Staying at home has turned most of us into cooks. Wherever you turn, someone is making banana bread, dalgona coffee, or a sourdough starter.
And where are the recipes coming from? Google, of course!
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As night follows day, as a rainbow follows the storm, so too does home cooking follow a pandemic. Apparently.
Banana bread
Google Trends has been keeping track of the recipes people have been searching for all around the world for the last 30 days, with some unlikely surprises, one of them being how to make hand sanitiser.
The other nine items on the list are not healthy, to say the least. They mostly include comfort foods, sweets and meals from our childhood.
Without further ado, the list:
1. Banana bread
Clearly more of a dessert than a bread, it’s what you make when you don’t quite want to eat those bananas but you can’t quite bear to part with them yet, either. What we can learn from this is that a lot of quasi-quarantined people are buying more bananas than they can use.
Pizza dough
2. Pizza dough
Frozen and refrigerated pizza doughs are available, and yet people are choosing to make their own. Or maybe the stores are out of the frozen and refrigerated types; after all, homemade pizza sauce is not on the top-10 list.
4. French toast
This is the epitome of what people seem to be looking for in these still-unusual times: It is not an everyday meal, it is something a lot of us associate more with childhood than adulthood, it has more calories than are good for you (especially with syrup), and it is delicious and easy to make.
Chocolate cake
5. Chocolate cake
No one even thinks about chocolate cake unless it’s somebody’s birthday. It is probable that people are associating it with childhood, celebration, fattening, which is why so many seem to be making it.
6. Dalgona coffee
Apparently, it is everywhere on the internet, especially Instagram and TikTok. This massively popular drink from South Korea floats whipped coffee and sugar — two whole tablespoons of sugar — on top of milk.
Dalgona coffee
We’re talking 252 calories for a single serving, with 36 grammes of sugar and 40 grammes of carbohydrates. That’s more in each category than a Snickers bar.
7. Chicken breasts
There are many ways to make chicken breasts, and people at home are presumably looking for new ones. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
8. Carrot cake
When done right, carrot cake is the most sublime dessert known to man or woman. It’s the best way to pack calories on top of calories and make it seem healthy because it has carrots in it.
Carrot cake
9. Ground beef
Like the chicken breasts, it’s versatile and relatively inexpensive. People are looking for recipes for it because they have ground beef on hand and are looking for new, non-hamburger ways to make it.
10. Fried rice
Really? Fried rice? Yes, fried rice is fine, but the 10th most-searched recipe on the internet during a virus? And one of the 10 was hand sanitiser?
Tribune News Service