Best cooking schools for five-star dining at home
What better way to upgrade your culinary skills than with local legends sharing their secrets?
This article appeared in issue six of Travel + Luxury magazine. Explore the full edition here.
Food and, more specifically, dining out have long been a reason to leave town. Some of us head to a supermarket or farmers’ market straight after touchdown in a new place to marvel at all those novel cans and jars and produce, while others book tables at revered restaurants months in advance.
Now culinary schools are also on that list. Cooking classes are an ideal way to parachute straight into a new locale and become acquainted with the locals via their food traditions.
From the art of perfect pasta in Victoria’s King Valley to a taste of Southeast Asia in Queensland, we’ve rounded up some of Australia’s best cooking schools.
Casa Carboni, SA
Trip to Italy cancelled? Keep your suitcase packed – Casa Carboni enoteca and cooking school in the Barossa offers a taste of la dolce vita here on home soil.
Matteo Carboni hails from Parma in northern Italy, but he has been sharing the secrets of silken handmade pasta with Aussies for 10 years, together with his wife Fiona, who looks after front of house – and, more importantly perhaps, the vino.
Matteo’s classes are intimate and hands-on as he takes you on a tour of the boot, with pasta as the map. Taste the island of Capri with ravioli filled with locally made fresh cheese and suspended in a fresh tomato sugo, or head to Puglia as you shape orecchiette before tossing it with a lip-puckering combo of cime di rapa (bitter greens), anchovy and garlic.
The Agrarian Kitchen Cooking School and Farm, TAS
Rodney Dunn and Séverine Demanet’s bastion of paddock-to-plate cooking, The Agrarian Kitchen, has a new cooking school and kitchen garden opening in October. After 12 years of holding classes in their home kitchen, the action will now take place in a new purpose-built venue adjoining their New Norfolk restaurant.
“I want to create the best kitchen garden in Australia and it’s coming along amazingly. It has been designed by our gardener to supply the restaurant and cooking school.”
Classes will be led by Rodney as well as visiting experts, and while there will be signatures such as The Agrarian Experience, The Whole Hog and Charcuterie, the highlight will be the new half-hectare walled kitchen garden.
“I said I want to create the best kitchen garden in Australia and it’s coming along amazingly,” says Rodney.
“This garden is four times the size of our last one and has been designed by our head gardener, Mitch Thiessen, to supply the restaurant and cooking school.”
Cooking-school guests will harvest produce, then return to the kitchen to prepare a feast. Green thumbs should also look out for the new gardening and soil classes that will be added to the roster.
Dairy Flat Lodge & Farm, VIC
From the crack team behind Lake House in Daylesford, Dairy Flat Lodge & Farmdishes up more bucolic bliss. Surrounded by rolling paddocks, vineyards, olive groves and gardens, this is the place for a country getaway or a day trip out of town.
Chef-owner Alla Wolf-Tasker has teamed up with celebrated baker Michael James (late of Melbourne’s acclaimed Tivoli Road Bakery) to offer sourdough-baking classes at on-site bakery Bake House. Guided by the best in the (baking) business, you’ll learn how to knead and roll your own sourdough baguettes, loaves, Danishes and even doughnuts.
Cape Lodge, WA
From truffle hunting to foraging Aboriginal Noongar bush food with a Wadandi custodian, hyper-local experiences abound for the culinary curious at Cape Lodgein Margaret River’s Yallingup.
At this luxe stay chef Tony Howell offers cooking demonstrations as well as private cooking classes when he’s not serving guests his two-, four- and six-course seasonal tasting menus in the lakeside restaurant.
Another cooking school stay in the region is Wildwood Valley. While the self-contained cabins are more pared-back than the suites at Cape Lodge, the appeal is the back-to-nature setting and the cooking school run by Sioban Baldini, who trained under Neil Perry in Sydney before working at Martin Boetz’s Longrain.
Given her mentors, it’s no surprise Baldini is passionate about Italian and Thai cuisine, and her four-hour workshops allow plenty of time to chop, sauté and sizzle a five-course feast to enjoy.
Spirit House, QLD
You’d be forgiven for thinking you’d landed in steamy Southeast Asia at Spirit House in Yandina in the Sunshine Coast region, where a torchlit boardwalk guides the way through the rainforest with its chorus of frogs and cicadas.
“Why not learn to tame the heat of the wok to cook your own duck red curry with lychee or crisp barramundi with tamarind chilli sauce?”
Sure, you could have a perfectly enjoyable lunch or dinner here in one of the Asian-inspired pavilions among the serene Buddha statues and perky ginger plants, but why not learn to tame the heat of the wok to cook your own duck red curry with lychee or crisp barramundi with tamarind chilli sauce?
Sunday Kitchen, NSW
Mother and daughter team Sivine Tabbouch and Karima Hazim may have officially launched their boutique Sydney cooking school Sunday Kitchenin 2018, but it is Karima’s fond childhood memories of watching her mother and grandmother preparing Sunday lunch that sparked the idea.
Karima describes their menu as “simple Lebanese home-cooking”, but with flavour bombs dropping one after the next, the dishes are anything but humble.
Menus rotate between lamb, fish, vegetarian and breakfast every Sunday, and highlights include lamb kibbeh nayyeh and Sivine’s signature (and dangerously moreish) eggplant yoghurt dip served with fried bread. A special word of warning to students: arrive hungry.
A Tavola!, VIC
Nestled in the beautiful northeastern King Valley wine region, Pizzini Wines is an ode to Alfredo and Katrina Pizzini’s Italian heritage. So it only makes sense that cooking is part of the experience.
In a relaxed atmosphere, Katrina takes you through the basics of the Italian kitchen, from pasta and gnocchi with seasonal sauces to aperitivo snacks, wood-fired pizza and delightfully puffy calzone.
Then it’s time for a wine tasting to pick the drop that will best suit your dish. That could be pinot grigio to go with gnocchi in a pumpkin, gorgonzola and pancetta sauce, nebbiolo with Katrina’s signature meatballs, or a juicy Nonna Gisella sangiovese with a perfectly blistered prosciutto and spinach calzone.
Daylesford Longhouse, VIC
While this boutique farmstay and cooking school in Daylesford was featured on the seventh season of Grand Designs for its contemporary design and striking greenhouse (the 100-metre-long farmhouse also took out Australian House of the Year in 2019), it’s the cooking school we’re interested in here.
Seasoned cooks may take an intensive masterclass in anything from cheesemaking to curing and fermenting, while dilettantes can keep it light with a Lunch and Learn session. The cooking school partners with a host of cooks, chefs, artisans and producers, so you could be learning the inside story of traditional Jewish home-cooking with Monday Morning Cooking Club’s Lisa Goldberg one weekend, or find yourself knee-deep in terrine, cassoulet and confit duck at a charcuterie masterclass the next.
Belinda Jeffery Pop-Ups, NSW
If cooking with an Australian food legend in the lush Northern New South Wales hinterland is on your must-do list, this one is for you. However, snagging one of the eight spots at Belinda Jeffery’s hotly coveted pop-ups could be as tricky as trying to find a park on Byron’s main drag in the middle of January.
Held in a charming 120-year-old country hall in the Byron hinterland, expect generous, vegetable-based country fare with a cake (apple pecan crumble cake, perhaps) or pastry (blueberry crostata, say) thrown in.
Banana leaves sway in the breeze and cows amble outside the windows as you sit down to a long lunch at the end of it all while someone else does the dishes.
The Tamarind Cooking School, QLD
Master French, Italian, Thai, Cambodian or Malaysian cuisine in the stunning Sunshine Coast hinterland. Chef Terrence Alexander runs the cooking school at Spicers Tamarind Retreat where luxury is the order of the day, whether you’re taking the plunge in your private cedar hot tub or rolling up your sleeves in the cooking school.
Do your best not to be distracted by the dreamy rainforest vistas as you’re whipping up barramundi jungle curry, adobo pork and Aperol Spritz panna cotta – you can eat those with your eyes when you sit down to lunch with a tipple at the end of your class.