At Main Course's Tapas cooking class, you'll find there's plenty to eat. Photo/Hayley McLarin
At Main Course's Tapas cooking class, you'll find there's plenty to eat. Photo/Hayley McLarin
Bring containers: these cook-it-yourself tapas are more than a snack serving, writes Hayley McLarin.
I'm told that if you go to Spain you don't find tapas restaurants, you find tapas bars.
These small plates of food are not intended to be big meals, more morsels to enjoy with drinks.
So here's a public service announcement: at this class you will make generous portions, enough for more than a mere taster. So bring containers to take the leftovers home.
Main Course is a familiar haunt for me. I have done several classes here and always found them to be fun and informal. The venue may also seem familiar to first-time visitors as it's been used for many television food ads.
Since 2003 they have been holding weekday and weekend classes, and running a well-honed and successful programme of classes from Indian to Middle Eastern to Italian cuisine through to bread and chocolate workshops.
At the end of the room a table is set waiting for us to all sit and enjoy the dishes we are about to make. There are four cooking stations along one wall, and in the middle of the exposed-bricked room is a demonstration bench, where chef Eric Morgan outlines the dishes we will be making on this Saturday night.
Our menu is grilled beef sirloin with garlic oil and blue cheese, Andalusian chickpeas and spinach with picada (garlicky breadcrumbs that thicken the dish) and sherry vinegar, grilled chicken skewers with romesco sauce, patatas bravas and torta de Santiago. Four savoury dishes, and dessert in a couple of hours. Piece of cake, right?
Armed with the recipes to follow, Welshman Morgan takes us through the dishes while he peppers the conversation with little life hacks for cooking: ways to infuse garlic in oil, and chef's knife skills and ways to make a microplane indispensable in the kitchen.
Chef Morgan leads the way at tapas cooking classes. Photo/Hayley McLarin
He breezes through the steps of each recipe and, in little more than 45 minutes his dishes sit on the stainless bench, wafting delicious smells. Alas we can't taste what becomes the staff dinner. Instead we all take photos of the prototype, the reality is that ours won't look so well-orchestrated.
Morgan quickly puts participants at ease and you feel like you are among friends, chatting as you watch them cook. Which is obviously deceiving for the husband and wife that we share our work space with. The class was a Father's Day gift that has Dad multitasking on chopping and stirring while checking on the potatoes in the oven. As Morgan wanders past he rescues the steak from being cooked too early, and finishes off the potato cubes so they are a uniform size.
There is much banter next to us, with a family who are on a night out – twin brothers who in their late-20s, their mum, aunt and a cousin. No, it's not a special occasion, just a way to get together for dinner – once they have cooked it. On our other side are girlfriends enjoying a night out while their husbands are looking after the babies. One of them is a vegetarian, so she has completely different dishes to our steak and chicken, and it looked so good I asked Eric for that recipe too.
None of the dishes has more than six steps, the challenge is more about timing. On our side of the bench, we grapple with how to turn on the induction stove top, and then we are away, emptying pre-measured portions from small bowls.
Given that tapas is an accompaniment at bars, I have come armed with a nice Spanish wine and we enjoy a glass while we do a pretty good job of the dishes – that's cooking the dishes. When it comes to cleaning them, Main Course has a wonderful student doing all the hard graft.
Tapas at Main Course. Photo/Hayley McLarin
Clare and I tackle the petite, ground almond torta de Santiago cakes first, so they can cool, then take on a meat and savoury dish each.
I would never have thought to add orange juice to beef and blue cheese, but this recipe, written by Main Course's former Barcelona chef, works – the warm steak softening the blue cheese until it has the texture of custard. Sherry vinegar lifts the spinach and chickpeas and the breadcrumbs brings the dish together. There is also sherry vinegar in the sauce for the chicken skewers. The little cubes of potato are roasted and served with tomato sauced spiced with paprika.
Our meal is shared in a casual environment, so casual that Clare and I are talking too much and have to be ushered out because everyone else had gone, the dishes are done, the benches are gleaming and there are more classes tomorrow.
We step out on to the street. It's only 9pm but we have eaten so well, there's no room for a nightcap. Bravo!
