Kitchen obsessives: Why aim to cook the perfect dish?

The Food Programme

BBC

Food, Arts

4.4 • 977 Ratings

🗓️ 20 September 2020

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

March 2020. Supermarket shelves were bare, restaurants and takeaways were closed, schools and workplaces closed. Perhaps it's no surprise then that all around the world, people started getting creative in the kitchen. But as Leyla Kazim finds in this programme, some cooks took lockdown cooking to a whole new level.

Warwickshire cook Dan Fell made headlines for sharing his 'perfect' fried chicken recipe after spending 18 months testing it. In New York, journalist and chef Bill Buford became obsessed with cooking the perfect roast chicken. And journalist Kate Ng spent her days emulating the perfect crimps on her Grandmother's curry puffs. It seemed we'd become culinary perfectionists in our own kitchens.

For Leyla Kazim, lockdown was all about baking the perfect sourdough loaf. In this programme she wants asks why so many of us became obsessed with creating the perfect meal, and what the quest for perfecting a dish says about us. She speaks to long standing recipe obsessives food writer Felicity Cloake and 'obsessional' Youtube cook Alex.

Presented by Leyla Kazim. Produced by Clare Salisbury for BBC Audio in Bristol.

Transcript

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0:44.5	Hello, you've downloaded a podcast of BBC Radio 4's The Food Program.
0:49.6	Welcome to our world, from cooking to culture, politics to pleasure. We hope you enjoy it.
0:56.3	March 2020 will be a month that we remember for many reasons, but for one man from the Midlands, March will always be when he claims
1:06.1	that after 18 months of attempts, he cracked that famous blend of herbs and spices and managed to create a perfect imitation of his favorite takeaway.
1:20.0	Soi.
1:22.0	Well it's a guy who spent a year and a half trying to recreate the flavor of KFC at home and people are so happy.
1:29.6	The story appeared on Primetime TV on the show Have I Got News for You. Dan Fell's recipe made
1:35.6	headlines and it sets social media alike. Now don't get me wrong, I get it. When restaurants closed all over the country, we were all
1:48.2	craving the dishes that we were missing out on. this was fried chicken fever and at the food
1:55.8	program HQ it got us wondering why do we get so obsessed about perfecting recipes for the foods that we love?
2:07.0	You're listening to the food program, The Place for Hungry Minds.
2:12.0	I'm Leila Kazim and that noise is the sound of my lockdown obsession. I am a cliche lockdown sour dough baker and that sound is of me
	...

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