Cooking holidays, courses, weekends – PAGE 2
& short breaks

ITALY: Culinary week with cookery classes in Umbria

Food is the focus on this full immersion culinary week in Umbria. Italy is a paradise for gourmets and this 1-week holiday will introduce the secrets of authentic Italian cooking in hands-on classes. There will aso be guided sightseeing and shopping trips as well as meals in celebrated restaurants. Cooking classes take place at Villa La Rogaia, an outstanding old Umbrian country house, decorated with sculpture and set in a large garden, olive orchards and lavender fields.

Range oven and AGA cookery courses

Do you want to learn to cook on your AGA or range/heat storage stove? These sorts of ovens do require a few different techniques and approaches and a dedicated cooking course will arm you with all the hints and tips to get the best from the oven.

AGAs and range cookers and stoves work a different way to conventional ovens – they make use of heat storage, working on the principle that a heavy cast iron oven will absorb heat from a continuous, but lower intensity source (be that gas, electricity, oil or solid fuel). This creates an efficient energy store which transfers heat steadily to its multiple ovens and hotplates. But it does mean cooking is a little different from a conventional oven and AGA and range oven cooking courses will help new AGA owners to get to know the new friend in the kitchen.

Because it's always on an AGA is ready to cook – instantly. The four oven AGA has an oven for roasting, one for baking, one for simmering as well as a plate-warming oven – the heat comes from all surfaces at the same time, resulting in a more gentle cooking that preserves the moisture and flavour of food.

A number of dedicated AGA cookery courses are on offer, some are short one-day classes while other are longer multi-day courses. The AGA site itself has a useful list of AGA approved cookery schools, including: Eckington Manor Cookery School on a working farm in the Cotswolds; the Phyl Lomas Cookery School running courses in Hartford, Cheshire; or The Cooking Experience in Hadleigh near Ipswich in Suffolk and more ...