Chinese food has always been a favourite in our family. It wasn’t only because my husband started experimenting with Chinese cuisine a few years ago and in time became quite proficient not only in entertaining us with a variety of stir fries, but also impressing our guests – especially our friends from Poland – for whom chow mein was an exotic experience. It meant he was in charge of dinners on some Sundays and I always gladly surrendered my place at the hob together with my favourite apron.
For many years we also had Futana, a wonderful Chinese restaurant just at the bottom of our road, where the food (and the service) never disappointed us.
As they say you can’t have too much of a good thing. So the news that I had won two places in a cookery class at the AEG- sponsored School of Wok (www.schoolofwork.co.uk) made my day.
At this point we didn’t know what fun lay ahead of us. The choice of instruction at this temple of oriental cooking is vast. This ‘culinary institute’ offers Chinese, Thai, Malaysian and Vietnamese cuisine – as the main strands of learning – and many more. They are also very understanding of modern lifestyles and their classes come in many formats. You can choose from one hour lessons, three hours and five hour sessions, weekend and five-day courses – after which the students are ready to enter Masterchef, no doubt. The School is conveniently located at the western edge of London’s Soho from where most of its produce and seasoning come.
Hoping that this is not going to be our last experience of the school, we decided to start from getting the fundamentals right and opted for the ‘Understanding the Wok’ class. The teaching style of our chef, Neville Leaning was very relaxed, his instructions fun and tips – priceless. For example, don’t you find peeling garlic really fiddly? It was my experience too. Neville demonstrated that the easiest way to help a clove of garlic to shed its dry ‘shirt’ was to wet it and then whack it with a flat blade of a chef’s knife. Whoops – the clove almost undresses itself.
Early on in our three-hour class, we started working on our knife skills (I hope I am not getting myself into trouble with the web police) as 80% of Chinese cooking is prep work: cleaning the produce, dicing, chopping, stirring and marinating it – before the actual process of heat-assisted cooking begins.
We were to tackle three dishes with a moderate level of difficulty: stir fried Sichuan chicken (well seasoned chicken breast with cashew nuts; the name comes from Sichuan pepper corns), a flash fried morning glory – a beautifully theatrical in its colour and appearance Chinese vegetable reminiscent of kale leaves, egg fried rice and jiaozi – minuscule Chinese dumplings. We learnt to fold jiaozi – which can be fried or used in soups – which requires a lot of concentration (those with joga training had a head start) and very nimble fingers.
The results of our efforts were delicious but for me personally a real revelation was learning to fold fried egg (in the same format as for breakfast) into the cooked rice. Properly done and generously seasoned with light soya sauce and ‘enhanced’ with petit pois it tasted and looked like in our favourite restaurant. I was proud of myself.
Cooking at the School of Wok was also an opportunity to use AEG appliances – the induction hobs, teppan yaki and super-efficient extractor hoods (Chinese food has to be smoking hot). I feel that this is an often overlooked benefit of cookery schools. If you’re considering investing in new appliances you can test them there before you make a decision on a brand and a particular model, and part with cash.
Cooking at the School is fun. We came there with varying levels of culinary expertise, expectations, habits (together with stories to tell) and hang ups. Neville got us prepping and cooking – and gave us the confidence that it will all turn out OK in the end. And indeed, it did. We all agreed on this as we wolfed down the results of our efforts in the shared meal, washed down with a nice glass of wine. And we laughed a lot… It’s perhaps not surprising that cooking together does wonders for your relationship…with your partner but also with the world around you.
