[Yeast and West, where the twain shall never meet]

The pandemic cook is a new species that has emerged from the pantry so to speak, either due to the sheer necessity of getting nutrition for survival or due to the forced house arrest that brought an opportunity to develop the Chef in you.  As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention and some humans have dared to go where they have never been before — the Kitchen — with the awe and trepidation of early voyagers who set off to discover the new world.  For many it turned out to be a wonderland to play with tools and new gear never before seen. For others it was a botanical nightmare, presented in the form of herbs and spices, which their middle school education didn’t quite prepare them for.   

Chop Chop

Once you have made the brave leap into the hallowed grounds of the kitchen, there is the problem of where to start.  You are faced with a  bewildering array of knives, pots & pans, and the first order of business is to ensure you have examined each of these of implements and specially with knives, be aware of which is side is the sharp edge so that slicing, chopping, dicing and other assorted cutting techniques don’t threaten any of your limbs. Once you are confident in your manual dexterity to deal with the tools of the trade, and have learnt that braising is not a hairstyle, you are good to move forward. The next step is distinguishing & recognizing the contents of the numerous bottles and jars, that hold the very substances which will determine if anything you cook is edible or not.    While the powders, granules and seeds may look familiar to the sight, their names and actual usage in the cooking process is a mystery to many.  

The Shopping List

Christopher Columbus probably may well have had the toughest grocery shopping assignment in history.  His task was to buy or obtain by any means necessary, all the exotic spices the east had to offer — among other incidentals such as gold & precious metals. His journey represented the dry grocery wish list of every castle and manor of Europe.  So you can imagine the bland & bitter taste of disappointment that might have permeated European kitchens; having waited for months, they find out that Columbus had lost his way and had nothing to show for his troubles — except for the supposed discovery of a new land — which by the way didn’t mean anything for the kitchen staff of  ‘Downton Abbey’ of the day.   

Thankfully though, the average cook or the aspiring chef in today’s world doesn’t have go through nearly the kind of troubles Columbus went through to get the condiments one needs to cook up the delicacies of the world – be it French, Italian, Indian or Chinese, one has the ability to delicately dial up spice levels anywhere from 1 star to 5 stars. 

From Grandma to YouTube

There are also other critical considerations that you have to bring to a boil before you actually are able put anything edible on the table.  Questions that come to the fore are whether stainless steel, carbon steel or cast iron is the best vehicle to bring your culinary dreams to reality and this may need to indulge the metallurgist in you, or alternatively decide if the non-stick convenience of chemically coated pans are the right answer.

Either way, once you decide to apply heat to your favorite sauce pan, there is the all important question as to what happens next.  While the days of calling your Grandma for her favorite recipes are long gone, largely because she doesn’t have any recipes recorded with the precision that can be of help to today’s cooks, who are compelled to measure ingredients using modern Digital Kitchen scales whose accuracy is quite exacting. 

Enter YouTube — and just like that, you can access any number of ways to cook your chicken. One problem though, there is a tremendous amount of concentration needed to keep the hand eye coordination going, so that you are not incinerating the chicken and triggering the smoke alarm, while at the same time not burning your fingers, as you try to pause the YouTube video to see what step you just missed.  This is a delicate dance indeed!  Once you go through these tribulations a few times, hopefully you are rewarded with that succulent chicken dish the video promised and your iPhone has survived a few crashes to the floor as well.

As we hopefully near the end of the pandemic soon, we can expect that at least some of the newest entrants into the kitchen will keep going back and keep cooking with natural foods as long as the planet is able to produce them for human consumption — and before all things artificial rule our lives in the age of AI.

Bon Appetit !