Bring out the chef in you!

Go gourmet

Fetching ingredients, cleaning, and chopping them, as you knead the dough by the side while keeping an eye on the burner lest your daylong efforts go waste, doesn’t sound like a party, right? Gruelling to say the least! What if there was a way to make the same drill exciting, with a couple of changes?

Last weekend, Shwetha, an MBA aspirant in the Capital discovered a way to do it by learning burger making from scratch, at the Monkey Bar. Says she, “Going out for lunch with your friends is a regular affair every weekend. But stepping out of the kitchen of a famous restaurant with pride writ large on your face as you serve your friend a dish that you learnt from a professional chef, is a change that everybody would love to experience.” With a series of culinary and mixology workshops, Skillicious by Skillhippo has networked a number of restaurants in the City to invite Delhiites to acquire culinary skills under the tutelage of the best chefs in the Capital.

One can always search for recipes online or refer to a book, avers Chef Laurant from Rara Avis, but the idea of culinary workshops, which have been very popular in Europe, is different as “People with an instinct for cooking, share their passions, talk about food and life and share a moment with chefs. The purpose of these workshops is to share those moments and a few tricks of our trade with food enthusiasts. Believe me, you cannot possibly find these techniques in your cookbooks.”

Explaining how the workshops work, the chef reveals that a relatively simple dish is picked up for the culinary class; then the chef presents a talk on its origin and flavours before the participants get into the act of chopping, grilling, cooking and eventually making their friends taste their dishes.

“While burgers are universal, there is a lot of skill and finer nuances of making a burger,” expresses Chef Manu Chandra, adding that considering the level of complexity of these dishes, “I do not think this is the workshop that will turn you into sous chef but a workshop that offers you a chance to rustle up a universally loved dish.”

Thrilled after learning a French dish Coq au vin at Rara Avis in Delhi, Asmita Singh wants to repeat the experience many times over. A history graduate from Lady Shri Ram College, Asmita says, “I want to apply to Le Cordon Bleu (a renowned hospitality institute in Paris). Getting to understand the inner working of a restaurant’s kitchen is priceless for an aspirant chef like me.” She instantly registered for the workshop as soon as she read about it on a social media site.  “Having heard of culinary workshops around the world, we were just waiting for an opportunity to get to attend one in our vicinity. How could we miss it?” adds Asmita.

So, its time to give a fresh lease of life to the innate chef in you, who knows, in the near future you might be asking the Sanjeev Kapoor’s and Nigella Lawson’s of the world to eat their heart out!