Want to cook like a Michelin-starred chef? Me neither, but a cooking class at Michelin-starred Northcote, in the Ribble Valley, is an experience you will want to repeat.
I love to cook, and in lockdown (wow, that seems so long ago now) with time on my hands, I added a few new dishes to my repertoire – but since then life as usual has resumed and my weekly meal planner lacks verve, the same old dishes on repeat. After a day at Northcote however, the Michelin-starred hotel and restaurant in the glorious Ribble Valley, have been reinvigorated and added some new, delicious and shockingly straightforward (when you think who came up with them) recipes to my range.
Lisa Goodwin-Allen has won many, many awards, and has held on to Northcote’s Michelin Star since taking on the mantle of executive chef in 2015. Heading off to a cookery class in her kitchen felt a little daunting, as I am not the most delicate of chefs, and haute cuisine isn’t in my skill set. I needn’t have worried though, as what I learned was practical, manageable in a home kitchen and easily recreated by the average home cook – but oh my, it was fun to learn.
Slightly nervous, the day’s class met with our tutors for the day, Rick Ogden and Ben Hinchliffe, and discovered what we would be learning to cook: warm cured salmon in a white balsamic butter sauce, with dill oil and pickled cucumber; salt aged beef fillet with a marrowbone crust, with a smoked pancetta and mushroom Bourguignon, and pomme Anna; and Lisa’s famous apple cheesecake.
We started with the apple cheesecake, an incredibly complicated looking pudding, but actually quite simple to make. If I invest in some moulds and the spray, I could easily make it at home, which when you see the finished product is hard to believe. We started with a custard (a new experience for half the group, who were soon quite thrilled to discover their capabilities in custard-making. The custard is then frozen in semi-hemispherical moulds, whlle we moved on to the next stage in our morning’s lesson.
The salmon and steak dishes were equally straightforward. We spent our morning creating the accompanying sauces, and this was a revelation, it must be said. Maximising the flavour from just a few, high quality ingredients through careful preparation and slow, careful cooking opened my eyes to how I might recreate these dishes at home really quite easily – just the addition of time and patience to my approach, rather than anything clever or complicated. We made a red wine sauce, a Bourguignon sauce, a mushroom puree, a white balsamic butter sauce, and a dill emulsion, which is actually a mayonnaise, and takes 60 seconds to deliver a fresh mayo I could eat all day – and doesn’t have to be dill! I can use garlic, or basil, or nothing at all. This may have been my day’s greatest revelation – making your own mayonnaise is easy peasy lemon squeezy.
A day in the Northcote Cookery School includes a two-course lunch, with a glass of wine selected by the sommelier, which is a culinary treat that makes the day worth it even if you end up burning your sauces and dropping your apple. None of which I managed (okay, my onions got a little caramelized, but I chose to start again...) and my day was perfection.
Following lunch, tea and truffle chocolates were shared in the cookery school kitchen, while Ben showed us how to finish our apple cheesecakes. Never before have you seen 12 adults getting so giddy about a cheesecake... First, we got clever with carving bits out of the frozen hemispheres into which we dollop apple puree, before clamping them together and dipping the assembled balls in white chocolate. Next the really fun part – the application of food spray, in green and red, to create a faux apple. It’s hard to believe these joyous balls of appley pleasure came from my own fair hands. (I am not counting the guidance from Rick and Ben here, it was me, all me.)
After a demonstration of how to plate these up, we moved onto a demonstration of how to cook the perfect steak, and the making of pomme Anna. There’s no time to actually do this part ourselves, but we are sent home with full, detailed instructions, and all the ingredients we need to construct every dish. And it worked – my salmon was just blushing in the middle, soft and sweet, and my steak, first seared and then cooked for just 11 minutes at 110 degrees, was melt-in-the-mouth awesome.
Leaving with my bag of goodies (not to mention my only slightly chocolate splashed Northcote apron) I felt as if I had really learned something of lasting value. While my day might have been spent within view of a busy Michelin-starred kitchen, creating wonderful food that I won’t need a tutor on stand-by for next time – in fact, I have already repeated my steak fillet in Bourguignon sauce, to rapturous applause.
