Due to popular demand, Umami Shop Canada is back with live streams of the fourth season of their cooking show in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The owners of the shop kick-started their latest show by cooking up some ginger beef pasta Saturday night.
Patricia Luu and her husband, Sven Roeder — who is part owner of the store — hosted the cooking show as over 2,000 viewers tuned into Facebook live to watch. As a way to keep people busy during the novel coronavirus crisis, home cooks can also cook along with meal kits they pre-order from the store.
“We wanted something, a feel-good kit, because ginger beef is something that originated here in Calgary, Alberta,” said Luu. “We are in southern Alberta and we wanted to showcase that and it’s one of the most popular dishes on our menu.
“We put together a kit with all the ingredients in there … nice Italian pasta and ginger beef we’ve made ourselves from Alberta beef and the sauce, we have ginger sauce and we’re going to showcase how to make it all from scratch.”
The show’s hostess said they weren’t planning on filming the fourth season until the summer, but with many people having to stay home now due to physical distancing and self-isolation, the couple received several requests to host their next season a lot sooner.
Luu said it was their second-biggest production yet. (The largest show they’ve ever done consisted of making sushi.)
Luu said people from all across Alberta order the meal kits and watch their show. The kits are also assembled with some help from local businesses.
“In the kit, there’s always something local in there, this week we’ve been working with Andrew Hilton, who did the wine pairing for us in the kit and all of of the fresh vegetables come from fresh flavor farms, the garlic is from local organic farms,” she said.
The live cooking show is also sponsored by Lethbridge Subaru.
According to the owner, their food supplies not only come from all over the province, but they also come from the West Coast as well.
Luu added that this specific meal kit only takes about 15 minutes to cook.
The pair say they look forward to hosting the rest of their latest season, which will consist of five to seven episodes, similar to previous seasons.