A double dose of Taste

Here it is: a write-up of weeks three and four of the Sense of Taste course, in one yummy serving. Apologies for the late post, but the festive season has kept me eating and drinking and socialising and drinking… for one thing, I was actually very impressed with my tuna steak at our staff Xmas lunch at Wakame (I love my new job!), but that’s a musing for another post.

It’s been a month since the Sense of Taste course wrapped up, but I think I was nostalgic for it from the minute I walked out of that kitchen. What a fun, memorable experience!

Nicola couldn’t make Week Three, so I took along hubby Arthur. And it turned out to be the perfect week to have my pasta-loving partner there: we were cooking Italian. We started the session with a presentation from Kimilili, who make Swiss cheeses with milk from their free ranging cows out in the mountains of Wolseley. Arthur, who dear readers will know is a cheese maniac, was in his element. (And he’s actually a good cook, when I let him at the stove. See how dashing he looks sweating off these onions!) We tasted some fantastic cheeses, including an unusual and delicious smoked feta.

Now, it seems that Week Three of the Sense of Taste Course is also Wild Week of Semi-drunken Debauchery. Everyone is pretty relaxed with each other by this stage, and there was also a birthday in our group, and what with the beer flowing freely… Well, when Chef Peter tried to educate us in the colourful history of chunky, salty puttanesca pasta sauce (puttana is the Italian word for prostitute) there was some extreme teasing (from the girls, nogal!) that had our tough-as-nails teacher blushing.

We started with that Italian classic, made rustically tasty with anchovies and capers. Arthur was in such a good mood, he even conceded to putting some garlic in our sauce (gasp!). We didn’t make pasta by hand: Chef Peter believes it’s an unneccessarily fiddly waste of time and has ‘a guy’ (details if you go on the course) who makes great fresh pasta, so that you don’t have to. Next, I finally got to make gnocchi! That’s been on the ‘to do’ list for years, and I’m glad I learned at Sense of Taste, because that was some of the best gnocchi I’ve ever eaten (and very “unprecious” to make). Chef Peter gave us his extremely clever tip for making the lightest gnocchi (again, you’ll have to go on the course…). His other clever idea is to fry the gnocchi, which transforms them from pasty balls to golden nuggets of nomminess. Slather them in Matthew’s blue cheese sauce, and you can easily eat a whole bowl. Which is a good thing, because plenty of SOTers needed their stomachs lined that night…

No Italian class would be complete without risotto, which basically involves lots of stirring. Obviously, this can be done with one hand, leaving the other free to transfer beer to your mouth. The risotto was served with fresh salmon that had been flown in from Norway, arriving at 3pm that afternoon. Never in my life have I had such sublime salmon. The kitchen crew just lightly baked it, so it was still soft. With each bite, its coral creaminess melted into the buttery risotto, creating a subtle flavour and texture combination that was simply beautiful. Even Arthur ate all of his, and enjoyed it. If you understood how much this man dislikes fish, you’d know how miraculous this was. Final verdict: Week Three is cheese, carb and beer heaven.

Nicola was thrilled to be back for the final week. And, as you can see from the photo, she’s a bit of a sushi fan (who isn’t?) Week Four is Gourmet Indulgence Week, with sushi and fillet steak on the menu. There’s a bit of precision involved in making sushi (which is probably why we did it before the beer took too much of an effect), but Chef Peter and his crew do teach you a few tricks, like squashing down the rice just a little harder than you might feel comfortable with. They’re right – it does make the sushi neater, presuming you’ve not overcooked the rice! Basic, edible sushi isn’t really that hard to make – as Chef Peter told us, the years and years of training that sushi chefs go through is really more to do with filleting the fish, and mostly to do with the very strict Japanese appie system (in other words, it’s all about paying your dues). Another thing I learned is that red pepper is surprisingly tasty in sushi – untraditional, I know, but this is a fun course, after all!

Once we’d gorged ourselves on sushi, we moved onto the meat. Chef Peter used to run a famous restaurant up in Joburg called Carnivore, which, as you can guess, basically just serves lots and lots of different kinds of meat. So he knows a lot about it, and has some interesting insights to share about cuts, storage and cooking of meat. Then, we learned the chef’s trick for making perfect medallions of fillet: wrapping it very, very tightly in lots and lots of clingwrap. And that clingwrap doesn’t come off when you fry it. Sounds dodgy, but it works. We sealed the ends of our fillets, removed the clingwrap and sealed the sides, and then they went into the oven for a few minutes, while Chef showed us how to make the mushroom mousse that was destined to be their crowning glory.

Finally (okay, 15 minutes later, but the wait felt interminable!), the fillet was served, along with what I like to call The Potato Bake of the Gods – I don’t want to know how long it took Matt to mandolin all those potatoes, but it was worth it! Kitchen-hand Mark had made some rosemany jus (which he’d given a name… I think it was ‘Julie’. Shame, the dude is in a kitchen from 5am to midnight every day. Makes it pretty tough to get a girlfriend.) It was a fitting, if slightly bittersweet, pièce de résistance to the course.

Do the full four-week Sense of Taste course for R1800, or you could do a taster by joining their awesome curry class on 28 January for just R500 (I’m convinced Chef Peter has decided to do this because beer goes so well with curry!). Be your own ‘Chef in Action’ and learn to cook (and eat) the ’spicy world tour’: Thai green chicken curry, North Indian beef and lentil curry, and Malaysian-style red curry with hake, pok choy and porcini mushroom, served with Persian herbed rice. Email: events@senseoftaste.co.za or call 082 578 9029 to book.