Taste – Raw Food Course

Tom Kha Soup

Last week I attended Deborah Durrant’s Taste course – a 1 week intensive hands on course – it follows on from her Feast 2014 course, and is geared to fine dining, menu planning and plating techniques.

Shame that Karen had to be back in SA and was not able to do this one with me.

We built on several of the techniques learnt in Feast and learnt a few new ones.

Summer Rolls

The course was built around three types of menus – for small dinner parties of six people, larger parties of twelve and for larger so-called pop-up events.

We now have 2 sets of recipes for those menus, and during the course we made half of them.

Green salad

Plating skills and techniques are all important in fine dining – so we started off by learning to plate a leafy green salad.

Not my strongest point I am afraid – but I am improving.

It never occurred to me to use surgical tweezers to get that salad piled up so nicely!

At this point we made some fermented cheezes which needed to be dehydrated for use later, as well as making fermented pickles, chutney and pickled mustard.

Chocolate panna cotta

Then we made and plated a whole menu for six – Tom Kha Soup and Summer Rolls starter, coconut dumplings main course and a chocolate panna cotta dessert.

The chocolate panna cotta is divine!

Our kitchen at  home is being renovated at the moment. Once that is complete we will start working through all the recipes from Feast and Taste programmes.

Till next week – Bon Apetit.