Why is India having a Bake-a-thon?

Hey everyone,

It’s us, the cookie people from Dohful. To tell you the truth, with the whole world upside down, for a while there we had no interest in getting you interested in Cookies.

But slowly we started seeing a different, totally unexpected trend. On our Instagram and even otherwise, we saw people baking more and more.

We would get queries about recipes which we had posted on Youtube, or about certain ingredients and their possible substitutions. Now, I had never pegged us to be a nation of Bakers. But things were different this time.

There was no all-purpose flour anywhere. When we searched for this bakery staple in the grocery stores, we couldn’t find it anywhere - online or offline. We were getting calls from friends and family for troubleshooting their baking escapades.

There was definitely something happening, and we were not complaining.

The Google trends data also supported this hypothesis. The search results for ‘How to Bake’ has gone up exponentially since March 22, 2020.

And not just baking, the search for ‘All-purpose flour’ and ‘yeast’ has also increased by folds according to the Trends data.

The most intriguing part was the extensive bread baking. Because unlike America, India had no shortage of bread. Even in the only grocery shop open for us here, there was always plenty of bread available to be bought.

Despite this, the recipes for bread, whole wheat bread, pav, burger buns and so much more have been searched unprecedently by us Indians.

Baking, in general cooking, is a therapeutic activity. I have always believed that everyone should know the basics of this art. It improves our lives in ways more than we can imagine. And also bring a much-needed calmness during these tense times.

What do you say?

As for us, we realized that we were as passionate about helping others bake as baking ourselves. This transition was natural and unplanned for us, and we enjoyed every minute of it. This is how we here at Dohful spent the last two months.