Brush Up on Your Culinary Skills With Virtual Cooking Lessons From 6 DC Chefs

12/1/2019

A continuing series about awesome social distance activities in DC to keep you entertained during the outbreak and inspired to keep daydreaming about your next adventure in the Nation's capital.

Cooking isn’t our thing. Well, unless you count microwaving a meal as “cooking." Needless to say, the #quarantinelife has been a challenge for our culinary abilities since the essentials in our kitchen only extend as far as wine, ice cream and coffee.

But the extended time at home is an ideal time to perfect those less than Top Chef-worthy cooking skills.

Thankfully, some of DC’s best chefs are using their downtime to share their knowledge and recipes and starting to offer free cooking classes to an at-home audience looking to figure out the basics of cooking, meal inspiration or just try some new recipes.

Here’s our curated list of six DC’ chefs to check out if you’re hungry for virtual at-home cooking instruction.

Cooking Newbies

If you’re clueless in the kitchen and the stove is used more to stack dirty dishes than cooking meals, Voraciously from the folks at the Washington Post is here to help. The website provides step-by-step instructions, introduces you to the basics and dishes that will allow you to create satisfying meals, zero intimidation.

Ed Hardy, the executive chef at Harlot in Shaw and a chef instructor at Cookology culinary school in Arlington, is now live streaming free kitchen tutorials on the school’s Facebook page.

Culinary Competent + Sous Chef-Worthy

Eva Kronenburg, a former pastry chef at Convivial, is churning out a slew of videos for her YouTube channel, which concentrates on comfort foods, baked goods, and specialties from her native Philippines.

Check out recipe tutorials on “Chronicles of a Quarantined Chef,” a recorded series from Lincoln Fuge, executive chef of Present Company in Mount Pleasant. The idea for the series came to him as he started wondering what to do with all the random ingredients in the walk-in refrigerator of his restaurant before closing it down. (We can totally relate! This is us every single day.) The best thing about this series is that recipes often use leftover components from previous episodes, so tomato sauce remaining from the eggplant parmesan goes on the pizza.

Kith and Kin Executive Chef and Owner Kwame Onwuachi is offering up his newly minted “Eat Clean While Quarantined” series on Instagram live which features dishes made with limited fat and sugar, a “manageable” amount of carbohydrates, and a protein. Clocking in at under 400 calories per serving, they require roughly 20 minutes to make. Onwuachi shares the ingredient list the day before going live so viewers can stock up.

DC-based Mr. Foodtastic (Chef J. Jackson) serves straight up foodporn on his Instagram feed with accompanying recipes and how-tos! Recipes ranges from cooking basics such as turkey burgers and the proper way to boil an egg to more sophisticated fare like seared scallops with fontina grits and brown sugar garlic pork loin. His videos are funny and engaging but fair warning, everything he makes looks delicious and will make you hungry for food that the poor ramen in your house will in no way satisfy.

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