m's kitchen
I wanted to find some new sourdough recipes, both to wake up my starter and to use some of the ingredients crowding my freezer and cupboards. Specifically I wanted to use the old can of pumpkin puree we bought last November, the frozen blueberries Suzanne gave us when she left for Sweden, and the overpriced little bin of candied ginger I bought in duress which is now in the way of everything else (including the big bag of candied ginger I found later for a much more reasonable price at gross out)
After going through a bunch of shitty SEO recipe sites, I found a few of interest and I somehow stumbled on a youtube channel which sent me down a rabbit hole.
Let me introduce you to M's kitchen. featuring a collection of savory and sweet bread recipes.
These videos have a kind of Japanese craftsman vibe to them. There's a word in Japanese, shokunin that describes the kind of careful striving towards perfection. I've featured these sorts of videos on my webpage before, highlighting the ritualistic Japanese process of making charcoal, paper, chalk, ink pens, and pottery. I went through my feed to link to these videos here but discovered they had all been taken down, consumed in the internet dumpster fire.
I don't know much about the person behind M's kitchen. All the videos are marked as 3 years old. She has an instagram link in the description, but I can't view any facebook owned links, so I don't know if it's active.
She makes each of her breads by hand with a standard method. The melon bread is folded in a particular way and the top is scored with six lines just like you'd see in a shop. The ham and cheese rolls are rolled, folded, cut, and inverted in a way which suggests that she learned it working at a bakery.
The videos don't have a soundtrack and aren't condensed in a way that hides the effort required. You never see her face, only her plump hands, the hands of a baker that loves baked goods. I can recommend these videos if you're looking at excuses to try some baking.
I made a note of the URL so I could return to it later and when it came time to bake I decided to load up the channel on my phone. A search for "m's kitchen" returned this a different Japanese baker - with recipes that seemed OK but weren't as good as the channel I was looking for. If you look at those links, the only difference is the tag: 'mskitchen9332' vs 'mskitchen4740'.
Curious, I did a youtube search for "m's kitchen" and quickly backed away because the internet is a dumpster fire and youtube in particular, is a horror show. But after deciding to do a write-up, I went back and picked through all the ads, shorts, and suggestions to join the Nazi party to investigate all the "m's kitchen" channels.
- This m's kitchen channel covers Indian food. It looks good, it's just not what I'm looking for.
- This m's kitchen channel has 10 videos of Japanese recipes with a cutesy xylophone heavy soundtrack (a big red flag).
- This m's kitchen channel has 5 videos of greasy American food with cutesy soundtracks
- Each video in this m's kitchen channel shows dozens of household and kitchen gadgets, unboxing, and food(?). It uses cutesy soundtracks. I think I'm either too old or not enough of a capitalist to understand the appeal.
- This m's kitchen channel has short Japanese recipes interspersed with political council meetings(?). The recipes are aggressively short and feature cutsey soundtracks.
All the channels with soundtracks are bad. It's almost as if these people know their content is otherwise too weak to invoke the appropriate emotional response. I have similarly strong opinions about the way reality television is edited.
I don't know what the phrase "m's kitchen" means to an Asian person. A search for "m's kitchen" on duck duck go brought up several local Chinese restaurants. When I searched for "m's kitchen Tokyo" it brought up several facebook links I was unable to follow.
On a whim I did a search for "n's kitchen" and it brought up a bunch of Thai food with some Japanese and Chinese recipe channels.
"o's kitchen" brings up African and American food channels.
"p's kitchen" was inconclusive, but I was growing tired.
By the time I reached "q's kitchen" I was too irritated by youtube's SEO bullshit to continue.
So in conclusion:
- Never browse youtube. It is a mostly horrible cesspool.
- Never put anything of value on youtube. Copyright no longer serves to motivate people to produce things - only for rentseekers to steal from the public domain.
- Videos with background music are almost certainly awful
- Videos titled "X's kitchen" where X is a letter of the western alphabet are racially segregated(?)
- Shokunin is delightful to watch.
Here's what I made:
The infrequently updated blog.