What's your cooking music?

Recipe, or not really, but a damn good salad: Apple, Celery & Endive with Hazelnuts and Blue Cheese.

In my right hand I hold my knife and in the left I’m rolling the dice with hitting the shuffle button. Chromatics, Alanis, Four Tet and Orbital all fall into queue. The tracks quiet the second guessing in my cooking. I find the sounds, all familiar, carry myself from prep to plate in a timely manner. The playlists I’ve created direct the mood and the experience of what I’m making. If I am taking on a project with patience in mind the music tends to be jazzy and soothing. When I make eggs on toast, something quick like, Azealia Banks - “212” somehow makes those eggs scramble faster.

I’m deeply curious what everyone listens to while they cook. Someone’s taste is almost too intimate. Sharing music you genuinely love with others exposes you. Your taste might reveal how much of a romantic you are. The current album you’re obsessed with might let others know you’re a “365 party girl.” When hosting people for dinner I have overplayed “hipsters oasis,” a seemingly endless list of songs featured on most restaurants house playlist. If I were to just hit the shuffle and let the night roll, I might as well sit at the dinner table fully nude.

Songs have this remarkable ability to transport you to times in your life where you discovered a new genre, where you made progress, when you might’ve been low. The music we cook to has an impact on what we produce, how we serve and nourish. A knob of butter becomes informed by the beat. The dice of a carrot is either exact or abstract. What interests me are the things existing around us our subconscious is not aware of. I hadn’t put much thought into the music I listen to when cooking but I was listening to Dean Blunt while working on a recipe. The genre-bending haunting vocals allowed me to focus but imbue my work with character and conceptually present it in a new way, even for me.

I want to know, what do you listen to? What music gets you there? Maybe it doesn’t have to be about cooking. If you work from home, if you’re allowed to listen to music at work, what tracks repeatedly carry you onto the next phase. I will mention, I am not as interested in what music you listen to while you work out, unless you’re bumping it to Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. Perhaps, without knowing it, a song has been your anchor rendering you to access the deeper most vulnerable parts of yourself.