Streaming cooking classes flourish in the age of lockdown

As millions of home-bound social distancers worldwide have turned to online and streaming offerings to stave off boredom amid coronavirus lockdowns, Turkey too has turned to its screen offerings from foreign series to Broadway shows, and from fitness routines to gourmet cooking.

Foreign residents of Turkey's capital Ankara have gotten the live streaming cooking bug too.

Marshaling the power of Zoom and Instagram, Alicia Santana, a Dominican chef who has lived in Ankara for nearly a half-decade, said the idea of live streaming international cooking lessons has long been brewing in her mind.

"Since I'm moving from country to country every four or five years, I realized that this is a good way to reach out to the four corners of the world in an easy and fun way," Santana, 41, told Anadolu Agency.

She said the necessity to self-isolate and quarantine herself for public health in a break from her usual work with the Turkish Culinary Academy motivated her to take up the online cooking classes project a few weeks ago.

"I thought that perhaps a way to help the people to alleviate that collective anxiety, from my small space of course, could be to share a little of what I know as a cook and what my friends around the world, as cooks (professionals or not), could also contribute," Santana said in an email interview.

With the classes free to join, Santana said some 20 people attend per session lasting from one to two hours, springing from countries worldwide including (so far) Turkey, Argentina, France, Israel, Ukraine, Germany, and Colombia.

"We have planned two classes per week, possibly Thursday and Friday," she said.

So far a septet of cooks from Spain, Italy, Dominican Republic, and Mexico are holding forth...