Here in the States, there’s been lots of talk about how we’ve become a nation of bread bakers with the arrival of quarantine life.
As it turns out, bread baking is an international phenomenon. In a recent Medium post by the CookPad team, they analyze recipe usage data from their Italy team to show how interest in bread making has spiked in the Bel Paese an order of magnitude higher than before the pandemic.
According to the data, interest in the recipe for “pane di grano duro” (which translates to ‘durum wheat bread’ in English) jumped 12-fold, garnering more views during the lockdown than the entire top 10 recipe list did pre-lockdown.
And also much like the States, Italians are also seeking comfort through food. Views for ice cream, torta, and fried rice balls were way up. And this being Italy, it should be of no surprise that pasta-making saw a huge increase: Fettuccine saw over a 700% jump in interest in during quarantine.
Italians are also sharing what they are making online too. According to Cookpad, “cooksnaps” (where cooks take photos of their creations) have jumped 3-fold in the app.
I guess it shouldn’t be any surprise that Italians (and Brits, Canadians and pretty much everyone else) are baking more bread and cooking more in general. The big question is what all this forced-home cooking will do to behavior in the long term and what it means for different participants in the food and cooking ecosystem. It will be a couple of years before we can gauge the staying power of new habits learned during this time, but my guess is all of this quarantine cooking is, at the very least, giving some of us skills that can better equip for life.
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