Cooking courses in London are increasignly becoming more and more popular. Careful selection of your cooking class on the basis of the flexibility of the teachers and the variety of dishes they offer for you to learn.
You might have spent half of your weekends this year sitting on a very uncomfortalbe stall at Selfridges,
going through the 1,000 page recipe book from Locanda Locatelli and dribbling on every picture. And you might have watched hours of cooking TV programmes, to the point that you now dress like Nigella and speak like Jamie (or viceversa). But there is not much you can do to learn how to cook, other than experience it under proper guidance. This is the scientifically proven way of how kids and adults learn, and it is valid for all subjects, including obviously cooking.
Cooking courses in London are increasignly becoming more and more popular. Being under the eyes of an expert and being guided and corrected on the go is the only way to quickly grasp the essence of cooking, with all those tips making the real difference. All this cannot be written in a book or explained through a screen. How much "enough salt" is actually enough? What does "until cooked" mean? When are egg whites sufficiently "hard"?
And therefore, cookery courses in london have been sprouting up like mushrooms. You can find cooking courses to learn how to prepare sushi, how to bake the perfect souffle', how to assemble the most fantastic parmigiana di melanzane. Most of them are group cookery courses though, involving from 5 to 10 people per chef, in extremely well equipped kitchens. The menu is mostly fixed and the choice normally quite limited, and the chefs are well prepared but only on the menu they teach. There is not much time to fuss around. The schedule is tight and at the end you will probably taste a good lunch with a bunch of strangers or go back home with something like a take-away.
Although sometimes pretty cheap for the individual, unfortunately these courses are usually held during inconvenient times of the day or weekend, for anyone with a normal job or family life, and are run in batches where you will have to follow the instructions of a very busy chef dealing with a large number of students (some of whom, believe me, can be at a very beginner level and therefore slowing down the pace of the lesson incredibly). There are very popular cookery courses in London (such the ones at Caldesi or Divertimenti), but do not have too high hopes on these. It's a nice way of spending an afternoon with friends (or complete strangers, if you are lonely), but it's not the perfect way to learn how to cook.
A very good option instead is individual cookery courses in London arranged at your home.
These are extremely convenient and can be super effective cooking courses: the menu is customised to your needs and you can ask all the questions you have of a fully dedicated chef. You will cook a full menu from beginning to end, and you will have the possibility to eat at home with your friends and family, after the lesson. Costs are not outragious.
Only watch out. Rely on chefs who know what they are doing (avoid Chinese teaching Italian food, Thai teaching sushi, and ... English teaching anything... Ha ha) and have a chat with them before agreeing on the lesson, to understand if they know what they are talking about. As a miracle, after the recession, too many home cookery courses in London have come up, from self taught entrepreneurial bankers who spent long time in Selfridges and now speak like Jamie Oliver... But cannot offer much else other than this.
