Rise of home chefs

Gao Ling bought an oven two years ago but only put it to use during Spring Festival in late January. Since then she has been baking bread nearly every day, with her 17-year-old son as the first taster.

"I didn't have much time for cooking before. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, I finally started to learn how to bake, which I always wanted to do," says Gao, 46, who teaches at a middle school in Beijing.

With schools shut nationwide, Gao bakes after her day's work from home. It takes her hours, from kneading dough to watching the bread rise in the oven. For recipes, she looks at apps and sometimes she asks friends for advice.

"The online recipes don't tell you everything. Sometimes you need to figure out the adjustments to make, such as where you place the dough in your oven," she says.

Gao has promised her students that when their school reopens, she will take her handmade bread to class.

The epidemic has created huge online traffic on cooking apps. One example is the recipe-sharing app Douguo that saw a spike of 113.47 percent in its active daily users during this Spring Festival.

Active-user numbers have peaked during the first day of the weeklong Spring Festival holiday in recent years, Douguo's CEO Wang Yuxiang says.

But the number didn't drop in the following days this year. Instead, it continued to climb until Feb 23.

"We had around 10 million people using our app on Feb 23. The rise stopped after that, perhaps because many people went back to work. But the number has still remained high," Wang says.

"Most of the new users are under age 25. Over 80 percent of users are women."

Wang says Douguo's target users are young people and families as the former bring new ideas to the platform and the latter are stable users who cook for their children.

The number of active users is not the only thing that has increased for the app. The average time each user spends on it has also risen from 33 minutes to 50 minutes.

The traffic is a "sweet burden" for Wang's team, especially its search function, for which the technical team worked through the Spring Festival holiday to ensure the app ran without crashing.

"We didn't expect the growth to continue until the end of February but we realized that people would be cooking more as they are at home since the epidemic started. On the second day after Lunar New Year (Jan 25), we made all our paid cooking courses free," Wang adds.

Zhao Gang, a popular user on Douguo, has uploaded more than 800 recipes. Her posts have received more views and comments this year.

She says it's easier for green hands in the kitchen to learn some dishes that combine staple foods with other ingredients. Among new recipes she has uploaded are noodles with gravy and fried dumplings with chives and eggs.

Zhao also hosts a livestreaming show to teach viewers how to make noodles with gravy by hand.

"I started to cook after recovering from a health issue years ago that made me realize the importance of eating healthily," Zhao says."I want to share my experience and knowledge with others."

Zhao says she recently noticed complicated flour dishes such as deep-fried dough sticks getting more attention among her recipes on the app.

Wang also noticed trends among users of Douguo. During the early days of the epidemic, the most searched dishes on the app were quick ones that take up to 10 minutes to prepare. But as the epidemic progressed, people were looking for more complicated dishes to kill time.

"As all our cooking courses are now free of cost, we find that professionals such as chefs are among the most-followed people on our app," he says.

Wang adds that young users are searching for healthy dishes and are looking for ingredients high in protein and low in fat.

While more people are returning to work, Wang is not worried about new users spending less time on Douguo in the future.

"Cooking is something that young people don't have time for because of their busy work schedules. After being able to cook, thanks to staying at home, they will find fun in cooking."

Wang says the epidemic will push people to focus on staying healthy and improving their immunity, which they can do in a way by cooking.

"We will also cooperate with professional nutritionists on our app to provide more information about eating healthily," he adds.