Learn to Cook: a Fun and Friendly Environment Makes the Difference

Forget preconceptions based on memories of home economics classes at school! Leave them behind when you learn how to cook on an intensive residential cookery course at one of Europe's new breed of cookery schools. Great surroundings, onsite accommodation and modern teaching methods in purpose built kitchens makes the best courses feel more like a holiday than 'training'. What's more, you'll be with other highly motivated food enthusiasts so you'll have a wonderful time in-class and after hours. This is the new face of learning to cook. Enjoy it!

Whether you learn to cook for business or pleasure, the skills you'll get from an intensive training course will give you in-demand skills for your private or business life. At home, you'll wow your family and be the envy of friends with stunning professional-quality meals, dinner parties and family events. For business, the sky's the limit as your new skills open-up career-changing opportunities in your local community or around the world. And because you'll have a much-demanded skill, learning how to cook professionally could enable you to create a career that gives you new levels of freedom and control over your future.

Top-restaurant level cooking is about a combination of skills, experience, creativity and confidence. The best intensive cookery courses (typically residential, four-weeks and with no-less than two practical sessions each day) will quickly get you from basic cookery to professional restaurant level.

- Intensive training should get you up to pro-level in a few weeks
- Demand trainers who are trained at teaching as well as in cooking
- Expect lots of real-world cookery experience
- Your training should be tailored to your aspirations - you may want to become a yacht chef!
- Look forward to getting lots of useful life-skills as you learn to cook
- Residential courses ensure you get the most out of your course

If you can't cook but want to learn, choose a smaller cookery school for more individual help geared to your needs and abilities. When choosing your school, visit it and meet the team and students to make sure of a friendly environment where you'll feel supported and encouraged - not threatened! And of course, whether you want to cook for fun, or for a living, make sure the school staff are genuinely interested in you and your plans.

Even if you embark on an intensive cookery course believing that you can't cook but want to learn, don't be surprised if the experience awakens a desire to make a career with your new skills. Perhaps you could start doing some part-time private function catering in your area, or maybe you'll take the plunge and go into cookery full-time. Either way, you'll do so with the knowledge and confidence that you have superb training behind you, practical catering and business skills, and the invaluable contacts that only the best cookery schools will give you. Above all, a good school will continue to support and encourage you during your new career.

A good cookery course will enthuse and motivate you, not only to learn to cook but also to experiment with cooking in ways you hadn't previously imagined. And unlike trying to learn to cook at home, your course will give you the opportunity to make new friends with similar interests to yours. If you go on to start a catering business, it might even be with a fellow course participant who shares your passion and food vision.