Ainsley Harriott is a British celebrity chef and television presenter best known for hosting the BBC show Ready Steady Cook1. Online, he became a staple of early 2010s meme culture, mostly through a photograph of him grinning wide while sprinkling spice onto a salad, an image 4chan posters compared to a troll face and worse3. The still was turned into an exploitable so users could drop Harriott's face into game screenshots, film stills, and album covers.

A second stream of Ainsley content came from clips of his 2000s BBC series Ainsley's Barbecue Bible, where his hands-on style and double-entendre patter gave editors an endless supply of material3. That same enthusiasm caused real problems for the broadcast version of the show. Viewers wrote in to the BBC accusing him of dipping his fingers into contestants' dishes and setting a bad hygiene example, with council food-safety officers publicly criticising his on-camera habits1.

Two Ainsley templates get the most reuse. The first is the salad exploitable, where his grinning face is cut out and pasted over other characters, typically to signal a game, film, or moment is now "his." The second is the oil-in-the-pan shot, often captioned with the line "Looks like it's time to oil up"6. Both usually lean on Harriott's suggestive kitchen delivery for the joke, so edits that add a Barbecue Bible audio clip or a cropped grin fit the format cleanly.