Ryan Riley, the founder of Life Kitchen, realized that his business model was relevant to an emerging population of long COVID patients. Life Kitchen is the United Kingdom’s first cancer culinary arts school where symptoms such as loss of taste and smell are common with certain cancers and treatments. Since this symptom overlaps with long COVID, he decided to learn what, if anything, he could do to enhance smell or taste through food.

After doing the research, he and co-founder Kimberly Duke created a free book that offers 18 recipes that are flavorful and taste-tested by long-haulers. The free book focuses on three categories of foods: Snacks, Substanials, and Sweets. Some of the recipes include foods with strong flavors like:

• Lemon
• Feta
• Za’atar (Mediterranean spice mixture)
• Apple
• Ginger
• Shichimi togarashi (Japanese spice mixture)
• Blue cheese 
• Sambal (chili paste)

What Life Kitchen Learned about Long COVID

In the process, Riley and Duke found there are three types of long COVID patients. “There’s people who just lose their sense of taste for the first two weeks that they have it, [and] there’s the people who lose their sense of taste or sense of smell, which is anosmia.” There are also people with parosmia, which is a distorted sense of smell.”

The founders also learned that foods like garlic, onion, eggs and roasted meats are undesirable to people with a distorted sense of smell, so Riley made sure to remove these items from recipes, challenging him to find equally flavorful foods.

The Process of Writing the Recipe Book

Riley and Duke collaborated with Professor Barry Smith, the lead for the UK group who is researching loss of smell as a COVID-19 symptom, to make the free recipe book. They invited people without loss of taste and smell, between 10 and 20 long-haulers, to test the recipes and offer feedback. More than 150 to 200 recipes were developed in the testing phase, yet only 18 made it into the recipe book.

While producing recipes, Life Kitchen generally focuses on five flavors: aroma, umami, texture, layering, and trigeminal food sensations, which is the tingling feeling that spices cause. Umami is a must as it is a savory flavor that adds “deep, rich, savory comfort, according to Riley.

Umami stimulates the taste buds and brings all the flavors out. “So I would always say try and get as much of umami into your food, try to add a tablespoon of miso, a tablespoon of soy sauce, grate some parmesan over that pasta, try to really push the flavors as high and as powerfully as you can,” he suggests.

Spices and heat were also used to mitigate the often metallic and bland flavor experienced by long-haulers, so adding spices, herbs, and sauces can improve flavor.  

Recipe Sneak Peek from the Book

One example of the use of umami, spices, herbs, and sauces to enhance flavor is represented in Life Kitchen’s mushroom and blue cheese mac ‘n’ cheese. Get the recipe here (serves four):

Ingredients:

• 400g (7oz) dried pasta of choice (we used chifferi rigati)
• Two tablespoons vegetable oil
• 100g (31/2oz) shiitake mushrooms, sliced
• 1⁄2 teaspoon cracked black pepper
• Zest and juice of 1 lemon
• 470g (1lb 1oz) jar of béchamel (white) sauce
• 90g (31/4oz) blue cheese of choice, crumbled
• 100g (31/2oz) parmesan, finely
• Grated, to serve (optional)

For the Breadcrumbs:

• Two slices of your choice of bread
• A large handful of basil leaves picked

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C/180°C fan/400°F/Gas 6.
2. First, make the breadcrumbs. Place the bread and the basil leaves in a food processor and blitz to fine crumbs. Tip the crumbs onto a baking tray and bake in the center of the oven for 10 minutes, until golden.
3. Meanwhile, bring a large saucepan of salted water to a boil and add the pasta. Boil according to the packet instructions until al dente.
4. Reserve a cupful of the cooking water.

Purchase the physical copy or download the free e-book to access all 18 recipes.

*Thompson, R. (2021, June 10). The free cookbook designed for people with taste and smell loss from long COVID. Mashable. https://mashable.com/article/taste-and-flavour-cookbook-covid

Much about the novel coronavirus, i.e., COVID-19, is still not fully understood. As research progresses and our knowledge of the virus increases, information can change rapidly. We strive to update all of our articles as quickly as possible, but there may occasionally be some lag between scientific developments and our revisions.