With more than three million followers across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, Tyler Butt has inspired countless people with his no-frills, family orientated, nutrition-led home cooking videos.
We met him at his home in a chocolate box village near Cambridge, where we talked about food, family and his love of AGA cookers…
The minute you meet Tyler Butt, it’s obvious he has found his rhythm. At 28, surrounded by "his girls" – fiancé Kate, four-year-old Stevie, 11-month-old Olive, and two seven-year-old French bulldogs named Missy and Dusty – he's built a life that feels both wonderfully domestic and remarkably modern.
It's hard to imagine this warm, confident content creator once sat in a grey office overlooking an industrial estate in Rugby, running a printing and workwear business, but that’s what he was doing at just 18 years old.
It was, he says, a moment of existential dread, staring out at over the roofs of the rain-soaked industrial estate and thinking "is this it?" It became the catalyst for everything that followed.
Tyler applied to university that day, a decision that set off a chain of events he couldn't have predicted. That summer, a festival scout spotted him, leading to modelling work. It seemed like fate intervening. University in London, a modelling contract, it all appeared to have fallen into place perfectly.
Except it hadn’t.
"I didn't get on with uni and I didn't massively get on with modelling, so I felt kind of lost," Tyler says. The modelling world, he discovered, wasn't quite the glamorous career it appeared from the outside. "When people asked me what I did, I'd say 'I get changed all day.' People thought I'd made it, but I was living on my overdraft."
He was signed by a management agency, but the reality remained unchanged. Tyler says: "Unless you're really taking it seriously and you've got a really good headspace about it, which I didn't at the time, you're not going to make much more than you would at a part-time job."
It was during this uncertain period that Tyler met Kate through mutual friends. Their connection was immediate and they spent every day together for six weeks before he moved in with her. What followed were years of moving across the south of England and to the Cotswolds, until Kate's mid-lockdown pregnancy brought them to their current home.
Tyler no longer models, but he's found something far more fulfilling. His journey into cooking began not with formal training or real culinary ambition, but with love and curiosity.
"It was like I wanted to better myself through food," he explains. "I wanted to learn more about nutrition. Kate doesn't cook, so I just kept cooking more. It was how I wooed her!" he laughs.
"When I was growing up, it was always just something out of the freezer, into the oven, on to a plate. I didn't know then that you could make a lasagna. I always thought it just came out of a packet."
The discovery that these dishes could be made from scratch was revelatory. When Tyler left home he vowed to cook everything from scratch, a commitment that would eventually transform not just his own relationship with food, but help hundreds of thousands of others with theirs.
Tyler's content creation didn't begin with grand ambitions or strategic planning. It emerged from a desire to solve what he calls "the age-old problem of what to cook for dinner". His videos evolved organically around this universal struggle.
"Everyone's had a long day, everyone has family around, and there's always the question of what to cook. It's a big problem we all face."
This spirit of wanting more – the same drive that got him out of that grey office – is what Tyler identifies as essential to his personality. It's what pushed him to learn that lasagna doesn't come from a packet, and it’s what drives him to help others discover the same joy in cooking.
Tyler began creating content during lockdown, and his following grew quickly and substantially. The response from people recognising him in the street is overwhelmingly positive. "They say 'thank you' a lot because what I do is really simple, I'm just helping them put good food on the table."
Tyler has created content with Channel 4 Served in association with Laithwaites and has other exciting projects in the pipeline, but he’s happiest when at home.
When Tyler and Kate moved into their current house, they inherited an old four-oven AGA. Initially hesitant, he quickly discovered it was "really intuitive and really simple". So, when he decided to create a studio in the barn in his garden in which to create content, he knew he wanted another AGA.
At the AGA showroom in Oundle, he spotted the AGA 60 immediately. "It was the first thing I saw when I walked into the store, and it was just so cute,” he says.
The AGA 60 has two cast-iron radiant-heat ovens, one for roasting and baking and the other for simmering. It also has a cast-iron hotplate that can be set to either boiling or simmering.
Space constraints in the studio made the compact cooker perfect, though Tyler admits to initial nerves. 
"I was worried about having only one hotplate on a 60cm cooker, but it actually works really well. The heat is variable and you can change it really easily. It goes down or up to temperature really quickly."
The AGA perfectly complements Tyler's cooking philosophy.
"I always cook in a frying pan, a tray, or a big pot, and the AGA lends itself perfectly to this kind of cooking."
He describes the seamless process of making a casserole, browning on the hotplate, then moving to the roasting oven, then the simmering oven for hours.
The studio is like a character in its own right in Tyler’s content. It’s a beautiful space with high ceilings, beams and doors that open on to the garden. The once unused building has been transformed by Burton Living, who designed and built the kitchen. It’s a beautiful and usable space. There’s an island unit with open shelves and charging points, oak drawers and bronze hardware. After much deliberation the cabinetry was painted in Light Bronze Green by Little Greene, which goes perfectly with the Linen AGA 60.
Tyler describes the cooker as looking "cute but robust, kind of like my little dogs – they're cute, but they're solid," and it has become the heart of his content creation.
From that grey industrial estate to a barn studio in a beautiful village, Tyler's journey illustrates how the desire for "something more" can lead to unexpected places. In his case, it led to helping thousands of people answer that nightly question: What's for dinner?
