Flavour: Sachie's Kitchen Review

I attended my first ever cooking lesson at Sachie’s Kitchen and I thought I would share my experience with all of you.

Sachie’s Kitchen has been up and running for just over a year offering cooking classes for individuals, groups and team building activities for corporates. She has become hugely successful in a short time and I was so excited to attend a class at her kitchen.

Currently Sachie is running “Brigade 6” which is a collaboration among 6 of New Zealand’s top chefs. Each chef is taking 5 classes and each class presents their own interpretation of Malaysian, Chinese, Japanese, Thai and Vietnamese cooking.

The class I signed up for was taught by TriBeCa’s head chef Hayden McMillan and was focussed on Thai cuisine...

Upon arrival at Sachie’s sparkling kitchen in Parnell, we were greeted by our host and a glass of sparking peach sake. It was absolutely delicious – sweet and fragrant, it really set the tone for an amazing evening.

We then spent around an hour watching Hayden cook 3 great recipes. He chatted to us throughout the entire demonstration, mainly giving cooking tips, but also relating his experiences as a chef. It was really cool to see a head chef cooking up close and personal: he made it look so effortless – I couldn’t wait to try it out for myself! It was really great to get a better understanding of Thai cooking especially the different core ingredients used for cooking such as palm sugar, lime, lemongrass and the different parts of a coriander plant.

The most important things I learnt about cooking were:

• To keep a tidy kitchen while cooking; this includes benches and utensils being clean while dealing with different ingredients
• To season the food/ingredients throughout the cooking process, not just at the end. If you ONLY season at the end of the cooking process the salt can just make the food taste salty as opposed to acting as an enhancement to the dish.

After watching Hayden cook the three recipes, it was our turn! I must admit that my partner for the cooking (and good friend) Aimee and I spent a lot of time chatting and laughing when we should have been cooking. However, that’s what I loved most about the experience – it was about us, we had all the time in the world and could make the process as stressful or as fun (in our case!) as we liked.

Our favourite part was definitely devouring our creations – we especially enjoyed the Kumara and Coconut Milk soup – delish!

This was Hayden’s first stint in Sachie’s Kitchen and he has 3 more classes to teach;

16th July - Japanese
6th Aug - Chinese
10th Sep – Vietnamese

Brigade 6 is running on Tuesday nights through until November, I highly recommend that you check it out!

For a full timetable of all the Brigade 6 classes, and Sachie’s fabulous weekly Japanese cooking classes check out www.sachieskitchen.com

Follow; Sachie’s Kitchen @SachiesKitchen

Hayden McMillan @haydenthechef

And ME! @albiegysberts