot, why a slow cooker suits a stew that catches, what to use instead when you cannot get an ingredient. The quantities are not a generic formula either: both builders are anchored to recipes I have cooked and published here, and their defaults are tested against those recipe cards every time I change anything.
No signup, no email, nothing to install. I have not seen another recipe site doing this, and I would like more of them to.
“I appreciate all the explanations of what the ingredients are doing. It’s like having a more experienced cook right there with me.”A reader, on the bigos builder
Let’s work together
If you’d like to collaborate on photography, recipe development, content or consulting, tell me what you’re trying to achieve and we’ll take it from there.