An ideal television evening is a well-balanced five-course meal, but there are evenings when a person wants to turn himself out of his responsibility. This is how I looked away from the beautiful bird flu models in the pleasant science program on Wednesday Atlas and I ended up on RTL4 at the „Grand finale” by Snack masters, a program in which renowned chefs have to imitate a classic mass-produced product. The assignment turned out to be one with a monstrous level of difficulty: the wokkel.
The wokkellyricism was not out of the air. The chefs praised the shape of their model: “How is it so beautiful? Those curves!” And: “So light, so airy!” Botticelli’s Venus faded to a penne during the week. The longing for the ideal wok soon translated into speculation about the recipe. Would there be oil in the dough? Can you approach the ideal wokkel shape with a pasta machine?
The cooks became increasingly embarrassed by the wokkel, an assignment that towered over the lacquered veal cheek with puffed crackles that they usually devote themselves to. After a day of fruitless fiddling, the Amsterdam chef Michiel van der Eerde (Baut) shouted: “It makes you so insecure!” And there he smashed a piece of wokkel batter, flots, on the kitchen floor. He quickly picked it up again. With the competing cooks of O&O from Sint-Willebrord in Brabant, the twist disappeared from the wokkel during frying.
In the meantime, presenter Miljuschka Witzenhausen had gone to Belgium to investigate the conception and birth of the 1.2 million kilos of wokkel that are ground every year by Dutch jaws. Wrapped up like an aspiring researcher of Inspection Service of Value if she had a look at the extruder, the device in which the salty drink finds its way.
Baking and adding the seasonings turned out to be done in the Netherlands – which means that more than a million kilos of half-baked wokkels enter our country every year. Seasoning is not a matter of spreading, as we were explained to the machine in question: “There is an electrostatic component. The flavors are negatively charged, the drum is grounded and then the opposites attract.” As long as the wokkels don’t make us magnetic!
A bite, but then a bit cowardly
Meanwhile, the Snackmaster-chefs were able to touch up their wokkels with a brush completely free of magnetic fields, so that the jury could finally make a final verdict. “This one does have a bite, but afterwards it is a bit cowardly”, jury chairman Witzenhausen judged the Amsterdam attempt to second place. The winning wokkel from Sint-Willebrord “continued to resist, even after the third bite, fourth bite.”
My view of the world was confused for the rest of the evening. then in news hour the research report on the first months of the corona crisis was discussedI saw the plodding in Snack masters for me: no recipe, no stuff and the discovery that all your experience with the Japanese hamachi is worth nothing when creating a wokkel. I saw Hugo de Jonge before me, pacing by the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport: “It makes you so insecure!”
In the studio of Mariëlle Tweebeeke, Jeroen Dijsselbloem of the Dutch Safety Board delivered devastating criticism of the long letter in which De Jonge had defended his policy and described the committee’s conclusions as hindsight. “Wisdom”, tasted Dijsselbloem. “Thanks for the compliment. But this wisdom can be applied in this way.” For example, that the government is only credible if administrators dare to name the uncertainties of a situation. Dijsselbloem worked through his list of criticisms. Hugo de Jonge was a defenseless wrangler between his jaws.