Chefs at The Cooking School at Dean Clough in West Yorkshire are noticing a boom in the number of men taking up cooking courses.
At a recent fish course at the School in Halifax, 50% of the students were men, a rise on the usual gender split which is typically at around 20% The rise is partly explained by the growing number of women buying places on cooking courses for their other halves so that they don’t have to cook!
Other popular courses for men have been the Prashad Indian cookery courses and also the Taste Of!courses which run over a series of Monday evenings.
Executive Chef Manager Matthew Benson-Smith welcomes the soaring interest in cooking from men and from women and he thinks TV has a role to play. “Our curry course with Prashad always sells out ““ the restaurant from Bradford is Gordon Ramsay’s favourite and was a finalist in his Channel 4 TV series. We find that women are buying cooking school vouchers for their men so that they can choose the course they attend themselves. We are now finding that Curry is top choice for them as well as bread baking and knife skills ““ maybe that is the hunter-gatherer thing! But it’s great that men feel more at ease than ever before coming to a cooking school and building on their cooking prowess. I’m betting it’s a great recipe for a happy relationship especially when a perfectly cooked meal arrives at home afterwards in one of our generous takeaway packages. We are bracing ourselves for Fathers’ Day!”
Customers can choose from an array of courses for Father’s Day including Preparing Meat and Poultry, Pasta Masters with Salvo’s of Leeds, and Secrets of Prashad. Alternatively, buy Dad a voucher and he can pick a course himself. All vouchers can be gift wrapped. More details at www.thecookingschool.co.uk