National Post (National Edition)
A GUIDE to LIVING INSIDE
How not to go stark-raving mad during the coronavirus lockdown
Chefs serve at-home classes to sharpen your quarantine culinary game
Quarantine cooking has taken on a life of its own. From hobby to life skill, our collective circumstances forced a sweeping change. In pre-pandemic times, we ate more than half of all meals out of the home. Nearly overnight, we started cooking for ourselves. Watching others cook has long been a source of entertainment, but now it has taken on a much more practical bent.
With retail food shortages and lengthy waits for grocery delivery or curbside pickup a reality in many parts of the country, cooking skills aren’t merely nice to have — they’re a necessity. For many of us, it’s never been more important to be able to create satisfying, nourishing meals with ingredients on hand. Food professionals are poised to improve people’s lives in very real ways, and thanks to social media we have a window into their kitchens.
Celebrity chefs may be used to having the spotlight, but the real joy in lockdown cooking videos is seeing others steal the show. It seems more people than ever are sharing impromptu cooking classes on Instagram, and judging by the number of views, we’re more than willing to partake. From ways to minimize food waste (@foodwastefeast), pantry meals (@chetnamakan) and cooking with kids (@emikodavies; @theocooks) to pastry workshops (@ mollyjwilk), fermented foods (@abrowntable, @kimchikoreahouse, @kirstenkshockey) and baking sourdough bread (@artisanbryan, @fullproofbaking, @matthewjamesduffy), there’s plenty to choose from.
It’s only natural that celebrity chefs and television personalities swiftly started creating customized lockdown content to share with their fans. Antoni Porowski launched his IGTV series, Quar Eye: Cooking Lessons in Quarantine, on March 16 — the first instalment alone has 1.2 million views. Padma Lakshmi demonstrates how to make “leftover soup” with her daughter, as well as kootu (lentils with vegetables and coconut milk), chicken stock and lasagna with white ragu. The already-legendary Ina Garten cemented her status with a pitcher-sized, single-serve Cosmopolitan tutorial (“It’s always cocktail hour in a crisis!”). Instagram has become a quarantine cooking hub, and even non-food celebrities such as actor Florence Pugh and comedian Iliza Shlesinger have joined the fray.
If you have the means and the desire for higher production values, MasterClass has an impressive lineup of food-world stars — including Gordon Ramsay, Alice Waters, Thomas Keller and Gabriela Cámara. And if you’re looking for a more formal learning environment, culinary schools such as Rouxbe and Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts have online offerings. But it’s in their informality that Instagram cooking videos shine. Food professionals, many of whom are unaccustomed to being on-camera, welcome us into their kitchens and share their expertise.
A cook-what-you-can ethos extends from the recipes to the videos themselves. These chefs, cookbook authors and food writers are sharing what they can with what they have — both ingredient- and equipment-wise. With little else than a phone and tripod setup, they’re pushing outside their comfort zones, and having fun in the process. There’s a resulting sense of intimacy that is just as comforting as the quarantine cooking tips. We’re at home, they’re at home. The DIY spirit of quarantine cooking videos is as characteristic as their subject matter.
Toronto-based chef and culinary instructor Ema Costantini (@hotpotsandchocolate) posted her first IGTV cooking video on March 18, as a way of keeping the momentum going with her students at George Brown College. The semester had ended abruptly, and unsure of how long the disruption would last, she moved online
‘(THE LOCKDOWN) MIGHT ACTUALLY CHANGE THE WAY PEOPLE COOK FOREVER, AND FOR THE BETTER’
— SABRINA GHAYOUR, CHEF AND AUTHOR
to fulfil her promise of showing them how to shape pasta roses. She has since shared tutorials for making mozzarella and gnocchi di ricotta, shaping cappellacci and agnolotti del plin and repurposing stale bread.
Before mid-March, she had only made one appearance on video — making pasta strewn with fresh flower petals for a friend’s YouTube channel. “I am not comfortable in front of the camera,” says Costantini. “It’s so much easier with an audience than actually having to talk to the wall. I don’t know where to look in the camera so you barely see my face in the videos. I’m just trying to get a bit more comfortable because everybody’s going to have to try and move onto an online platform.”
London-based Palestinian chef
Sami Tamimi (@ sami_tamimi), co-author of this summer’s forthcoming Falastin (with Tara Wigley; Appetite by Random House), also arrived at the idea of sharing cooking videos spontaneously. The pandemic coincided with the release of the U.K. edition of his third book (he co-wrote Jerusalem and Ottolenghi with Yotam Ottolenghi), and he turned to IGTV as a way of responding to a difficult situation.
“I had all these anxieties because the book is out and nobody’s going to be able to buy it. I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to sit and wait. I’m going to go out there,’” says Tamimi. “It’s very unlike me, because I’m a bit shy. And I just decided to do it from the comfort of my home, my kitchen.”
Having been a chef for several decades, the cooking aspect of the videos is second nature. Being on camera, though, took some getting used to. He posted his first video on March 22 — his father Hassan’s favourite eggs — and followed it up the next day with hummus, which he landed on since he had a bag of soaked chickpeas in the freezer. Nearly 18,000 people have watched a video he thought no one would notice. Now, he spends much of the day on social media, answering questions, encouraging his followers, and showing people how to turn staple grains and legumes into the likes of fried kubbeh, ful medames and mejadra.
“I was always the person behind the scenes and people didn’t really know much about me apart from this persona that you reflect on your Instagram profile,” says Tamimi, adding that his followers find the simplicity of his videos reassuring.
“People engage with it and feel, ‘Wow, he’s doing that for us and we can actually do it. It’s so easy. He makes it step-by-step and it’s not something complicated, and all the ingredients are in our cupboards already.’ I’m in the same situation as them. I’m stuck at home and I’m helping them, but I’m also helping myself.”
For chef and author Sabrina Ghayour (@sabrinaghayour), sharing videos with advice and minimal-ingredient recipes is a way to support her audience. In midMarch, she started receiving messages from followers across her social media platforms wanting to know how they could stretch their ingredients further and inject some life into pantry meals.
Ghayour has since rolled out a series of tutorials for three- or four-ingredient dishes on IGTV and her website. Her recipes for lentils, flatbreads, bulgar wheat pilaf, bean patties, potato pops, split pea falafels and onion bhajis are both budgetand family-friendly. “Now more than ever, it’s time to really pare it down,” says Ghayour. “I started thinking about lentils, and just the bare essentials. Real staples. And not everybody has all of those things but I thought if I’ve covered a few different store cupboard ingredients, at least when somebody comes to me and asks, ‘Do you know what to do with split peas?’ I’ve got that covered.”
Pantry cooking has proved to be a genre unto itself. Those of us who previously leaned heavily on the ability to pop out for fresh herbs or produce at the last minute are having to be more creative. Techniques such as fermentation and other means of preservation — time-honoured for good reason — have captured a whole new audience. Slow and tactile processes such as baking bread and making pasta from scratch are also appealing to many. Once thought of as forgotten, or at the very least neglected, the pandemic has snapped these skills into focus.
This realization, coupled with her own interests and heritage, is guiding Costantini’s choices for online cooking classes. “I feel like a nonna at heart. I do the things that my grandmother does. I make pasta. I cook from scratch. I try to use absolutely everything from the food,” she says, adding that she has memories of growing up southeast of Rome, and the wonderful things her grandmother would make with very little. “She was super, super thrifty. And yet she always had snacks for everybody — food that was absolutely delicious made from stretching things. So for me, it’s going back to my origins.”
For Tamimi, emphasizing the versatility, nutritiousness, deliciousness and affordability of staple pulses and grains is also a reflection of how he grew up in Jerusalem. Whether canned or dried, he says, “they are very inexpensive ingredients and you can do wonderful things with them.” In choosing to demonstrate his fried kubbeh on IGTV, he wanted to strip away any intimidation someone might feel when coming across the recipe in a cookbook. In an overhead shot, viewers can watch him shaping the bulgur, and come to the realization themselves that it’s completely within reach.
“I chose this recipe because first of all, it doesn’t cost a lot. It’s really, really cheap to make. But also, it’s one of these things that you put in a cookbook and people don’t go for it because they think it’s too complicated. But then when you see me doing it, it’s actually really easy to make,” he says. “It’s just basically putting all the things together. You can do all the prep the day before and then finish it on the day. So it gives people a boost of confidence.”
Having a direct line to food professionals — watching them respond to the current situation with creativity and resilience — is both reassuring and inspiring. Taking lessons from online cooking videos and applying them in ways that make sense for our individual situations is one way to enhance our lives. Learning, experimenting and being open to new ideas is the best way to upgrade our culinary skills, not just during lockdown but beyond. “It might actually change the way people cook forever, and for the better,” says Ghayour. “As much as it’s a terrible period of time, hopefully we’ll come away from it with a tiny bit of wisdom.”