Leiths Cookery Week – day one

So, if you’ve read Friday’s preview, you will know that this week I’m doing a day by day review of my week at Leiths School of Food and Wine. This is the round up of Monday 8th on the white intermediate course.

My group (32 ish) was split into two classses of 16, each with two chefs (plus an amazing team of washer uppers) to help them out with recipes. We started out with making a pear, walnut, and amaretto loaf cake with streusal topping, which was amazing. As recipes go, it covered a few of the bases, as it involved beating egg whites, folding flour and ground almonds, and rubbing in flour and butter to make the crumble streusel topping. It wasn’t difficult at all – vaguely fiddly but not challenging.

The problem with intermediate courses in just about anything, is that ‘intermediate’ is incredibly vague and difficult to pin down. For instance some of our group didn’t know that getting fat in egg whites would make them impossible to whip to medium soft peaks. As I expected, some of the course (such as this kind of cake) was already familiar to me. I think with an intermediate course, that’s to be expected. Some of the things I’ve done a hundred times (cake), some things only a few (choux pastry) and some things never before (filleting a fish). You just have to estimate which is going to be roughly right for you and the skill set you’re looking to develop.

For the second recipe, we made aubergine and proscuitto gougères, which involve making choux pastry, adding parmesan to it, using it to line a ramekin, and then filling the middle with a gorgeous mix of aubergine and proscuitto. There were only two of us in the group who’d made choux pastry before (though to be fair, I’d only made it for the first time about 4 days before the course). The lesson in choux pastry was helpful – I learned a lot about what to look for when it’s the right consistency (it should drop off the spoon reluctantly) and I learned that you don’t always need to add all the egg because flour can vary in terms of age and type, and it can even be affected by the weather! Plus the chef, Helli, was amazing – very patient and very knowledgeable – an absolute star to have in the kitchen.

After making the choux, we made the filling, which was finely chopped pan fried aubergine mixed with proscuitto (I used rather a lot more than the recipe suggested..!), mustard, and double cream. The pastry then rises up around the filling and creates the most gorgeous sumptuous little pot of HEAVEN. Plus it was relatively challenging, so that lesson was brilliant all round. We ate those for lunch with a herb salad, which was very tasty.

After our kitchen session, we went to the demo kitchen for the afternoon and watched a lovely chef make feta stuffed roast lamb en balon, duck breast with lime and ginger, warm pigeon and cracked wheat salad, ribeye steak with chimichurri sauce and lamb daube. The meals are all prepared at the front of the demo room, but there are two screens with cameras focusing on the prep areas and hobs, so even people sat at the back can see. The chef (I arrived slightly late to the afternoon session so I missed her name!) who did our demos was lovely – very funny and chatty, but also informative. The demos are obviously not hands on but they’re very useful and I learned an awful lot, and you get to try everything they make. Plus you get to see lots more recipes in the making, which is obviously brilliant. I’ll definitely be making the lamb daube myself – it’s rich and delicious, and quite amazing served with mash. I’m not so sure I’ll be tunnel boning a shoulder of lamb though – it took our professional chef 20 mins so it would take me at least 45!

It was a brilliant first day – at times I worried it would be too simple for me, but I still learned a lot and it’s SO much fun being in the kitchens all day and getting to ask every silly question you’ve ever had about recipes, techniques, and foods.

Five things I learned on day one:

• If your herbs are out in a warm kitchen and are starting to look a bit wilted, pop them in a bowl of iced water for a few mins. They will perk up!
• You should use a small roasting tin for meat so that the fit is quite snug – this will help keep in all the flavour and moisture.
• When rubbing butter into a crumble, you should only rub the butter into the flour – add the sugar after it’s become like bread crumbs. Sugar, oats, and other ingredients can interfere and can easily be added afterward.
• Don’t cook with wines that are too purple – so avoid Shiraz. It’s best to use the kind of wine you would drink with the dish.
• You should place duck breasts skin down in a cold pan before gradually warming them up to render the fat. They are HELLA fatty, so I really recommend doing this. Then you can save the duck fat for roasting potatoes later! :D

Tomorrow I’ll be writing about making hazelnut and raisin bread, and watching the chef make pecan sticky buns, among other things. My mouth is watering at the thought!

See you tomorrow..!

 Disclosure: I contacted Leiths about their courses and arranged for a discount on their intermediate course in exchange for an honest review of my experience, which I have chronicled over a series of posts.