If you’re snowed in, and run out of bread – don’t worry!! Watch ‘Cooked’ (Season 1, Episode 3 “Air”) on Netflix and get some tips on how to bake your own amazing Bread! It only requires four ingredients – Flour, Water, Salt and Yeast.
Director Ryan Miller opens with a lyrical scene of a Moroccan mother making bread while talking to her child about the ancient traditions of baking. From this simplest of home kitchens, the episode takes the viewer on a journey to understand how this most elemental of foods feeds and interconnects cultures around the world.
Pollan, with help from modernist cuisine guru Nathan Myhrvold, explains why it is that food with air pockets in it, like bread, appeal to us so much, and the importance of bread throughout history in maintaining a civil society.
The episode travels in time from the ancient Egypt of 6,000 years ago, when bread making first began, to a communal oven in contemporary Morocco, where a baker bemoans the fading tradition of neighbourhood bakeries, to Pollan’s Berkeley, California kitchen.
Also featured is Massachusetts-based master sourdough bread maker Richard Bourdon, who posits that today’s rise in gluten intolerance stems from making bread the wrong way – speeding up the process in a way that changes the very fact of what bread is.
It ends with a beautiful freshly baked loaf by Pollan and the satisfactions of self-reliance, being able to make a staple at home with your own two hands.
From best-selling author Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food), Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney (Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), and an all-star cast of directors and cinematographers comes the Netflix Original Documentary Series Cooked, which examines the primal human need to cook and issues a clarion call for a return to the kitchen in order to reclaim lost traditions and restore balance to our lives. Each of the series’ four episodes examines one of the physical elements used throughout the ages to transform raw ingredients into delicious dishes through cooking: fire, water, air, and earth.