teach a man a dish … and you feed him for life
Food has become a national preoccupation, fed by the constant presence of Jamie, Gordon and other celebrity chefs on our screens. But for some of us, cooking is in danger of becoming a spectator sport as we sit back and watch rather than rolling up our sleeves to join in. Basic skills such as jointing meat, filleting fish and baking bread, which were once taken for granted, have gone by the wayside. I decided to enrol on three very different food courses in my quest to learn some fundamentals of food preparation. Not just cooking, but the whole process from choosing ingredients to preparing them. To understand meat I joined a course at The Ginger Pig in London’s Marylebone, a traditional butcher that specialises in free-range rare breeds with four stores in the capital and one in Yorkshire. For fish I headed to the Billingsgate Seafood Training School at the UK’s biggest inland fish market, and for bread making I went to learn more from the award-winning breadmakers Degustibus.
The Meat Class More »