Back to the kitchen basics

Mabel Asumba, an administrator with a local company, has a passion for cooking, and for years, has been a collector of cook books, which she has regularly used to explore the culinary world.

However, to further improve her skills, she decided to enrol for a private culinary class lead by a professional chef.

“This is my first time in a cooking class and the experience is totally different from using cook books,” she says, adding that her aim was to know exactly what it took to put together a given meal, the number of calories in a meal and how to eat right.

We meet her last weekend in a Saturday morning class. As we enter the classroom, we find John Cardovillis taking the group of eight students through the day’s menu. It’s Chinese chicken Kung pao with egg fried rice and Ginger beef stir-fry with sweet and sour chicken - a popular Chinese dish.

In no time, everyone is busy with the preparations after getting instructions from the chef Jarni as he is commonly known.

This is one of the many culinary classes offered in the city and that have become a popular fad among Nairobi’s elite women.

“More people are signing up for these cooking classes either as individual or in groups to learn the 12 types of cuisines in our menu list,” he says.

Each session costs between Sh1,000 and Sh1,500 for three types of dishes, the popular ones being French and Italian cuisines.

The students vary from people who want to gain basic skills of being a chef, those who want their house helps to be trained on certain continental dishes, and those who do it for fun.

Evelyn Aswani is also in class today after her employer enrolled her for the Kiswahili class to learn the art of making samosas and mandazis.

For decades, the culinary abilities of Kenyan women have often been compared to those of our neighbouring sisters from Uganda, where it’s said that women take the saying that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, very seriously.

Exotic cuisine

Kenyan women have also been labelled, erroneously or not, as non-domestics who prefer the boardroom chair to the kitchen stool. It is true that most career women in Kenya have left most of the kitchen chores to househelps as they pursue the career ladder.

However, in a bid to change this per caption that more and more career women are opting to improve the meals served in their homes by getting professional help both for themselves and their househelps.

“While Nairobi is full of restaurants offering continental cuisine, we are now seeing a new generation of food lovers who prefer to have these exotic cuisines made at home rather than have a takeout,” says Cardovillis.

These cooking schools offer a wide variety of hands-on and demonstration cooking classes ranging from having visiting chefs give cooking demonstrations to local artisanal cooks with the emphasis on developing technique and expertise along with a sense of ease in the kitchen.

Jarni, who is one of those chefs who offers private sessions to interested parties has practised his culinary abilities in some of the country’s top restaurant and says the popularity of his classes has grown five-fold since its inception in February 2012.

The high-end Brew Bistro Restaurant also offers a four-week course for a mini master class on Monday and Saturday mornings that costs Sh20,000 with a graduation ceremony after successful completion.

Creative juices

The cooking classes vary from the basics introductory class to cooking with nature – a vegetarian course and an advanced class where students learn how to prepare restaurant cuisines.

“There are many passionate people interested in cooking and this is the perfect outlet for their creative juices,” says Mrs Soraiya Meghji, Brew Bistro’s marketing director.

The course has attracted many patrons who have eaten at the restaurant and would like to have the same food cooked in their homes.

There are also individuals who simply love to cook as a hobby and who are ready to cough up the Sh20,000 to improve their skills under the tutelage of an expert and then there are those who are pursuing their career goals and are interested in becoming chefs or simply working in hotel kitchens.

While the demand is big on continental cuisine, not many people are interested in local cuisines since most people are looking to learn new cuisines.
Zubeda Wacheke, who works in a law firm, has also enrolled for a Chinese cuisine class.

“I love Chinese cuisine, but it is expensive in restaurants so I opted to learn how to cook it and make it at home instead of having to go to a restaurant whenever I feel like eating Chinese food,” she says.

For Indian cuisine, Shella Grover, a former lecturer of developmental studies in India who moved to Kenya last year after her husband got a transfer decided to pursue her cooking talent and people loved her food.

“I got a lot of compliments from the guests most of whom asked to have private lessons on Indian cuisine,” she says.

Five months down the line, her hobby was turned into a business venture that she runs in her Westlands home. For her, working from her home was the perfect setting as it allows her to spend time with her young daughter.

She has classes three times a week that run for three hours and each class prepares four dishes.

Cooking for fun

“When I came to Kenya and visited restaurants that offered Indian cuisine, I was disappointed as there was no authenticity in the food,” she says.

She also observed that the perspective of women in Kenya is very different from that of women in Indian, when it comes to cooking.

“I get a mix of clients most of whom invest in improving their house helps culinary skills on Indian cuisine while others come here to learn a different style of cooking for the fun of it.”

Although she has never taken any course on food production, Shella attributes her passion and expertise in Indian cuisine to her mother and mother-in-law who are both great cooks.

Her sessions include learning about appetizers, rice and pastry cooking and cost between Sh3,000 and Sh3,500 while other exotic foods like butter chicken that take longer to prepare cost more.

This kind of small classes are a reprieve for many people who are interested in pursuing food production classes in colleges but cannot do so due to financial and time limitations.

Utalii College, one of the leading colleges in food production, offers a certificate course for a duration of 18 months for a full-time programme and 30 months for apprenticeship programmes.

A full time certificate course in food production in most colleges costs between Sh32,000 and Sh60,000 per semester.

Shella, however, says it’s not the time that you spend in a class that matters but the time one takes to practice preparing a particular cuisine that helps perfect one’s culinary skills.