Quick review of the new food trends I've gotten into

 I write this not with passion but with a sense of urgency, I'm already backdating these posts by a day because I couldn't get them all out within the month. And now I have two more posts to go, it's already 11.10 of the next day, so there's layered urgency. I've not written anything for today, but also the last month's average is not where it should have been. This is a number-fudging post.

I want to talk about a couple of new youtube channels I follow and how I've been inspired by them.

The two I'll talk about here are both cooking related.

The first one is the channel of the popular restaurateur, cook, food writer and celebrity chef of sorts J Kenji Lopez-Alt, last-name double-barrelled because he took part of his wife's family name. He's a cool guy, takes the scientific and fact-based approach to cooking and I'd heard of him here at there, heard of his book, checked out his articles on the food lab which I think is on seriouseats. He's also in a few podcasts. But I wasn't intimately aware of his passion. In these covid times, he's become more active in his youtube channel and does weekly or biweekly cooking from kitchen. We get to see how he works in his home kitchen, the utensils and the tools he uses and his methods. It's such a revelation, the small things he does. And his PoV is great too, it doesn't look like it's overproduced. Makes me want to learn more about cooking techniques and try interesting new recipes. Unfortunately not a lot of them have been without meat so I'm still waiting for the recipe to fit my culinary requirements.

The other channel I've grown to love is called Chinese Cooking Demystified. It's hosted by a white dude who lives in China with his Chinese family and his wife, they show us the Chinese approach to cooking, utensils and philosophy in general. For example, in western cooking, even cooking on even utensil is important, but in Chinese cooking the wok's heat is supposed to be concentrated at one point, and you move your ingredients around to scorch them. Each has its pro and con but you can see how the existing culinary hegemony doesn't need to me how things need to be by definition. Was introduced to the channel because I follow Kenji, and now Kenji's featured them in his channel too.

I don't know if I'm actually going to follow their recipes but so many foods that I thought beyond my reach are quite approachable and don't even need weird ingredients, unless you consider star anise to be strange. And the desserts, the milk ones, the custards, all of them so yum.

Also got to learn a little bit about modern Chinese fusion cuisine history, how there's so many different items that are sinofied versions of western food and how those twice-transformed foods are now making their way back into the west. So originally western food that China made its own is now coming to the west as authentic part of chinese cuisine and now doubt it'll be modified using modern trends again and then sent back to china again and come again and again and again. That's how cultures work that's how knowledge transmits. Fuck the concept of culinary appropriation.