Life at Leiths: Looking Back

I started the year long Professional Diploma at Leiths School of Food and Wine back in October 2013. On my first day the teachers told us that there would be tears on our last day. Sitting there, feeling intimidated and nervous, this was hard to imagine. Was choosing to spend a year learning to cook the right decision? Would I be good enough? But sure enough, 9 months later, the thought of leaving the Leiths bubble is pretty emotional. Mountains of culinary knowledge aside, here are just a few of the lessons I learnt and the advice I'd give to anyone embarking on their own Leiths adventure...

                     My first ever dish at Leiths, day 1: hummus and crudites

  Don't be terrified on the first day, when you are taught how to chop and you instantly feel you know NOTHING. You will be fine.

  By midway through the first term, you might not iron your whites anymore. That's ok.

  For the first few weeks of the first term, you will be ridiculously exhausted. Then your stamina builds up and you're no longer crashed out by 8pm!

  Sometimes a teacher actually is giving you a death stare. Most of the time, they're just thinking about getting through a day of tasting 32 lemon meringue pies.

  Lavelli does the best coffee, Bridge That Gap does the cheapest sandwiches and The Ginger Pig is best for meat feast days. Tesco is marginally closer than Sainsbury’s. Lunch is a big priority at cookery school.

  Salt and butter are your new best friends.

  Enjoy the only time that reading Nigella or watching Bake Off can count as studying.

  Learn to ignore the confused stares of other public transport passengers when they can smell a Thai marinaded mackerel or golden syrup steamed pudding on their journey home. They'll be used to it (and you) by the end of the year. 

  Try everything. 

  Don't be alarmed when you become perfectly accustomed to eating 5 different soufflés in a morning demonstration, a two course lunch cooked by the other class, a causal 4pm snack of veal steak and potato rosti... and then dinner as usual. 

  It's ok to spend the day learning to cook fabulous things and then have fish fingers for tea. 

  Sometimes you'll wind up having deep fried brains for breakfast. Sometimes you'll have tried 6 different glasses of champagne before midday. Relish being part of a world where this is acceptable. 

  Absorb every piece of advice, hint, tip and suggestion teachers give you. 

  Leiths is a bubble and sometimes a slightly dodgy espagnole sauce feels like the end of the world. It's times like these that it is important to step back into the real world and remember that 6 months previously you didn’t even know what an espagnole was and you survived.  

  Blog it! I love being able to read back through my blog and remember all the food, the laughs and the ups and downs I’ve had this year. Also on a selfish note I’m going to really miss Leiths and I want to read enviously about all the new adventures next years lucky 96 students are having. 

  Be prepared for a roller coaster. It's going to be the best year ever.

My last dish at Leiths – creative rabbit: braised rabbit and pancetta pie, Parma ham wrapped rabbit loin, baby carrots, potato puree, red wine jus and microherbs.

Leiths: Advanced Term, Week 9

Feels very weird to be writing this. Advanced Term, Week, 9. Aka my last week at Leiths! Ok, technically I still have two more weeks of exams, graduation and one last fun group cooking task to go but I have had my last curriculum, written my last timeplan and had my last normal dish marked. It feels very surreal to be writing this and know that I won’t be writing ‘Bring on week 10!’ at the end. The last nine months have been a whirlwind, a rollercoaster, a journey and all the other X Factor style clichés out there. In fact, the ‘lasts’ all seemed to come in a hurry without warning and I don’t think it has really sunk in that my year of cooking is all but over and I only have two more sessions in the Leiths kitchen – one to cook a 3 course dinner party (that last group task) for 8 and one the dreaded practical exam. I don’t want to get too mushy and I have one more Leiths post planned, looking back at the last year, so here is what week 9, the last week, held for us…Making my own pasta was one of the things I was most excited about doing when I started Leiths so it seemed quite fitting that it was there again in my final week. This was a chicken and wild mushroom ravioli with broad beans, morels (we got a bag of morels each, each costing £22!) and Madeira cream sauce. The chicken filling meant a return to the dreaded mousseline making but after learning from previous goes (don’t skimp on the egg white, blitz heavily before sieving) it was much easier than fish quenelles, and much tastier too. I’m really going to miss the chances Leiths gives me to cook dishes like this – I don’t know how often I’ll just casually make my own ravioli at home. Hopefully remembering how much I liked this dish will be the push I need to make it a more frequent event. Our last week at Leiths ended with a bang – our craziest all day cooking session yet where we entered the kitchen at 9:45 and didn’t stop or leave until 4:30 that afternoon. We kept meaning to leave for lunch, but suddenly it was 2pm with a service time of 3pm and we all realised a break just wasn’t going to happen. After a morning of foie gras parfait (delicious until you eat too much and feel sick…), baking brioche and clearing a Sauternes jelly, the focus switched to our creative rabbit dish. This was essentially the savoury version of the plated dessert challenge as we were each given a whole rabbit, a list of ingredients, a service time and told to get cracking! After much deliberation (I really wanted to try a black pudding and rabbit Scotch egg) I made: a braised rabbit, pancetta and thyme pie, parma ham wrapped rabbit loin, potato puree, baby carrots and red wine jus. Aside from one forgotten pan disaster (when my teacher was thankfully out the kitchen) I was really pleased with how this dish turned out. It was busy but I served on time, my seasoning was the best I’ve done in a while and I finally got a chance to have a proper go at a potato puree so it was a lovely way to end. We got to tour the kitchens again once everyone had served and there were a huge range of ideas – one other pie, pastas, a variety of Scotch eggs, croquettes, mousselines and more. As someone said, we have come a long way from the hummus and crudites on Day 1 back at the start of October. Bring on…the summer?!

Leiths: Advanced Term, Week 8

It would be impossible to count the amount of skills I’ve learnt over my past year studying cooking at Leiths. From the basics of chopping an onion properly, to the complex rules of croissant dough to filleting fish and gutting pheasants – there’s been a fair few! This week was my penultimate week of normal cooking curriculum at Leiths and it definitely felt like we were ticking off the last few major skills…On Monday we were transported back to a 1950s kitchen with some good old fashioned jam making. My mum loves making jam – hence our kitchen's jam cupboard – and actually made her own batch the day before me, so there is definitely a competitive blind tasting in the future. As my Mum is such a jam making fan herself, I’ve never had a go on my own so I turned up on Monday morning, jars at the ready, excited to give it a try. Whilst raspberry is my absolute favourite jam, the strawberry definitely smelt delicious whilst cooking – super sweet and summery. I didn’t realise you could make jam so easily on a small scale (I filled two jars perfectly with my amount) but now I know this I’d love to experiment with other flavours this summer.It was like Great British Menu met Masterchef in the kitchen on Tuesday when creative cooking returned once again. This was probably our most ambitious creative challenge yet: designing a plated dessert that included a sabayon, parfait and puff pastry element. The long list of fruit, nuts, chocolate and alcohols available made choosing tricky. In the end I made a peach & blackberry parfait, peach mille feuille with amaretto sabayon, blackberry coulis and crushed honeycomb. I had to restart my sabayon (being too cautious with the alcohol prevented the structure forming properly) which added time pressure and left me not totally happy with the presentation. Normally this would be like a dream dish for me, eaten in minutes, but after two mornings working on it and with a heck of a lot of washing up to do, I didn’t even get to try it! This week also brought two tasks vegetarians might not be comfortable doing – killing and prepping our own crab and lobster. I didn’t know how I’d feel about doing this but as a meat and fish eater I think it would be hypocritical for me to not have tried. I was certainly nervous on seeing them but Leiths teaches us the fastest, most humane way to do it so it was all over quickly. Picking the cooked crab for the tian above turned out to be a much worse job in my opinion – I am not the most patient person and inserting a cocktail stick into every nook and cranny of the crab to get each flake of meat out definitely tested me! Thursday was an unexpectedly really fun day – definitely up there in my favourites. Who knew sausage making would be so fun?! I never expected making sausages from scratch to be part of the Leiths course but it was great to have a try and I haven’t felt so proud of a plate of food in ages! Also those caramel apples… heavenly. I doubt this will become a regular occasion in my kitchen (for starters I wouldn’t know where to find pork intestine for the casing…) but it was a great skill to add to the list. Bring on week 9!      A spot of baking to end the week – Friday’s Fougasse, made with a starter dough

Leiths: Advanced Term, Week 7

Despite only being a 3 day week, Week 7 at Leiths still managed to cram plenty in. There were new skills, new ingredients, lots of delicious food and most importantly a new discovery about one male teachers’ jewellery tastes…The trouble with making your own Danish pastry dough is that you have to tend to it every 20 minutes, giving you very small amounts of time in which to get other things done. Or the perfect amount of time to make a prawn laksa! This was a surprise favourite for me – without the prawns it made a delicious fragrant noodle soup for dinner. The only thing that could have made it better was apparently a touch more fish paste to bring out all the flavours more. The trouble is, the jar of fish paste on its own smells like something that should be nowhere near any food. Even though this scent and flavour disappears when combined with all the other spices, it is difficult to be anything other than very sparing with it. More curry bravery needed!Terrines. Something I order at restaurants but have never thought to make at home. Until now! Our terrines demonstration showed that actually they can be fairly simple, really pretty and a great make ahead dish for a crowd. On Monday we were making a very traditional terrine de campagne – chicken liver, bacon, pork mince and pistachios all wrapped in bacon. For me, the star of the show was the sweet and sticky onion confit which made up for the fact that my terrine was a little soggy due to too damp onions…you live and learn!I don’t know why, but I really associate cooking scallops with Masterchef. Is it just me or is there nearly always a scallop starter in the final – normally a rectangular plate of 3 little scallops each sitting on a puree of some kind and topped with a dainty decoration? Bearing this in mind, I was excited to finally have a go at preparing my own. Having been sternly warned by our teacher that the scallops were expensive and therefore under no circumstances were we to muck this up – the pressure was on! Happily, the process of getting the scallops out of their shells turned out to be much simpler than I anticipated and actually really satisfying! Phew. After the depressing burnt croissant experience of week 4, I was determined that Danish pastries would not go the same way. They use exactly the same method, the only difference being the shaping and the introduction of fillings. I made the majority of mine frangipane filled and only one was cinnamon and pecan butter – a decision I regretted on trying it and discovering it was delicious! They made pretty monster sized Danishes but I don’t think anyone was complaining. It was fun to learn all the different shapes from the classic pinwheel to the plait, princess and one described by one male teacher as ‘looking like Egyptian jewellery’…naturally. Bring on week 8!

Leiths: Advanced Term, Week 6

There is no longer any escaping the fact that we are over halfway through this last ten week term. I found this to be a savoury and presentation based week with challenges ranging from snails to sweetbreads (such a misleading name) and as usual I am sad that I am one week closer to the end!The week started with a a creative cooking session – a sea bream, a list of extra ingredients and two hours to get cooking. Creative cooking pressure is different from day to day following the curriculum with new worries about being judged on imagination and creating something of ‘an appropriate advanced term standard’ but it’s also really fun to try something on your own. I made a courgette and lemon risotto, slow roast tomatoes and courgette chips to accompany my pan fried sea bream and it was fascinating to walk between the kitchens and see the huge range of dishes all created from the same ingredients. A tomato and mozzarella salad might not sound very advanced term, but sometimes simplicity is underrated. This probably ended up being my favourite thing we made all week! I think the main purpose of making this dish was to take advantage of the short asparagus season and also practice making two identical plates for a change. It was also a chance to practice preparing frisee lettuce – the weirdest ingredient where you only use the pale inner, slightly anaemic looking leaves and discard all the vibrantly green but also intensely bitter leaves. Also – slow roast tomatoes are my unexpected new addiction. So good!This week’s all day cooking focused on rehearsing skills – particularly for the above seared tuna, fennel, asparagus and radish salad and vegetable vinaigrette. We spent 45 minutes chopping vegetables into petit brunoise (miniscule dice) for the vegetable vinaigrette. This was faintly ridiculous (and depressing when the whole dish is eaten in about 5) but when you have teachers combing through your diced onion picking out diamonds and rectangles you become very determined to produce those perfect squares! I think speedy knife skills really show a professional chef so it was good to practice – but also a relief to get to use a mandolin for the salad.Try as I might, on Friday I could not get my sablee aux fraises to stand straight (such problems). My teacher comes over (sadly post photo), gives it one adjustment and it was perfect ! Magic. There was more double trouble as again we served two identical portions, and this time there was more of a challenge to get two identical swirls of raspberry coulis. This tasted great at school (I still find raspberry coulis drinkably gorgeous) but a little less so by the time it had experienced a journey home (via the pub) in a plastic bag… Bring on week 7!

Leiths: Advanced Term, Week 5

A week filled with days to look forward to – a trip to a vineyard, first time making filled pasta, petit four day. I think this week contained highlights from my whole time at Leiths and made a welcome change from the struggle Week 4 had been. More days like this please!Spinach and ricotta tortellini is one of my favourite instant lazy dinners – boil for 2 minutes and boom dinner is ready. Therefore it was quite different to spend the best part of 3 hours making the above crab and prawn tortellini with a crab bisque. I’ve really been looking forward to making my own filled pasta and although fiddly, it was undoubtedly more satisfying than the supermarket option. Shaping is going to take a bit of practice but with results like this I’m more than happy to do so.Tuesday brought our first Leiths school trip! We all piled on the coach down to Plumpton College, an agricultural college with a vineyard and winery used by the students as they learn about wine, and then Ridgeview Wine Estate which makes English sparkling wine that has been served to the Queen. Before this trip I didn’t realise how much wine and sparkling wine England makes, and more importantly, how good it is! It definitely made a change (for the better!) from the museums and conferences that school trips used to involve. Even when our coach got stuck in rush hour traffic on the way home I didn’t feel we could really complain, and I’m pretty sure the 6 wines we’d tried that day helped that…Petit four day. A day I have literally been looking forward to since I first heard about it way before I even started at Leiths. And it didn’t disappoint! A day devoted to sugar and pastels in which we made (deep breath) rose marshmallows, almond & pistachio nougat, passion fruit pate de fruit, pistachio and raspberry macarons, amaretto chocolate truffles and iced fondant fancies. Cue the sugar high! The atmosphere in the kitchen all day was really relaxed and fun as our table worked together to bring the above plate together. I’ve tried making macarons before and they’ve never worked so it was super satisfying to open the oven and see ‘they look like actual macarons!’ much to our teachers amusement. As our teacher pointed out, at the start of Leiths we were scared of making a single sugar syrup and now we’d made a plate involving at least six – showing just how far we’ve come in the last eight months. Dividing it all up at the end of the day felt like dealing out a sweet shop and we all went home tired but happy….craving salt and nursing a sugar induced headache. Podding broad beans, shelling peas…Thursday morning felt like it should have been spent in a sunny field in the countryside instead of a hot London kitchen. The veg was for our gnocchi and combined with asparagus made a perfect Spring dish. I’ve made gnocchi once before and they turned out gloopy and grey so it was so satisfying to learn the secrets and get light and tender results this time. This dish, followed by a raspberry macaron saved from the day before, made the perfect lunch. Bring on week 6!

Leiths: Advanced Term, Week 4

Week four highlighted the rollercoaster that Leiths can be. I don’t even have a photo of the seafood feuilletee I made on Friday because I was so annoyed with the plate I’d served, although in the end it wasn’t actually that bad. Sometimes everyone has a bad week and I hope that this was mine – still enjoyable but just frustrating at the end!So far at Leiths we have only dealt with duck breasts, so our first challenge this week was carving up a whole duck. In fact we had to carve it once semi-cooked, adding an extra challenge in the form of a double layer of gloves so you could actually handle the meat. I didn’t expect carving a duck to be so different to carving a chicken (is that weird?) so it was really good to give it ago. Essentially this dish was the retro classic duck a l’orange served with pommes anna – a potato dish with the highest ratio of butter to potato I have ever seen – and it proved a very tasty way to start the week. New week, new nemesis. Jus. Sauces have been a struggle throughout Leiths for me – that final element that needs perfecting to bring a dish together. Perfect seasoning, reducing, skill right from the beginning. I made a jus last week that pretty much worked but this week felt like I was going backwards as it went from watery thin to toffee stringy in a matter of moments. Also, it appears eight months of burns and cuts in the kitchen have hardened us somewhat and the previously discussed skewer test (insert skewer into cooked meat, place skewer on wrist, if searingly hot then the dish is done) no longer works for us as despite repeated attempts we couldn’t feel anything, resulting in slightly overcooked chicken. Annoying when you have spent two days ballotining and cooking the whole chicken. Not my most successful dish but the wodge of garlic butter potatoes on the plate cheered up the situation. Croissants. Took 3 days to make, 2 minutes to burn. 6 months at cookery school and it appears I still haven’t lost my talent for forgetting when things went in the oven! In fairness, it was only the outside which had ‘taken on a bit of excess colour’ and the inside was still buttery and delicious but nevertheless it was a lesson learnt – when a recipe says 10 minutes, it means 10 minutes not 12. Despite this I had to remind myself that I never thought I would be making croissants from scratch – especially ones that actually looked and tasted like real, shop bought croissants – so I’m still a little bit proud and look forward to making them again so I can actually get them right! Bring on week 5!

Leiths: Advanced Term, Week 3

After spending nearly six months at Leiths, my class and I are well aware of the weird world we enter into every day. Cookery school is a bubble with food consistently on the brain – if you’re not making it, you’re watching someone else, if you’re not eating, you’re just waiting for the plate to reach you. You find yourself talking and obsessing about food in a way that most people would find crazy. And it’s not just us students – this was the week that our range of teachers uttered some memorable lines too..Another week, another new pastry. This week was the turn of filo – something I’ve bought countless times, marvelled at as they made it on Great British Bake Off and never given a go myself. Until now! A crucial part of making filo is beating the dough against the table with a specific flick of the wrist in order to develop the gluten. Trying to explain this process led to the classic line by my teacher ‘imagine you are a monkey and your pastry is your tail’ accompanied by a mime which sounds crazy but was surprisingly helpful. The next step is the elaborate stretching process to get the dough so thin you can see through it. We did this in pairs, draping the pastry over our knuckles and gently stretching it apart. As a different teacher said, this was potentially ‘the Bride Wars (what a film) of pastry’ as we desperately attempted not to create holes and sabotage our partners delicate filo. All in all, an interesting experience resulting in a tasty apple strudel!Wednesday was a day I don’t think many people were looking forward to: poached fish mousseline. Involving blending raw fish with egg white, then painstakingly passing it through a very fine sieve and poaching it in fish stock. Mmm. The day was about practicing classic skills – mousseline, beurre blanc, quenelling. In fact week 3 became known as the week of the quenelle and having been informed that our teacher that day was ‘the quenelle king’ the pressure was certainly on. Like piping or jointing I think it’s a skill that benefits hugely from practice so whilst this was perhaps not the most delicious dish I’ll make at Leiths, it was definitely helpful. Few demonstration titles are more enticing than ‘Chocolate’. It was the perfect reward after a morning of sieving fish – encompassing a chocolate tasting, watching tempering and sampling truffles. The ones on the above left were passion fruit or raspberry ganache filled and the right were coconut&white chocolate – essentially a gourmet Bounty bar. According to our teacher ‘chocolate makes everybody go weird’, referring to the new level of greed and struggle with self control people have when presented with a plate of chocolate, so hopefully we managed to restrain ourselves suitably. Turning out set desserts has become an unexpected nemesis at Leiths – jellies, bavarois’ and now pannacottas all seem desperate to stay resolutely in their moulds. Each time I learn a new trick – tip the mould at an angle rather than directly inverting it, shake it from side to side, jolt the whole plate downwards. Although the above vanilla pannacotta actually came out like a dream, it slid and stuck to the side of the plate, leading to a presentation dilemma that saw me plate up two versions of the dish and ask anyone who happened to walk past my table which they preferred. In the end the consensus was for the first one anyway, but hopefully next time I will be able to confidently get it right first time. Bring on week 4!

Leiths: Advanced Term, Week 2

Week 2 – the week all day cooking returned, jelly making involved eggshells and cocktail sticks, tart slicing symbolised friendship levels and a tomato black market emerged in Kitchen 1 at Leiths…There are some things at Leiths that, when demonstrated or explained, we can all instantly tell are going to cause trouble when it comes to our turn making them in the kitchen. ‘Clearing’ was this weeks example. This is the process of making a liquid as clear as possible by removing all solid particles, even ones you cannot see, resulting in sparkling consommés or jellies. The process feels truly bizarre – I never imagined I would be adding crushed eggshells, yes, eggshells, to a saucepan – and anything so intricate is a challenge in a small kitchen. Making the above strawberry stay prettily suspended in the lemon jelly was painstaking and nearly gave me a premature heart condition at 18, much to the bemusement of my teacher, so it was a relief to have it finally presented, turned out…and demolished in minutes.Shortcrust was the first pastry we learnt to make at Leiths in the Foundation term when we made it multiple times, but since then we haven’t really returned to it - until now in this Tarte Normande. It was funny to see us all struggling to remember something we’d managed to learn and bake back in the day when we were still nervous and lost the majority of the time. Time constraints meant we were only able to do 3 rather than 5 apple spokes on top of the frangipane, meaning that although it was still delicious you had to pick carefully who got what slice!Our week finished with the return of all day cooking, this time centred around a Nordic inspired smorgasbord of goodness. I never thought that I would be curing and smoking my own fish, but this week I did both in the same day – and both were surprisingly easy! Tea smoked mackerel took 5 minutes to cook in a homemade smoker using a roasting tin and some foil, and cured salmon was as simple as making the marinade in 5 minutes, wrapping in clingfilm and leaving it for the week to absorb all the flavours. To be honest, I didn’t think this would really be my kind of food but when it turned out so pretty I couldn’t complain.                         Green olive and artichoke pithvier with heirloom tomato salad
I’ve lost track of the number of different pastries I have learnt to make so far at Leiths but this week was a big one: puff. When good all butter versions are so easily bought it is not something I have ever made before, but I really enjoyed learning how and the sense of pride on seeing your pastry rise after making it all day is embarrassingly satisfying. A heirloom tomato black market formed in our kitchen in the afternoon as we all tried to present pretty plates with limited tomatoes: conversations such as ‘How much do you want for a slice of your green one?’ ‘A piece of yellow or two orange slices at least, the green is rare’ were integral to getting a decent variety. Bring on week 3!