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Slow food: With more time to spend in the kitchen, turn your focus away from what’s fast

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Why not bake your own bread or try your hand at pickling?

Next year, the fast food chain concept will mark 100 years on the American culinary landscape—traced back to the moment White Castle opened its second outpost in Wichita, Kansas. In the ’40s and ’50s, fast food giants like McDonald’s, Burger King and Taco Bell got their foothold, spurred by the ascendance of car culture.

Today, fast food has given rise to its cousin, fast casual. Convenience is key for these restaurants, rendering homemade meals a quaint concept. After all, who has time to actually prepare something from scratch?

Well, now we do, during this unprecedented time in our history when many of us have been advised to—or are wisely opting to—shelter in place. We now have an opportunity to make food at home the way it should be made: slow and deliberate, requiring patience. Some things take longer to make than others, but the rewards are many, including improved digestive health.

“I’ve been in the industry for 36 years, and everybody right now is used to, ‘Fast food’s gotta be faster, the microwave’s gotta be faster.’ … And the quality depletes from that,” says Chef James Ojeda of Mediterranean restaurant Bok Bok Chicken. “But when we are patient, if we can get back to that kind of mindset of just waiting a little longer for a better product, that’s where we’re going to find the quality.”

At Bok Bok, everything is made from scratch, from the hummus to the salads to the pickled turnips that accompany each meal. Those turnips alone—the recipe has been handed down through generations—require at least 24 hours to pickle.

Pickling and brining goes back centuries and spans cultures. Canning, a method of preserving food that gives it a much longer shelf life, was once a way of life for many Americans (your grandparents probably had jars of pickles and various root vegetables in the basement). Fermenting, which humans have been doing since the Neolithic age, is another method that takes time but produces some of the best-tasting foods we enjoy—think sourdough bread, sauerkraut, kimchi, cheese, wine and more—that are also chock full of probiotics, beneficial microorganisms that help maintain a healthy gut and aid the immune system in fighting viruses, fungi and pathogens.

Sandra Aboujaoude, owner of La Belle Terre Bakery and Cafe, wants people to understand how the food they eat impacts how they feel. The bread we buy in stores, for example, is laden with preservatives to make them last longer, but those additives aren’t friendly to our digestive system.

“I’ve had several of my customers come to me and say, ‘I’m gluten-intolerant, but I can eat your bread and I don’t have any stomach issues. Why is that?’ And I explain to them the whole process,” Aboujaoude says. “The flour needs to sit with the water and ferment and start breaking down before you can work it, and then you let it sit longer. Let it break down again. And you repeat this process six to eight times before you actually form it and bake it. During this process, the flour molecules are getting fermented or broken down, they’re getting processed with the water. And that’s what’s making it so easy to digest for people.”

All that is achievable at home, too, but it means letting go of the idea that food should be fast, that it has to come packaged and shelf-stable forever. We have little control of what’s going on in the larger world, but in our kitchens, we have so much say in how our bodies feel. Give it a little time. These days, that’s one thing we all seem to have.

Tags: Food
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