THE COOKERY SCHOOL
WHERE The Cookery School at The Grand, York; thegrandyork.co.uk
THE COURSE Around East Asia (£159 per person for full day with lunch)
TESTED BY Hugh Thompson
STATE-OF-THE-ART Head tutor Andrew Dixon (right) makes cooking East Asian dishes easy
THE SETTING
Aptly named The Grand, this opulent and imposing hotel was once the headquarters of the North Eastern Railway and lies between the train station and the city centre of historic York; you can see the towers of the great cathedral from its windows. The hotel’s state-of-the-art cookery school opened in March this year as part of a major refurbishment.
GROUP SIZE AND WORKSPACE
It’s one of the best-equipped cookery schools I’ve visited: there are gleaming pans and tools, cream granite worktops, induction hobs with built-in extractors, and sleek copper lights. Each person (up to a maximum of 12) has their own equipment drawers, oven and hob. At one end there’s a large kitchen island, where we perched on stools as head tutor Andrew Dixon talked us through the basics of East Asian cookery and demonstrated the dishes.
DO YOU NEED TO BE A GOOD COOK?
Not at all. My group varied from curious cooks to a young chef keen to learn new cuisines. The pace was relaxed and we concentrated on one dish at a time, so it was easy to follow. We cooked a menu of tom yum soup, beef massaman curry with lemongrass and coconut rice, chargrilled sprouting broccoli with cashews, chilli and garlic, and roast pineapple in dark rum syrup with lime crème fraîche (see opposite). The recipes may sound complicated but they weren’t – the trickiest thing we did was peel and devein prawns.
WHAT I LEARNED
In the first (quite lengthy) demo, Andrew explained that although East Asian cooking is perceived as difficult, once you make the spice pastes it’s pretty straightforward. We watched as he told us about each ingredient, then how to prep the pastes and cook with them. Because they involve a lot of peeling and pounding, it’s not practical to make curry pastes in small amounts, so Andrew made enough of each paste for us all to use.