Masterclass With A Masterchef

Mastering Macarons
Macarons are an elegant treat for anyone with a sweet tooth. With a delicious assault on the taste buds, the flavours of these delicate pastries will be the talking point of your home baking. Although they can seem tricky to make, we break the process down into easy to follow steps to ensure success every time. Working to recreate the demonstrated recipes, we will be making different flavoured macarons so at the end of the day you will have a colourful sele...ction box.
History Although the macaron is predominantly a French confection, there has been much debate about its origins. Larousse Gastronomique cites the macaron as being created in 1791 in a convent near Cormery. Some have traced its French debut back to the arrival of Catherine de' Medici's Italian pastry chefs whom she brought with her in 1533 upon marrying Henry II of France.[8] In 1792, macarons began to gain fame when two Carmelite nuns, seeking asylum in Nancy during the French Revolution, baked and sold the macaron cookies in order to pay for their housing. These nuns became known as the "Macaron Sisters". In these early stages, macarons were served without special flavours or fillings. It was not until the 1830s that macarons began to be served two-by-two with the addition of jams, liqueurs, and spices. The macaron as it is known today, composed of two almond meringue discs filled with a layer of buttercream, jam, or ganache filling, was originally called the "Gerbet" or the "Paris macaron." Pierre Desfontaines of the French pâtisserie Ladurée has sometimes been credited with its creation in the early part of the 20th century, but another baker, Claude Gerbet, also claims to have invented it
Course Includes
1 day tuition Information pack
Experience Level INTERMEDIATE LEVEL: You are an enthusiastic home cook who likes to be adventurous and entertain. You will be quite familiar with common cookery concepts such as baking, basic knife skills, frying and grilling and able to follow a recipe. No other special skills are required as we’ll teach you everything you need to know. You may be using equipment you haven’t come across before.
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Barbeque like a Boss!
Course Includes
1 day course tuition ... Information pack
Experience Level INTERMEDIATE LEVEL: You are an enthusiastic home cook who likes to be adventurous and entertain. You will be quite familiar with common cookery concepts such as baking, basic knife skills, frying and grilling and able to follow a recipe. No other special skills are required as we’ll teach you everything you need to know. You may be using equipment you haven’t come across before.
Our ancestors must have fast discovered that cooking over towering flames is for the less evolved and that grilling is best done over the glowing coals of a dying fire. No doubt they also soon discovered that building a fire and waiting for it to burn down is time-consuming. With the invention of charcoal man learned to circumvent this step. Charcoal has many advantages: it burns cleaner and hotter than wood, it burns more evenly and longer than wood, and it can be made from materials other than wood-a useful attribute when firewood is scarce. For early humans, its usefulness extended beyond cooking. The slow, steady burn provided intense heat for the smelting and working of metals, and the spent coals became drawing tools for the cave art that marked the beginnings of pictographic knowledge. Indeed, the virtues of charcoal are so numerous that it is no exaggeration to say that if cooking with fire was the technology that made us human, charcoal was the technology that gave us civilization.
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Bread for Beginners Baking your own bread. The perfect loaf is a result of care and practised method. It doesn’t come from an inherited knack for baking. If you have never baked before, be reassured that with simple ingredients and tools you can make a loaf to be proud of. Avoid becoming over concerned with perfection, it is more about the ‘Zen’ of bread making Course Includes
1 day course tuition ... Information pack
Experience Level FOUNDATION LEVEL: You may be a beginner in the kitchen but you may also be wanting to discover new flavours and techniques. You need not have any previous experience of cookery, this type of course will teach you the fundamental skills and techniques required to build your confidence and knowledge We will concentrate on techniques and help you understand the principals. Only equipment found in most domestic kitchens will be used on these courses.
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Chefs Chefs are professionals in a craft as old as history itself, with lessons to be learned, apprenticeships to complete and secrets to pass on only to other members of the craft. It is a craft that requires us to work ridiculous hours in a place as claustrophobic as a box and hotter than Dante's hell, and to do what we do and make it seem so easy and simple requires untold hours of practice. And it is more than a craft; it is a life, a vocation. It’s not a job, we are Chef...s. And we are not normal. But in this day and age we are presented as normal, and we may even present ourselves as such, and the public begins to see chefs as just that. Until one day they find themselves at a table, in a restaurant, at the end of one gastronomical delight after another, and they know that whoever created it is not like anyone else. Not normal either and it is a privilege to be recognised for it.
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Food Ethos
‘Modernist British Food’ – that’s it. No European twist; no fusion; no global menu; no apology- just British food at its best. And how? I use the best ingredients- locally sourced; seasonally purchased, cooked with passion, good humour, a dash of irony and an attention to detail. To showcase these local blessings I use the most modern cooking techniques to produce some of the finest and most exciting dishes in Essex. It is this combination of technique and one o...f the best local larders in the country that allow me to make dining out exciting again.
As a chef I can only smile at the wonderful ingredients we have on our doorstep here in and around Colchester and north Essex, and the artisan producers who spend so much time and effort to bring us these ingredients at their very best. Everything from some of the finest Beef, Lamb and Pork, through all the excellent kitchen garden, hedgerow and orchard produce to some truly excellent beverages. And the icing on the cake (pardon the pun) must be the close locale of the coastline and all its bounty, with Colchester oysters claiming king of the hill. The challenge I face as a chef is how to present such a gift of ingredients in a manner that allows the customer to appreciate how fine our larder is. What could be better than to sit down to dinner with good friends, sharing good wine, and enjoying the kind of food that stirs the soul- invoking memories of carefree times and ‘Cider with Rosie’ and yet challenging the diner with a new and exciting experience. In this corner of Europe our culinary heritage is almost totally ignored. In our quest to embrace everything else and settling for the something not quite right, we overlook so much that is good in our own food culture. Kedgeree; Shepherd’s pie, Welsh rarebit can be sublime when prepared with skill and ingenuity. This green and pleasant land in which we live is an amazing natural larder with some of the most varied range of ingredients available to a discerning cook. All that’s required is the confidence to showcase it, inspired by dishes that we love.
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