From Composer to Chef: Adam Ragusea's Journey to YouTube Fame
Fun fact that did not make the article: His favorite meal to cook when no one is around is a steak in a pan with butter, garlic, and a bunch of herbs.
Adam Ragusea, a Penn State alumnus who majored in music theory and composition, has transitioned his career from a journalist to a successful YouTube cooking channel.
Ragusea, a State College native who lived outside Port Matilda, attended State College Area High School where he was able to expand on his interest in writing music.
Ragusea’s father got him music lessons with Paul Barsom, who at the time was the head of the composition department at the Penn State School of Music. He studied with Barsom for a couple of years, who he described as a “mentor.”.
“He was probably the most important person in my personal development as a human being,” Ragusea said.
During the interview, Ragusea found his old music scores that were submitted for his college application and a score that was written with a nib fountain pen bought from a Penn State bookstore got him accepted to the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.
At the time, Ragusea’s composer “God” Christopher Rouse taught there, which made Eastman his “dream school.” However, Ragusea dealt with mental health issues that he calls a “complete freshman emotional collapse.”
With two weeks left in the semester, he packed up and transferred back to Penn State where the rest of his college experience was “terrific.”
“I took it for granted because I grew up around it,” Ragusea says.
One of Ragusea’s good friends from his years at Penn State, Peter Buck, remembers Ragusea as a “talented composer.” Being within the same major, they spent a lot of time in and out of the studio during college.
“He has a natural kind of discipline, that’s also really fun,” Buck said.
Both had grown up in Central Pennsylvania raised by “inordinately educated” families, which only added to their friendship and to Ragusea’s innate curiosity
.
“One of the things that I loved about spending time with him is that both of us have this tendency to put things together that other people did not,” Buck said.
Ragusea got back up to the elite level for graduate school at Indiana University in 2004, which brought back similar feelings that he felt at Eastman.
“I always felt like a bit of an imposter in the conservatory type world,” Ragusea said.
Due to his natural curiosity, it made it hard for him to focus solely on music and he began to lose interest in it.
Ragusea was a child who grew up listening to NPR in the backseat of his parent’s car. When there was a spot available to work at the public radio station at Indiana University, something “wonderful” happened for him.
“I had found my home,” Ragusea said.
Ragusea began to work in the news department and continued to have a career in journalism, which took him all around the country to do national work.
“He is an incredibly curious person, probably the most curious person that I know, which is why he’s successful at this job,” Lauren Morrill-Ragusea, Ragusea’s wife of 17 years, said.
His job in radio led to his next career step as a journalist in residence and assistant professor of practice at Mercer University, where he taught “happily” for five years.
Ragusea said an issue he ran into while teaching was he didn’t know how to teach visually since he's an auditory learner. To combat this, Ragusea took some cameras from school to practice and gave himself projects.
His long-term interest in cooking shows inspired him to make cooking videos for fun. Three months after posting one of the videos on YouTube, it went viral and he decided to post again.
That video led to his largest single jump in subscribers to this day. Ragusea currently stands at 2.55 million subscribers.
“From there, I was off to the races,” Ragusea said.
Morrill-Ragusea recalls that she had begun to receive texts about Adam’s videos from people who she had not talked to in a while.
When he blew up, he had already signed a contract to teach another year at Mercer. His YouTube career was moving quickly, so he wanted to quit his teaching job and began to build this new career.
Him and his wife sat down and created a plan to see if this was an achievable goal. They had done the same thing when Morrill-Ragusea commenced her journey as an author.
“He was nothing but supportive, so of course I was going to do the same for him,” Morrill-Ragusea said.
Ragusea quit his job and started building this new career path that “saved” them financially.
“YouTube has completely changed our lives mostly for the better, and we’re really grateful,” Morrill-Ragusea said.
Ragusea said his audience is mostly young men so he tries to make his channel a space to model “positive masculinity”.
Despite this message, Ragusea’s said he’s still received harassment, extortion attempts and negative comments.
In the beginning of his career, Ragusea said he’d have panic attacks from the comments but nowadays he views the negative comments as something that has helped him get better.
He rarely ever looks at comments except as when he makes cultural dishes to ensure the recipe is correct and videos that could be considered a public health risk. For example, a recent video Ragusea filmed was him foraging for a mushroom called “chicken of the woods.”
Each week, Ragusea said he posts one cooking video and one podcast video, which range from an exegesis of a food topic to media topics and historical tangents related to the topic at hand.
Ragusea takes a lot of inspiration from different works for how he makes his videos. He described the podcast's narrative form as “vaudevillian humor” or a “shaggy dog story.”
Even his method of filming his cooking videos is inspired by Hollywood director of the film “Lawrence of Arabia,” David Lean, who’s known for only shooting once with no second takes.
Ragusea now lives with his family in Tennessee where his wife grew up, which he said has beautiful scenery and mountains similar to the ones where he grew up in Happy Valley.
“Time marches on … there's things about the future that suck. There's things about the future that are great,” Ragusea said. “I focus on the great.”