Albert Cancook is the online alias of US-based Belarusian-Russian Electronic Engineer who rose to fame on various social media platforms during the Covid-19 pandemic by sharing short-form cooking videos. Although he started out on TikTok, he also simultaneously shared his videos as Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. Known by the username albert_cancook, he has both a Russian and an English YouTube channel.
Early Life
Albert Cancook attended Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics from 2005 to 2011 and obtained his bachelor’s degree in Systems Engineering from there. After relocating to the US, he started working as an Engineering Technician at ABC Assembly, Inc in Fremont, California in June 2016. He was promoted to PCBA Process Engineer in August 2017 and worked in that capacity until May 2019. He then joined Epoch International Enterprises Inc. in the same position and worked for nearly a year there. He next served as PCBA Process Engineer and Operations Manager for Green Circuits for a few months before joining Sierra Circuits as Senior Manufacturing and Production Engineer in August 2020. In early 2022, he was finally able to focus on social media as a fulltime career.
Career
Albert Cancook, who regularly watched other people’s content on various social media platforms, including TikTok, during the Covid-19 pandemic, started making his own videos and sharing them simultaneously on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube in mid-2020. He had his original YouTube channel since December 2016, and posted Russian-language content on it until he created his second, now more popular, English-language channel in November 2020. Although he spent 10-plus hours to source the recipe, shop the ingredients, cook and then edit the videos to make a short one-minute long clip to post, he didn’t have much viewership in any of the three platforms for the first few months. Then, in May 2021, his 45-second video about making barbacoa tacos got more than 10 million views on TikTok.
Since then, his viewership and follower count steadily increased on all the platforms. Within a few months, his English-language YouTube channel went from 10k subscribers to nearly 500k. Albert, who has working proficiency in English, initially made his videos in Russian and provided voice-over narration on his videos. However, in order to overcome language barriers and make his videos useful to a wider audience, he gradually stopped doing voice-overs, now only occasionally saying a line or two in his videos, and has made the English-language channel his main one. He first used his now-signature double thumbs up in the short, Chicken Big Mac, in February 2022. He is also known for using the signature expression "Mmmm... Bullshit!" for dishes he doesn’t like.
Family Life
Albert Cancook was born as Albert Niazhvinski in Minsk, Belarus, but relocated to the US in 2016. He is married to Olga Niazhvinski, who helps him with behind-the-scenes camera work, choosing music, and regularly does voice-overs for his longer content. He also has a brother, who visits him every weekend with his family to further support him.
