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Subject Focus: Cooking Confidence Cooking courses and Cookery classes

The UK’s mouth-watering array of restaurants, delis, specialist food shops and catering businesses has whipped up an ever-increasing army of food lovers in the capital. Many of us dream of having our private passion for cuisine and dedication to food appreciated by a wider audience. Whether you have professional ambitions to become a career chef, to own your own cookery business, or you’re an enthusiastic amateur that wants to sample a cookery course for fun, there’s a bewildering array of courses on offer in the UK…
 
Many of us derive pleasure from cooking for friends and family. It’s great to improve your cookery skills in the kitchen and develop cooking as a hobby. If you are looking to impress your friends at an impending dinner party or improve your knowledge of a specific cuisine, you could try a short cookery course to start with.
 
Institutions across the country offer everything from hands-on sushi courses to specialist curry classes. If you’d love to learn more about a particular cuisine or dish, try a venue like the Ming-Ai (London) Institute. It offers five-week evening cookery course in general oriental cookery and even a Chinese dim sum cookery course. 
 
Cooking for fun
For the time-starved among you or for those taking a first foray into cooking, there are plenty of day cookery courses on offer. You could take a cookery course in Flavours of the Pacific Rim at Leiths for example, where you will learn how to cook with distinctive lemongrass and ginger for an authentic result. 
 
If you return from work exhausted and can’t face the prospect of cooking at home, why not add a little spice to your journey home and try an open evening session? These cookery courses allow you to create a dish or two during the class and learn some useful kitchen techniques at the same time. 
 
Many of these evening cookery classes involve an end-of-session meal, where the participants get a chance to enjoy the fruits of their labour over a carefully selected glass of wine. Some of these cookery evenings promise to teach you a new dish in just half an hour. They are often a chance for participants to learn how to cook a two-course meal and sit down afterwards to enjoy it, all for less than the price of an average restaurant meal. 
 
The Cookery School at Little Portland Street also offers similar day courses, including Spanish cooking, Middle Eastern cuisine and a cookery course called Absolute Beginners. It promises to teach you the basics so that you leave feeling confident you’ve mastered the fundamentals of cooking. 
 
Career chefs
There may be a number of you who are either considering a career move into the food industry or looking for a new skill and have decided to develop your ability in the kitchen. Institutions across the UK are catering for this demand with a raft of introductory cookery courses that will help you translate your cooking talent into a new vocation. 
 
Louise Jordan, Head of Hospitality Workforce Development at Westminster Kingsway College said: ‘The College offers a number of courses for those who have always thought of turning those cooking skills into a professional career but have never had any formal training. We also offer cookery courses for those already working in the hospitality industry but want to learn new front-of-house skills like barista training or develop kitchen skills in butchery, patisserie or creating new dishes.’ 
 
Whether you want to reawaken your passion for cooking or think that a cookery course could be the start of a brand new career, our website lists a whole range of cookery courses to tempt you.
 
 
Cookery Course Review
We sent keen amateur chef Mark Redl along to Italian cookery school La Cucina Caldesi in Marylebone Lane to sample the delights of their Intermediate Italian Cookery course. Here’s how he got on…
 
 
 ‘I’m a confident cook although, as much as I hate to admit it, I don’t know everything. When the opportunity to sharpen and broaden my cooking skills arose, in the form of La Cucina Caldesi’s Italian cookery course, I happily booked myself in. This posed the chance to really discover the secret art of cooking like a native Italian. 
 
After a short and lively introduction it was time to get stuck in. Our tutor, Stefano, outlined a focaccia bread recipe, which requires ‘the duck feet method’ of kneading to create its bubbly texture. We all gave it a go and I was pleased to find out that the bread was easy to make when you know how. 
 
We swiftly moved on to prepare a stew, some of which I was told would be used to create ravioli next week. We were also given a well-needed lesson in knife skills. After this, the third dish to prepare that evening was Tagliata di Manzo, which I’ve since made for friends – it’s become known as the ‘dish of dishes’.
 
After lessons two and three I realised that this was only the beginning. Taster dishes were yet to come, namely a freshly made meat ravioli which can only be described as heavenly and in lesson three, the meat lesson, a piece of lamb so tender it could almost pass your lips unnoticed... almost.
 
We were all given individual meals to create and this finally gave everyone a chance to prove their worth in the kitchen. I was given the task of making Bruschetta with wild mushrooms and shaved truffle. I sautéed the mushrooms, a mixture of field, shitake, button and porcini mushrooms amongst others, adding rosemary and thyme to add flavour. 
 
By the time we finished our dishes I was starving. In the two hours, I’d diced and sliced my way through antipasti, kneaded my way through bread and learnt that you don’t have to use Dolmio to cook like an Italian. After a glass of wine we sat down to eat. The company was good, the food was outstanding and as I left the venue, I was already looking forward to showing off my newly acquired skills at the dinner party I’ve hastily arranged for this weekend.’
 
Fancy joining a cookery course near you?
 
Other types of cooking courses include:
 
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Interested in Cookery? Click here to see Cookery courses

Interested in Cookery? Click here to see Cookery courses