From Banana Bread to Viral TikTok Feta Pasta: Cooking in Quarantine
What else is there to do at home other than to perfect that chocolate chip cookie recipe?
—By Lizzy Palo
Let me set the scene: it’s March 2020 and you’ve been locked up in your house for weeks, having not seen anybody other than your family members. You sit in bed on your phone for hours at a time scrolling through TikTok, seeing video after video of people making whipped coffee and recreating dancing videos that Charli D’Amelio choreographed. You keep getting texts from your friends that they’ve made banana bread and once you realize you have overly ripe bananas, you also decide to pull out your Mom’s recipe and make a loaf… and another one once that one’s been eaten.
This was a routine performed by many during quarantine, especially college students, and it began to manifest itself as a newly realized passion for cooking and baking. A blog run by the Sugar Association even suggests that 50% of the conversations surrounding baking on social media since quarantine began are from people aged 18-24. Restaurants were shut down at the beginning of quarantine and people found themselves with lots of time on their hands to try new things and start experimenting with food. Even now we are seeing much more cooking amongst our peers than usual, indicating this hobby is here to stay.
TikTok Inspiring Beginner Chefs?
As a result of quarantine, people are testing their cooking and baking skills more than ever before. We know that half of the audience of baking conversations occurring online consists of individuals aged 18-24, and I would say that this is mainly due to the rise of TikTok. This vastly popular social media platform has become a hub for users to post recipes that they love and are currently making. Some recipes in particular have taken the platform by storm, such as a feta tomato pasta and spiky vodka pasta. When these recipes were at peak popularity, as soon as I opened my TikTok app I would see five videos in a row of users sharing their versions of them. And since this form of social media is most popular amongst high school and college students — two age groups that are obsessed with trying the latest viral trend — they’ve been persuaded to explore TikTok recipes themselves.
Isabel Riedel, a U-M junior, has tried many of the viral recipes herself, and she noted that the “rise of TikTok during quarantine created this TikTok cooking that’s catering to people who aren’t good at cooking… TikTok recipes always have minimal ingredients, are super easy, under 30 minutes or super hands off.” As a result of this, college students specifically are turning to the app for easy and yummy dinners to make before studying through the entire night. Sophie Park, a freshman who can no longer rely on dining halls since she lives off-campus, also said that the platform has become a one-stop place for her to find recipes that she’s excited about cooking. Like many other college students, she relies on the app for meal inspiration, as it’s quick and easy; you need only look at the comments under the videos for verification that it will actually taste as good as it looks.
Coping with Anxiety about the Pandemic
Cooking and baking hasn’t only been taken up as a hobby for pleasure, but also as a coping method to deal with the anxiety many people are feeling towards the pandemic. In an article published by Vox, author Nisha Chittal notes that “cooking forces [them] to focus on the task at hand instead of watching cable news or scrolling through the infinite loop of increasingly horrifying updates on Twitter.” Chittal speaks of cooking as a form of mindlessness and something that brings people comfort as well as entertainment during times of loneliness, especially during the pandemic. For Abbey Phillipson, a U-M junior, she felt like “anybody who had any mental health issue just became bigger than life when the pandemic hit, just because all you’re going to do is sit there and think about it.” She had just started competitive weight lifting when COVID-19 really struck in the US, and didn’t know where to take out her energy anymore, consequently turning to baking cakes as a distraction.
Even more so than cooking/baking bringing comfort and entertainment, Jenny G. Zhang from the blog Eater highlighted that “baking can also imbue a sense of control,” something people are desperately craving. In a time where everything is so uncertain, there is little that we fully have control over anymore, explaining why people have turned to making their own food as an outlet. Riedel turned to cooking more because she is “a person who likes a lot of control and [plans] things and schedules [her] day and the pandemic has taken a lot of that away,” but cooking is just one of those things she can completely control, bringing her some ease. We always hear of people “stress baking,” and that has never been more true than right now, as everybody’s fears and anxieties are heightened and there are limited activities that allow us to tackle them head on.
Time to Turn Baking into a Profit
While many beginner chefs have found pleasure in simply recreating viral TikTok recipes, others who began experimenting in the kitchen during lockdown decided to create businesses out of their newfound passion. For some, lockdown was an unproductive period, but for Park and Phillipson, baking in their home kitchens filled the extra time they had on their hands. They have different experiences with the businesses they started during quarantine, but they both were encouraged by those surrounding them to take their baked goods to the next level and start selling them.
Park began her homemade pop-tart business, Frosted Stuffers, in the middle of April 2020. She defines herself as “not someone who can just sit,” so when she got bored during the first lockdown she “had this idea of making homemade pop-tarts that you can fill with whatever you want.” It became something to fill the time and excited her, and after giving her friends samples they encouraged her to turn it into a business, leading her to create her first Instagram post for Frosted Stuffers on April 17th.
As she continued creating them and perfecting her pastry recipe, she realized that the “pastry was super temperamental and it was too much work” for her. She was putting in tremendous effort to try to perfect them, but about a month after Frosted Stuffers began, Park didn’t feel she was passionate enough about the business for it to be worth it and she ultimately shut it down in May. She continues to bake — especially stress bake — as a casual hobby, however running a baked goods business does not seem to be in the cards for Park’s future.
This process couldn’t be any more different than the one Phillipson began during quarantine with her current business, made with gLOVEs. Similar to Park, Phillipson found herself bored and wanting to fill a bit of her time by doing a fun activity: baking a cake similar to one she saw in a time-lapse video. She had rarely baked prior to this and even notes that she’s still more fascinated with the decorating aspect rather than the actual baking process. For her first cake, she “made it light blue and pink and put it on [her] snapchat story and about 20 or 30 people asked her to drive over a piece.” At that moment she realized she really could start something, and since nobody was able to leave their homes or really celebrate at all, they began asking her to bake a cake for them.
One story she told that stood out in particular was: “my friend’s mom is a nurse and she was on the Covid floor and had to live in a trailer in their front yard, so they were like, can you make a ‘you’re my hero’ cake and I’ll pay you for it, whatever, just to brighten her day.” Not only was making these incredible cakes helping her feel better, but Phillipson realized “it was also bringing a lot [of joy] to other people, because celebrating was not a thing.” So she went with it and was open for business in April, averaging about 10-20 cakes per week during the heart of Summer to 3-4 currently since she now has to balance her business with school and work. She had never thought that baking and decorating cakes would be something she was so passionate about, but since she has begun the business she has greatly considered it as something to continue to pursue once she graduates. She’s done extremely well for herself—so much so that she had the luxury of buying herself a car in August from the money she had earned from selling her cakes. Without the pandemic, her eyes never would have been opened to her passion for creating her own cake masterpieces. Although made with gLOVEs began as a distraction for the anxiety she had with the disappearance of competitive weight lifting in her life, it has now turned into a thriving business that she hopes will one day become her own bakery.
Everybody is attempting to deal with the ongoing pandemic in their own ways, cooking and baking just happen to be a common hobby that has been taken up throughout it. Easy and viral recipes on TikTok have encouraged college students to actually use their small kitchens in their apartment for once and cooking in general is serving as an outlet to take back some of the control we have lost in the past year. While some just consider experimenting in the kitchen as a fun activity to make these endless days feel a bit different, others have truly found their passion lies with baking. So you may find that taking a couple of hours out of your day to bake a loaf of banana bread is a lot more fun than you’d think, and who doesn’t appreciate food made from scratch?
Featured Photo, courtesy of Abbey Phillipson: her favorite cake that she baked for a client during quarantine