Why Online Cooking Classes Matter

Hello friends, it’s been almost a year since I last posted here (updates on The Sobremesa Cookbook are being posted on a separate blog, available exclusively to our crowdfunding donors).

A year ago, we were making the most of the benefits of our still-new Mediterranean life: in August, the month in which Spaniards desert Spain, we spent a week on a small Greek island and a few days of chill urban vacation in Copenhagen.

This month, it’s been exactly two years since we moved back to Spain, and everything, for everyone, has changed. Just when we were getting settled into our new lives here, as the crucial two-year mark was approaching and we were starting to feel our feet land on the ground, that ground was pulled out from under us. But not just us. I am also unemployed for the first time in my adult life. Working in study abroad during Covid-19 means, well, no work at all.

This is what my tech master (husband) sees!

Just a few weeks into confinement -which in Spain was the strictest one in the world- Israel and I joined forces to start to create online cooking classes. It’s a no-brainer, right? Everyone is going online. But, he said, we shall do this well, or not at all. He summoned his technical savviness and paired it with my passion for teaching, and together we make a good team.

The silver lining of life online is that I got to go back to work at the schools in the Bay Area I used to teach at; they welcomed me with open arms. I am loving being a regular part of those communities again. Together with my cookbook project, teaching online has kept me going these past few months; it’s been my lifeline.

We are now four months into weekly online cooking classes, and I have some things to say for them.

Cooking has always mattered; online cooking is relatively new to most of us. But it matters now, too. Here are a few reasons why:

First of all, the obvious: confinement (or shelter in place) means everyone eats at home. Restaurants were closed, and in Spain our only excusable outing for the first several months of the pandemic, other than medical reasons, was to shop for food. That meant that everyone had to cook at home as well (at least until the restaurant owners organized their ghost kitchens for delivery of prepared foods). The problem is that many of us had forgotten how to cook, or simply neglected that skill for too long. One of the many messed-up aspects of our contemporary food system is that we were convinced that eating out is easier, cheaper, and more convenient than cooking at home. This left many people at a standstill, when from one day to the next they had no choice but to cook all their own meals.

Teaching online cooking classes became a way to help people navigate a situation -cooking every day- which, paradoxically, had become quite unknown to many. Teaching in culinary schools was a wonderful thing, and although I am trying to recreate that experience as closely as I can in the home/online setting, it is of course a very different experience, and has its own set of advantages and challenges.

When you cook in your own kitchen, you are physically on your own. You must learn to use and make do with your own utensils, not the school’s. I love it when people hold up two pans in front of the camera and ask me “Shall I use this one or this one?” (this has happened several times already). Cooking at home, you have to juggle watching the screen, the actual cooking, and all the while cleaning up after yourself; in a school there’s always someone to do the latter for you. It can get messy and intense. But it can also be fun: in a culinary school, you’re not allowed to drink wine or sangría while you are cooking. At home, who can stop you?

Travel is not a player in the Covid-19 era. Exactly a year ago, on our trip to Sifnos, Greece, upon observing the hordes of excited tourists at the Barcelona airport (of which we were a part) I remember saying to Israel: this is always going to be this way, isn’t it? There’s no turning back. Wide-scale access to travel via low cost everything created a world which didn’t seem sustainable, but didn’t seem to be going anywhere, either.

I love being at home but oh, do I miss traveling. Our lost flights to faraway places can only be rehearsed now through our palates (or literature). The other day, as we were going through the round of introductions at the start of one of my online classes for 18 Reasons, the staff lead asked everyone to share what they were trying to gain from the class. Someone said: “I can’t travel now, so classes with Camila are the closest I can get to pretending I’m on a beach in Spain”. I loved her for that. She gets what I have been pushing for years now: food is about nourishment, and the senses, but it’s also about culture; travel through food is still possible today, from home. During my online classes I strive to recreate not only the tastes but also the history and social and cultural context, telling stories as we go. Although the lingering together at the table is hard to practice as a group, we always end with a toast, and I encourage everyone to spend a good while savoring, lingering, sharing at the table, like we used to in my in-person classes. Sometimes, family members who have been cooking together online with me but are physically distanced, will continue their time together on a FaceTime call while they enjoy the meal.

Finally, perhaps most important, and certainly most surprising to me, is the sense of community we are able to create through online cooking classes.

Bruno: teen chef

I have been teaching a series of online classes for teens and families alongside my son Bruno, who is 15. He is a natural on camera, and has taken on the role of wise-cracker par excellence, which seems to suit our viewers just fine, although sometimes I have to bite my tongue. Cooking together in front of the camera has been a great bonding experience for us, and I know Bruno feels good about being able to help out during hard times.

Moreover, it’s been such a treat to watch families cook together. We recently taught a sold out Mediterranean Brunch family class for The Civic Kitchen, which culminated with 12 families sitting down to their intentionally set tables, after having cooked together for two hours on a Sunday morning. It was a beautiful sight, and it made me wonder whether something like this would have happened naturally for all of us pre-Covid.

A couple of weeks ago I taught my first 2-day workshop on GF sourdough (also sold out!). This was perhaps the most challenging one to prepare, in part because it entailed coordinating with Jen of Civic Kitchen for her to make sourdough starter from scratch for all attendees, as well as assemble a pretty hefty ingredient kit with some items out of stock due to Covid hoarding practices.

Day 2 of GF Sourdough workshop with The Civic Kitchen SF

Israel and I shot some videos so students could prepare their sourdough starters before class. The first day of class, we were all online preparing the dough together for a couple of hours, and then, as our loaves proofed, we signed off until the next day, and I left everyone another video and the task to bake their own bread at home. The following day, we reconvened for a show and tell, Q&A session, in which everyone proudly shared their accomplishments. Gluten free sourdough is no small feat! The whole group felt very much in synch; although we had only spent a few hours online together over the course of a weekend, it was as if we had been together in spirit for much longer than that, knowing that we -and our yeast- were all sharing the same fate.

Teaching online also means that people can join in from anywhere in the world; no longer does a culinary school in the Bay Area have to cater exclusively to Bay Area residents. In addition to the fact that I myself am teaching from the other side of the world, I have been thrilled to witness a growing crowd of non-Bay Area attendees at my online classes. Sometimes people will remind others of which time zone they are in, in order to justify that they are “already” drinking when it’s only 10am in California. Since I’m 9 hours ahead, I don’t feel the need to justify it at all.

Online classes have certainly proven to create community; they are also a way for families and friends to regroup and reconnect. In addition to the public group classes, we have been running private online cooking classes, like the one pictured here, where a large family who lives spread out along the west coast of the US got reunited and had a great time preparing a full Japanese ichiju sansai menu together. Some of them had not seen each other since before the pandemic hit.

I knew we would be able to pull off online cooking classes; never did I suspect how impactful they would be.