One Man Is Re-Creating Airplane Food At Home. Here's Why
You may think you miss traveling and all that entails, but you're not likely to go as far as active social media user Nik Sennhauser has, because he doesn't just like travel — he's also a plane food enthusiast. He loves his plane cuisine so much he has been recreating his favorite meals at home and posting photos of them on social media. Sennhauser told TODAY that he: "always had an interest in plane food." Everything from the taste to the way it's served piqued his interest from the time he was young. "I was the kid that would spend half the flight sitting in the galley chatting with the flight attendants," he described in the interview.
From what he's said about his growing-up years, we can see why."The first time I got on a plane I was about five months old. I grew up between Austria and Thailand, so I'd be on a plane every two to three months or so. It was the one place where, as a kid, I would just eat the whole meal without question," he told CNN Travel.
And while Sennhauser used to travel regularly, the pandemic has turned transcontinental hops into a thing of the past. Instead of traveling, he now spends weekends going through old photos to get inspiration, and then cooks up a storm, plates them on authentic crockery, and posts the fruits of his labor on social media under the handle Flysoplane.
Preparing and plating inflight copycat meals can take up a whole weekend
Nik Sennhauser's pandemic hobby is so time-consuming he doesn't do anything else on weekends (via CNN Travel), but he appears to enjoy his at-home-yet-inflight dining experiences so much that he can plate any meal to make it look like the real deal. Though his red chicken curry with rice, carrots, and kale, with a Thai Som Tum carrot salad and mango pudding looks better than the stuff you might get on a transcontinental flight (via Instagram).
While Sennhauser told TODAY he's not a "natural cook," his different renditions of plane food undoubtedly look more appetizing. Plane food is notoriously bad, thanks to the fact that they are pre-made, frozen, then thawed at 40,000 feet. The cabin atmosphere also makes it a challenge for our sense of smell — which works hand-in-hand with our sense of taste — to function properly, according to TIME. The outlet reviewed the problem with plane food and reports that in order to for a dish to taste the way it does on land, inflight chefs need to add up to 30 percent more sugar and/or salt.
Sennhauser appreciates the fact that airlines have done what they can to make inflight food palatable. He says he thought of flying is head-turning enough, "and [then] there's someone who comes around with a menu to offer you the choice between two hot main courses. If that's not magical, I don't know what is," he said to TODAY.