School of Wok - Cookery Classes in London Review

Located in London between Leicester Square and Covent Garden is Jeremy Pang’s School of Wok – a leading Oriental and Asian Cookery School.

It was Thursday night and I was luckily enough to attend one of their Oriental Seafood & Fish courses.  On the menu tonight was Salt & Pepper Squid, Sweet & Sour Squid, Steamed Sea Bass with Crushed Soy & Hoi Sin and finally Steamed Scallops with Garlic and Vermicelli.

Having lived in Hong Kong for over 6 years I was really excited about this especially the Salt & Pepper Squid – could it live up to the seafood restaurants on Lamma Island that everyone from HK seems to frequent.

Our teacher that evening was Stefan Lind and there was seven students. The first part of the evening was the preparation, wielding massive Chinese choppers clearly we needed to hone our knife skills and not our fingers.  I learned a great way to peal garlic by dipping it in water first and then shaking the outer skin off.  We chopped, diced and sliced our way through garlic, ginger spring onions and chilies.  

Clearly Oriental cooking is about preparation.

The first step was to make the sauce for the steam scallops.  The sauce was a Chinese sweet chilli sauce which was amazing and I was quiet happy to have on it’s own.  

In it was: 1 cube ginger, 2 cloves garlic, ½ bunch coriander, 2 spring onions, 2 birdseye chillies, 1 tbsp hoisin sauce, 1 tbsp malt vinegar, 1 tbsp sugar, 3 tbsp light soy sauce, 3 tbsp dark soy sauce, 1 tbsp sesame oil, 1tsp chilli oil (optional).  Mix all this together. Done.

 

Take the Scallops, place rice noodles on the shell, scallop on top and steam.  When done pour sauce over and garnish with spring onion.  Amazing I could have eaten these all night.

We then went on to make the other courses, learning out to prepare squid, fillet the sea-bass, make a great and easy sweet and sour sauce and perfect our Wok skills.  All the dishes were amazing, surprisingly easy and great fun.  

 Steamed Sea Bass with Crushed Soy and HoiSin 

One thing that I really took away from this is that we shouldn’t be scared to cook Oriental Food we just need to be prepared.  The cooking takes seconds, it’s the preparation that you need to take your time over.

The School of Wok has many hands on classes from Dim Sum, to SE Asian Street Food, to day long tasting tours of Chinatown - you can find out more here.

Post by written by Jonathan Foster Kenny.  Many thanks to School of Wok for a brilliant and informative evening.

Disclaimer - this evening course was paid for by School of Wok.  I was not required to write a positive review.