The Ultimate Cookery Course

What’s the Ultimate Cookery Course all about?

When I started to learn to cook in earnest around ten years ago, I couldn’t find a cookery course book that would fit into to my normal mealtimes.

Most cookery course books I looked at categorised recipes into chapters such as “eggs”; “bread”; “cakes” etc. I wanted to learn all the fundamental cookery techniques and skills but I didn’t want to have to do ten egg dishes in a row or have to spend a whole week eating nothing but cake. That’s fine when you’re at a cookery school but would be close to torture as a home cook.

What I was really looking for was a step-by-step cookery course that would take me through all the key techniques but in such a way that I could do it as part of my normal day-to-day cooking.

A cookery course that lets you build up your skills gradually 

The idea with the Ultimate Cookery Course is to build a set of skills gradually, starting with basics such as knife technique and building up to more complex skills such as using gelatine, making soufflés and preparing fish, but do it in such as way that you can learn while you cook your daily meals.

I put together a list of 84 dishes, one a day for twelve weeks or two six week cookery courses. It’s designed to be an intensive course, requiring a commitment of around one and a half hours a day. However, I also want it to be accessible to anyone who wanted to take it a week at a time or just dip in and out for the odd recipe.

Classic dishes that you can cook as part of your normal meals 

I wanted to choose dishes that people could eat for their normal meals, as well as a few desserts, cakes and puddings for treats. I wanted to choose a balance of skills that started off slowly and then build gradually so you can expand your comfort zone and increase your confidence.

I also wanted to use “classic” dishes, crowd-pleasers and all-time favourites – the kind of food that people really love to eat rather than fancy, new combinations. So I’ve included everything from Lasagne to Lobster Thermidore, Eggs Benedict to Victoria Sandwich.

These dishes will allow you to build a repertoire that would look at home on any decent brasserie, bistro or hotel restaurant menu and give you the skills to start experimenting with new ingredients and building more complex dishes.

A cookery course that teaches you fundamental techniques 

As I was developing the course dishes, I realised that many of these classics naturally demonstrate a key technique, or several key techniques in combination. Lasagne, for example, is a great start with fresh pasta; Eggs Benedict teaches two great techniques with eggs – poaching and making a hot emulsion (the hollandaise sauce). You can even bake your own muffins.

When I started looking at the Ultimate Cookery Course, I realised that there were a few problems that I needed to tackle and, being a perfectionist, I knew that to get everything just right would involve a great deal of time which, with two young children, a busy job and the usual copywriter’s ambitions for international bestselling novel authorship, I just don’t have.

I decided to set up the Ultimate Cookery Course blog as a place to experiment, get feedback and improve my own techniques, as well as just getting some momentum behind the idea and seeing what happens. There are some key questions I want to answer before committing time and money to the Ultimate Cookery Course, so that’s where my audience comes in:

Firstly, who is this course for?

If you can handle cooking pasta with a decent pasta sauce (Carbonara, for example), making a risotto, a curry, a reasonable salad etc then this course is for you. I haven’t started with real basics (boiling water, making toast, cooking dried pasta) but I have included a range of dishes that involve fundamental skills that may be totally new to you or you might just want to know the right way to do it.

Secondly, where to start?

There were a few obvious starting points, foundation skills like making a stock or chopping onions that are showcased well in Minestrone so there was no contention there. But what next? I want each dish to showcase a particular technique but sometimes it’s not obvious the different in skill required between, for example, making a sheet of fresh pasta and baking a sponge cake. So necessarily some of the choices are going to be arbitrary.

Thirdly, which technique is right?

What’s the right way to poach an egg? I’ve got a fairly extensive library of cookery books and I’ve yet to find a definitive technique for poaching an egg. Not only is classic kitchen lore sometimes inconsistent but it may also be wrong – people like Heston Blumenthal et al have been applying science to the kitchen and finding that some of the methods passed down through generations of cooks might just be wrong.

The final reason for setting up this blog is to improve my own techniques and learn even more about cooking. I’m a pretty good cook, but I didn’t feel I had the expertise and authority to create the definitive cookery course – this will give me the excuse I need to get back in among the pots and pans and unleash hell!

Of course, the freedom a blog gives you means I can go off piste occasionally, write about some of the ingredients I use, the food stuff I’m into, the things that go wrong, ask for feedback and advice from better cooks and chefs and generally have a focus for my passion. Let me know what you think!