Cook with the pros: What you’ll learn in Melbourne restaurant cooking masterclasses
Melbourne’s hospo hot shots are helping home cooks learn new skills in the kitchen while cooking a feast from their favourite restaurant. Here’s what you can learn from a cooking masterclass.
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Pivot. In a crowded field, this must surely be up there jostling for Macquarie Dictionary’s 2020 Word of the Year.
In Melbourne’s hospitality industry it’s certainly the word on everyone’s lips, as chefs and restaurateurs transformed their businesses overnight to comply with the coronavirus crisis lockdown.
But it’s not just takeaway and delivery that’s keeping them busy.
Some are offering weekly fresh produce boxes, others are keeping the Sunday roast tradition alive.
And others are helping those wanting to break the drudgery of isolation by offering to come into their kitchens and cook. Not physically, of course. But virtually.
Last Friday night, Shane Delia held the first of a series of Maha live cook-along classes. Participants cooked a multi-course Middle Eastern meal from a pre-ordered pack of prepared ingredients alongside Delia doing the same streamed via Instagram.
Windsor restaurant Tipico has adapted its popular cooking masterclasses, with Italian classics now taught to participants in their own kitchens via Zoom.
And South Yarra’s peripatetic Atlas — where chef/restaurateur Charlie Carrington changes the cuisine served every few months — is taking Melbourne’s cooks on a weekly tour around the globe, with Carrington sharing his cooking how-to and travel tips via YouTube tutorials.
These hospo hot shots are helping cooks learn some new skills — and both the chefs and their stay-at-home students are having a ball.
Delia says the classes have connected a wide audience with his Maha restaurant, with some people who had never dined at the CBD restaurant signing up to cook along with him.
“For me to do a traditional cooking class at Maha there’s so much involved — I have to get portable screens in, print the menus, bring a whole brigade in to help me do it. There’s such a cost to get it done. But this, I just have to write a menu, send it out. On the night it’s just me and a camera — bang, we’re on.”
Tipico co-owner Marco Spieri says their online masterclasses have been well received by novice and confident cooks alike.
“There’s a lot of people who know how to do these things, but feel, maybe I’m making a mistake? They want to see how it’s made from a real chef,” he says.
The process is remarkably simple: find a class, pay your dues. Get your box of ingredients delivered and jump online at the designated time.
Over the past fortnight, we took some of these cook-along classes to see how they stack up in our new socially-distant world.
TIPICO
“The thing we miss most about having people in (to the restaurant) is having a chat,” says Tipico’s Marco Spieri, “so that’s why instead of just doing a video we use Zoom, so we can get into people’s houses and build the relationships we miss.”
Just like coronavirus, video conferencing app Zoom was unheard of a few months ago but is now something most are now all-too familiar with, whether for work or for group drinks play.
It’s a bold move for the Tipico team to make use of this technology for a cooking class — there’s the need to mic up and have someone in control of the Zoom screens — but this first masterclass is impressively glitch free. With a couple of cameras in use, it’s a terrifically professional set up.
There are about 30 of us in kitchens around Melbourne who have logged in this Saturday morning to learn how to make fresh pasta, having taken delivery the day before of our box of tricks that includes flour, eggs, salt and tomato sugo.
Over the next 90 minutes chef Daniele Colombo takes us through the how to’s of making fresh pappardelle, Zoom interactivity enabling questions to be fielded with as much ease as if we were kneading and rolling and dusting and cutting the dough all together in the Windsor restaurant.
The time passes quickly, the skills and tips are fantastically handy, and if my end product wasn’t as polished as that on the screen, it at least came with the satisfaction that only truly comes with DIY dining.
Score: Four and a half mamma mias (out of five)
Coming classes: Tiramisu masterclass (May 23), gnocchi (June 6)
Cost: $45 tiramisu; $60 gnocchi; orders by 5pm the Thursday prior to class.
MAHA GO
“What do you mean, slow down? I’ve just put a pan on the stove.”
It’s five minutes into Shane Delia’s first Maha cooking class streaming via Instagram Live this Friday night and already some of the 300-odd viewers are falling behind.
He’s not having it though — there’s just an hour to cook a four-course Middle Eastern meal of which some parts are simply heat-and-assemble, but most dishes are properly made from scratch.
The Spice Journey chef is comfortable with a camera and, with red wine in hand, is the consummate host from his home kitchen — charming, funny and candid, his wife Maha lobbing the questions posted via Instagram to him while he cooks and keeps a keen pace.
It’s a rollickingly good time. Tonight’s meal is a multi-layered feast consisting of baked lamb kibbeh filled with spiced halloumi and topped with tahini, saffron and barberry XO poached chicken, greens sauteed with toum (garlic sauce) and an aged rice pilaf.
The food is bountiful and terrific (I’ll definitely recreate the kibbeh), the medium fun and surprisingly interactive, with a good ratio of cooking to opening containers, and it’s exceptional value. Not only do you get this four-course feast that feeds two (with loads of leftovers) but also four pieces of beautiful Salt&Pepper crockery to serve it in. Now that’s cooking with class.
Score: Five out of five saffron threads
Coming classes: May 15 and 29
Cost: $130 including all ingredients and crockery; orders by 5pm, May 13 (unless sold out) for delivery/pick up on May 14 for May 15 class.
ATLAS
With its unique concept of changing cuisines every few months, Charlie Carrington’s Atlas restaurant has a legion of devotees, many of whom have signed up for one — or all — of the three-night masterclasses that tackle a different cuisine each week.
Promising “restaurant quality meals in 15 minutes from fridge to plate”, Carrington augments how-to recipes online with YouTube videos where he cooks and plates up each night’s dish. He also does a nightly Instagram Live to answer questions.
This week it’s Peruvian, and the box is filled with tomatoes, onion and coriander to make salsa criolla, potatoes and grains, sauces and marinating meats. The first night it’s papas a la huancaina, which is a bit like Peruvian version of niçoise, with a salad of roasted potatoes, olives, tomatoes and egg topped with pan-fried chicken and spicy cheese sauce. It’s terrific.
The second night it’s lomo saltado — a beef stir fry — and the third, whole smoked cauliflower with quinoa.
With most of the cooking done from scratch — bar the sauces which have been premade — the 15 minutes from plate-to-fridge is slightly ambitious, but the dishes are interesting, tasty and generous. As at Atlas, dishes are more Carrington’s interpretation of the flavours of Peru rather than strictly traditional, but given we’re not going anywhere for a long while yet, for global tastes to break up a long lockdown week, it’s hard to beat.
Score: Four out of five passport stamps
Coming classes: Brazil (May 11-17), Thailand (May 18-24) and China (May 24-31).
Cost: From $49 (one person, three meals) through to $139 (six people, three meals).
Orders by 5pm Saturday for delivery the following Tuesday/Wednesday.
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