This chef shows people how to feed a family for just $5

Professional chef Maurice Levene is walking through a grocery store in Pennsylvania, narrating the prices and possibilities of canned soup, microwavable rice and bags of pasta. He's making a video showing his 2 million TikTok followers how to make a family meal for just $5.

"We're going to use culinary techniques to extract flavor," said Levene, known on TikTok as Chef Moe.

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He decides on a protein-rich dish of pasta and lentils, buying garlic and onion (less than $1 each), then pasta, canned tomato sauce and lentils ($1 each), for a total of $4.58.

Then he's back in his kitchen, mixing ingredients while he talks through the steps to turn simple, inexpensive ingredients into meals to feed a family.

His videos showing these budget meals are going viral as inflation across the country recently hit its highest point in three years. Prices for coffee, lettuce, tomatoes and other grocery staples have soared, pinching customers and stressing family budgets.

"Some people don't have an oven, and that's okay," he said in a video about preparing potatoes to make gnocchi. "We're going to boil them."

The recipe calls for potatoes, egg, flour and oil, with options for ingredients such as garlic and parmesan. He cooks the potato dumplings, using a plastic fork to make decorative ridges in the dough. The result is a professional-looking dinner.

"It's cheap, you can make it for less than $5, and it's absolutely delicious," he says to the camera.

Levene said he never meant to make budget content, or become TikTok-famous. The 44-year-old chef spent the majority of his decades-long career in New York kitchens, starting as a dishwasher at the Brooklyn restaurant Chef Andrea, then working as a line cook in various kitchens before opening a restaurant, Castellanos Family Restaurant in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, in 2021. After about a year, he closed the restaurant, which he named after his grandmother, to do catering and focus on his career as a social media chef.

Now Levene spends his days working as an influencer, something he said he "never saw coming."

He wasn't even the person who uploaded his first video on TikTok.

"It was my 19-year-old son," he said.

"He asked me if I could make a detailed video showing how to make chicken parmesan," he said of the video from October. "I propped up the phone and showed him step by step, explaining why we're doing this. He went and he put it on TikTok."

Levene couldn't believe the huge response.

He realized people wanted more, so he tried a few other recipes. At first he would break down how to make restaurant classics like chicken francese and cordon bleu, then one day, he received a private message.

One of his followers said she wanted to make one of his meals but had to wait until the end of the month to afford the ingredients. Her husband, who was the family breadwinner, had just died, she told him.

"She was telling me how her life had changed so fast in the blink of an eye because she never worked, she never had to," Levene said. "Life had become extremely hard for her."

Her story hit home. He thought of his childhood in Brooklyn, where he grew up the son of a single mother and the youngest of five children. Back then, he said, he remembered "not being a stranger to hungry nights."

"If this woman is having these problems," he recalled thinking, "how many other people are having these problems?"

He made his next video for her. It was a simple meal of onions, zucchini, tomato sauce and pasta, all store brand to keep costs low. He encouraged followers to use salt and pepper packets left over from takeout meals, and to use water to stir-fry vegetables, instead of oil. The result was a colorful, healthy pasta dish that could feed a family of four for $4.19.

That video received 3.3 million views.

Viewers say they appreciate not just the recipes, but the instruction behind them. Levene intentionally keeps the focus on technique so viewers can apply them to their own recipes later on.

"The biggest techniques in cooking are emulsification and deglazing, which is important for building a flavor profile," he said, explaining that emulsification is blending two ingredients, such as oil and vinegar, and deglazing is adding liquid to a pan to make use of the stuck caramelized food bits for flavor.

"It's about lifting flavor from the pan and building depth across different dishes to meld flavors," he said.

In addition to vegetables and starch, he sometimes uses Spam or sausage in his recipes, or whatever protein he finds on sale at his local grocery or discount store. The stores that make appearances in his videos include Dollar General, Walmart, Aldi and Weis Markets.

His followers say they appreciate how he elevates ingredients.

Kyndal Jeter, a Texas-based mom of three, is a self-taught cook who turned to TikTok to learn how to create meals that could feed her family on a budget. She soon found Levene's page and quickly saw the difference in his content.

"Chef Moe isn't just another person sharing recipes online. He's educating people how to properly cook, and making it accessible to people who may not be able to otherwise learn the skills," she said.

As his platform continues to grow, Levene said his hope is to empower his audience to provide for themselves and their families, no matter how small their budgets.

"I know this won't stop world hunger," he said. "But we can help people, and it's kind to be kind."

Video: Professional chef Maurice Levene teaches his 2 million TikTok followers how to make a family meal for just $5.(c) 2026 , The Washington Post