TASTE
WOK STAR
I was on holiday in Italy with my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time,” he says. “She said to me: ‘Why don’t you teach people how to cook?’” “All the best ideas come from wives and girlfriends,” chuckles Isobel. “Yes,” agrees Jeremy, before admitting that he initially dismissed his future wife’s suggestion. “Then two weeks later I suddenly thought: ‘Do you know what? That’s a great idea.’ Teaching someone in their own home doesn’t cost anything apart from travel, time and food.” But persuading strangers to let you enter their homes isn’t easy, particularly if you happen to be carrying an assortment of knives. A great name for your business can’t hurt. “We sat around a mate’s house over dinner and a few glasses of wine,” remembers Jeremy. “I said: ‘Guys, I want to start this thing. I need a name.’ And many glasses later we got School of Wok.” He was up and running, visiting people in their homes and teaching them how to cook their three favourite Chinese dishes. The success of this venture would lead to the school on Chandos Place, which Jeremy and business partner Nev Leaning opened in May 2012. The school doesn’t focus solely on Chinese cuisine—its one-hour quick fire sessions, three-hour masterclasses and full-day intensive courses run the gamut of Asian cuisine. The school also runs gourmet walking tours of nearby Chinatown as well as hosting birthdays, hen parties and corporate events. To do all this requires a dedicated team of chefs, including Stefan Lind, who assisted Jeremy in our session earlier. So who comes here for classes? “Male to female, it’s about 50-50,” says Jeremy. “We get the city slickers, so a lot of bankers and lawyers, and we’re starting to attract more people from outside London, who want to do something different when they’re up in town, rather than just walk around and go shopping.” Today Jane has journeyed from Tunbridge Wells, while Isobel came from Faversham. But the cigar goes to Carola, an economist specialising in China, who lives and works in Buenos Aires. Most of the school’s clients come simply to improve their home cooking and to have fun, but an increasing number want to develop their skills further. The School of Wok now caters for this, for example, by introducing a five-day intensive dim sum course. Dim sum is an incredibly difficult skill to master and the next five-day intensive currently has four professional chefs booked onto it, but Jeremy stresses that this course has been carefully designed to suit 32 Covent Garden Journal Issue 19 Spring 2013
School of Wok 61 Chandos Place 020 7240 8818 schoolofwok.co.uk
all skill sets. “We take pride in saying that. I don’t mind if someone has no knife skills whatsoever, because the whole point is that we’ve given that course enough time to allow people to make mistakes and then learn from them. By the end of the week, yes, you may not be as good as those chefs, but you will have learnt a hell of a lot about dim sum.” Our own session begins with Jeremy taking us through the ingredients. “Chinese food is 90 per cent preparation and 10 per cent cooking,” he says. But we only have one hour, so most of the ingredients have already been prepped. These will become crispy baby squid, egg fried rice and blanched greens in roasted garlic and goji berry broth. Except that Jane has opted to make crispy smoked chicken rather than squid. Jane is a maverick, but she always gets results. The squid and chicken still need preparing. Jeremy demonstrates how to prep a baby squid, expertly removing innards, skeleton, beak and skin membrane to leave the tentacles and body. My early attempts results in an inky mess, but with Jeremy’s patient tuition my confidence grows and I soon stand back to admire my much improved handiwork. The squid needs no marinade, but Jane’s chicken gets the classic treatment of light soy sauce, sesame oil and pinch of sugar.
“If you use those three things in the right quantities you are guaranteed to make your food taste Chinese,” reveals chef, before adding a couple of drops from a bottle of hickory smoke. I then massage a dry batter of corn flour seasoned with salt and pepper into my squid. “You are looking for what I call a dry, dusty white consistency,” explains Jeremy. “Each piece must be dry, separate and dusty white, so when it goes into the fryer you get a really thin, crisp finish. And it’s going to be dry crispy not greasy, whereas using a wet batter you’d be much more likely to get a greasy, thick batter.” We leave Stefan to deep fry the squid and chicken, because there is urgent wok work to be done using traditional round-bottomed woks. The curvature is what creates the circulation of heat, with stirring, folding and flicking the three ways to cool your ingredients without having to actually turn down the heat under the wok. Our egg fried rice starts with a small amount of oil. I add a cracked egg once the oil begins to smoke, using a spoon to prevent the white from sticking to the wok and burning, before bursting the yolk and pulling the spoon back and forth through the egg until scrambled. “If you hear a sizzle in your wok you are stir frying—that’s good,” says