San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A Million Plates
A guide to virtual cooking & a recipe.
“It’s a way to share something I really love ... to have people at my sort of virtual kitchen in a way that I wish I could do in person.” Pooja Makhijani, New Jersey food writer and baker
Nine months in, the thought of another Zoom meeting is exhausting. But virtual cooking still restores me: It’s that alchemy of creating food together while catching up with friends that I knew I’d miss most when the pandemic started.
I’ve created this guide in the hope that it gives your holiday season — and let’s be honest, 2021 — a fresh dose of joy and connection. Whether you want to learn a favorite family recipe from your septuagenarian mother or grandfather who is safely across the country, or bake cookies with friends of any age in the same city, there are ways to do it that are fun, festive and restorative.
My first date was cornbread and chili with my Brooklyn, N. Y., friend Emily on FaceTime, chopping and simmering over life struggles and cornbread preferences. I felt both recharged and productive, no small task given the pandemic brain fog I’ve been rocking. Later, I taught my friend Dakota to make methi thepla, an Indian fenugreek flatbread, while commiserating about pandemic working mom life, and her mother taught me a quick banchan using greens from her garden.
Want to give it a go? This guide includes the basics of what I’ve learned since March, and ends with my recipe for methi thepla, an easy recipe to virtual cook.
For technology, smartphones and laptops are the easiest to use. A smartphone has a better camera than most laptops, can be placed securely somewhere for handsfree use ( a cheap mini tripod or an articulating arm phonemount stand will make this infinitely easier) and moves easily for closeups. But phones can also overheat and shut down if they’re close to your stove or oven, so be careful with placement. Laptops have a wider screen, so people can see more of what you’re doing if it’s set up at the correct angle. I put mine on something at least a foot tall with a flat top, like a food storage container or a stack of books. Closeups are a little awkward because of their size.
There are many options to video chat: FaceTime for iPhone users, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, Zoom basic ( no time limit for two people, 40minute limit for 3 or more), Zoom Pro ( no limits). I think it helps to virtually cook at least once with just one person to get comfortable with the medium with any of those options. If you are ready to cook virtually with a group of people, a Zoom Pro account ($ 14.99 a month) offers the best video quality, but Google Hangouts is free and works well.
Annelies Zijderveld has been teaching virtual cooking classes for 18 Reasons in San Francisco since April using Zoom, from her home in Oakland. She says it exercises a different part of her brain because she’s constantly thinking about the viewing experience in addition to cooking. She uses her laptop to talk with people and puts her phone’s tripod on top of cookbooks above her cutting board so people can see what she is doing. She also mutes her video when doing noisy tasks like blending, so it’s not jarring to others ( everyone should do this!).
New Jersey food writer and avid baker Pooja Makhijani started hosting bakealongs on Zoom back in March with friends and family across the country.
“It’s a way to share something I really love ... to have people at my sort of virtual kitchen in a way that I wish I could do in person,” she says.
She announces what she’s baking on social media early in the week, and friends reach out for the recipe and Zoom link. Her bakealongs have ranged from six to 35 people. The latter was too big for her to feel connected or catch up with people, so she now limits the number of attendees.
Since people join from different time zones, Makhijani bakes on Saturday afternoons Eastern Standard Time. She sends a timed schedule of what they’ll be doing with breaks ( for rising and baking) so people can log in and out as needed. Another option for scheduling a group cook is to take a poll of dates and times using an app like Doodle.
Virtual cooking and baking offer tactile experiences for kids that result in something tangible, says Zijderveld of 18 Reasons, which is important, because to many kids online school often doesn’t. There are also benefits to the adults helping kids virtual cook.
Months ago, while Zijderveld was going through a hard personal time, a friend asked if she would virtual bake with their child, who needed a pickmeup. Zijderveld cherished witnessing the child’s joy and pride in baking and eating at treat they made: “That filled my heart and my joy meter for weeks afterwards.”
What are you going to cook or bake? It could be as simple as two friends doing a week’s worth of meal prep. I tend to cook comfort foods that can also feed my family, like a big pot of Bolognese or baked doughnuts. It helps to consider the age and abilities of the people joining you and any time constraints before choosing a recipe.
The most important tip I can give is to be flexible. It’s not about creating an Instagramworthy dish, and sometimes people won’t finish cooking by the end or the food won’t turn out as you’d imagined. And that’s OK. Did you laugh? Learn something new about an old friend? Find a nonawkward way to connect with family? Then congrats: You succeeded.