国际英语新闻:Feature: Homemade bread aroma floats over Istanbul amid COVID-19

ISTANBUL, April 30 (Xinhua) -- Melek Aydin, a Turkish female cook, showed tips of making bread at her flat in central Istanbul with a live broadcast from her Instagram account on Thursday.

"I appreciate your attention to preparing the sourdough, kneading the dough, and waiting for it to be yeasted," Aydin told her followers. "You did a pretty good job."

Now, it is time for each of them to put their loaves of bread into the ovens.

The number of these kinds of broadcasts in which she explains the steps of making bread at home has recently increased as many Turkish citizens have stopped buying it over COVID-19 concerns.

"To be able to answer all the queries, I am posting videos on my Instagram account, showing the details of the process, and I am regularly broadcasting live," Aydin told Xinhua.

In her view, after learning how to make a loaf of regular bread, people mostly prefer to develop themselves and try new alternatives, such as whole-grain or multigrain.

"The fast-food habits had started to take us towards obesity and unhealthy society," she noted. "But I think we have now entered into an awareness period in that sense as people started to cook at home."

According to google search trend report, the number of searches related to homemade bread in Turkey has increased by 500 percent in the past month.

Gizem Gulmek Sapan, a 29-year-old newly married Istanbul resident, is among those who learned to make several types of bread by following videos and tips of some professionals online.

Her interest in making bread started when the outbreak became widespread in the country nearly two months ago. Since then, the Sapan family do not go to any bakeries due to their concerns over hygiene.

"The worst part of cooking bread at home is that we eat a lot," she said, noting that the flour consumption of the household has also increased significantly.

"I am buying at least three packets of flour per week," she said.

A manager of a supermarket in the Dikilitas neighborhood of the crowded Besiktas district said the previous month they had difficulty in meeting the increasing demands of flour and dry yeast.

"Our shelves have been left empty many times," he told Xinhua. "But I can say that in April, we were more prepared in providing enough supplies."

The sales of bread in the bakeries in Istanbul decreased at least by 35 percent in March due to the coronavirus pandemic as a significant number of citizens started to make their bread at home, Erdogan Cetin, president of the Istanbul Bakery Chamber, recently told reporters.

In Cetin's view, it is hard to catch the same quality and taste of the bread made in stone ovens in bakeries.

"But, the health of our citizens comes first for us," Cetin was quoted as saying by the state-run Anadolu agency. "This process will end in 15 days or a month, and after that, everything will be back to normal."