Cooking Italian at The Cookery School
Rosalind Rathouse is passionate, knowledgeable and enthusiastic about food and she shares this with her students at The Cookery School. She started teaching cooking in South Africa and since moving to the UK, she has taught at a local school and started a pie business. Pursuing her goal of starting a business which uses quality sustainable and organic ingredients where the staff are treated well.
I met her at a Social event at the school for an Italian Cooking lesson where she taught us to make fresh pasta with seasonal asparagus. There are a lot of helpers at the lesson to hold our hands through each process. They are all equally as passionate about The Cookery School and really enjoy working there.
Working in groups, we set about making out pasta. After mixing up the dough mixture we took turns rolling the dough several times through the pasta attachment on the KitchenAid, changing the width setting along the way. (I need to get one of these attachments for my Kitchen Aid). Ideally, you need two pairs of hands for this if you have a long piece of pasta. One pair to feed the pasta and another to catch it on the other end. The last part is to run the pasta sheet through the cutter to make tagliatelle. Place the cut pasta into a tray with a lot of flour or it will all stick together into a big dough ball again and all your careful rolling effort will have been wasted.
The asaparagus was prepared by breaking off the woody stems and slicing them into thin slices to make it quick to cook.
Making Tiramisu
We made some tiramisu for dinner and to take home. Here are the ingredients all laid out for us in preparation. It’s a really easy dessert to put together.
Step 1. Dip the sponge finders into some strong coffee or espresso if you have it and lay it into your serving dish.
Step 2: Mix the egg yolk, mascarpone, cream, and sugar mixture and add some marsala wine.
Finish with a cream layer and sprinkle with some cocoa powder. It’s best eaten after leaving this for a few hours in the fridge for the flavours to meld.
Our class was fun and interactive and the hands on approach to cooking was great. The dishes we cooked were simple yet tasty and as there weren’t any cheffy techniques or special equipment needed, this would be something that we can recreate at home. The step by step instructions was very easy to follow for cooks of all levels.
The Cookery School on Little Portland Street is hidden away in a side street near Oxford Circus. They won an award for “The Best City Cookery School 2013” and have been awarded 3 stars for sustainability. They teach classic and simple cooking using seasonal, sustainable and organic ingredients.They do a variety of lessons from single classes to professional courses. They often host team building events too. You can see all their classes here : http://www.cookeryschool.co.uk/cook/courses/
The Cookery School
15b Little Portland Street
London W1W 8BW
020 7631 4590
EatCookExplore was a guest of The Cookery School
