Cooking With Class

In a moment of weakness, you’ve invited your closest friends round for dinner – you’ve even offered to cook. It’s only when you’re elbow deep in damp puff pastry and there’s mayonnaise in your hair that you realise how terrible a chef your really are. Fortunately, food poisoning isn’t inevitable, because there are thousands of cookery courses located in London that offer you a helping hand whether you don’t know how to boil an egg or if your meringues aren’t as fluffy as you hoped.

Despite its size, London can be a difficult city to meet people in and taking evening cookery classes gives you the chance to socialise with new people in a quiet, friendly environment. Bars and clubs are meant to be the social hub of the city, but if you want to forge friendships and get to know people then evening classes are a much more relaxed environment.

Get To Grips with the Basics

Cooking is one of those skills that can seem like an unconquerable mountain if you’re starting from the beginning, but a good cookery class will start you treating the most basic ingredients properly and before long you will realise that there’s a fully fledged meal before you. You must learn that preparing food is about timing and breaking a meal down into its components, and the rest of your skill will build naturally.

The Cookery School at Little Portland Street is located minutes from Oxford Circus tube station in central London, and offer individual classes or courses depending on how much you have to learn. They have 3 standards of potential chefs: Intermediate, Beginner, and Absolute Beginner, which s a reassuring sign that they know that there are some beginners who don’t know their beetroot from their asparagus.

Exotic Cuisine

Perhaps you’re already comfortable cooking, but you want to add a new type of culinary expertise to your delicious résumé. Schools such as the Billingsgate Seafood Training School offer crash courses in a particular kind of cuisine, all be it with an up at dawn start and a hands on approach to gutting your fish. South East Asian cookery courses are available in East London with Lapan Cookery Classes and Sushi lessons can be found in Central London – there’s a class for every kind of food imaginable, but don’t jump in at the deep end and take up a specialised course if you haven’t mastered the basics yet! Exotic and advanced culinary classes teach you the tricks of the trade to cook meals that will amaze your guests and provide a welcome change and new exciting tastes, so roll up your sleeves and get involved.

Good Old Fashioned Home Cooking

As ever, anything worth having in London can usually be brought to your door in one form or another, and apparently cookery lessons are no different. Invite Me To Dinner is a company that promise you an experienced Italian chef on your doorstep, equipped with knowledge, enthusiasm and ingredients. All you need to provide is a clean kitchen and you can have one-on-one tuition in the comfort of your own home, which is the perfect way to learn if you’re trying to cook the perfect courses for an important dinner party.

If you’re looking for cookery classes in Greater London, don’t assume that you will have to hire a chef to come to your home, because if you would rather get out and enjoy the experience of learning to cook with other enthusiastic students there is plenty of choice. Many restaurants on the outer edges of the city are culinary treasures, nestled around the M25. Rather than keeping all their secrets to themselves, some restaurants open their doors for classes that invite you to learn how to cook food to a professional standard. Finding a restaurant near you is often as simple as trawling local magazines and newsletters for adverts.

The Cookery School is based in central London, W1 and classes can be booked at: http://www.cookeryschool.co.uk/.

The Invite Me To Dinner team can be contacted at their website: www.invitemetodinner.co.uk.

Sam is a freelance article writer who lives and works in the UK and specialises in creative writing and fiction.