THE COOKERY SCHOOL

WHERE Demuths Cookery School, Bath (demuths.co.uk) THE COURSE Vegan Fast and Delicious, 10am-4pm, £95, including refreshments and lunch TESTER Jess Sutton

WHAT IT’S LIKE Demuths Cookery School specialises in plant-based cooking. Owned by chef, restaurateur and veggie pioneer Rachel Demuth, its HQ is a beautiful Georgian townhouse in Bath. My class was a half-day but the school also offers full-day, evening, weekend and longer courses; all are vegetarian, covering Mexican, Indian, Japanese, Spanish, Italian and other cuisines, plus raw and gluten-free cooking classes too.

Bath looked wonderful in the morning sunshine and the warmth of the city was echoed in the friendly welcome from staff. The school has great views – almost too gorgeous to turn away from while we tucked into our freshly baked vegan biscuits and cups of tea. The recipes we cooked were all seasonal – the veg sourced from a local producer. I was excited to learn that we’d be cooking and eating two lunches as well as pudding…Yes!

WHAT I LEARNED Some people hear the word ‘vegan’ and a ‘must I eat rabbit food?’ panic ensues. The class showed this doesn’t need to be the case. All the ingredients we used were easy to buy in any supermarket, and we were tutored by two chefs who really know their stuff. Lydia taught us expert knife skills, getting us to chop vegetables extra-fine to make our starter, ribollita – a substantial, chunky Tuscan-style vegetable soup. While the soup was simmering, the other tutor, Janifa, explained how to make farinata or socca, a pancake-like Italian dish that’s made with chickpea flour.

Crispy tofu is a dish I love but I’ve never managed to quite get it right when I cook it at home, so I was eager to discover from Janifa that there’s a secret: you coat marinated tofu in cornflour, along with various spices and sesame seeds, so the outside goes gorgeously crisp when you fry it. It was impossible to resist and we ate piece after piece, dunked in sweet chilli sauce or, as here, in tahini dressing.

On to pudding… We were shown how to make vegan labneh (strained yogurt) to accompany chocolate and hazelnut brownies. To make our vegan version we used plain soya yogurt (instead of the more usual greek yogurt) that had been strained overnight. We were encouraged to add our own flavourings, such as rosewater, orange blossom water, maple syrup and agave syrup. Being able to tweak the flavours to our liking was, for me, one of the highlights of the class.