Basic ingredients: Located in a red-brick house on the fringes of the Cotswolds (about 20 minutes north-west of Bristol), Gables offers foundation hygiene, quick and easy, one-day, one-week and four-week residential courses from £55 to £3,450. The four-week flagship residential course promises you will be producing food to the standard of a quality restaurant – and even arranges a two-evening placement at a local kitchen as part of the deal. Specialist offerings include yacht, ski chalet and gap year cookery.
They Say: Our cookery school, which featured in Channel 4’s Country House Rescue, has a superb purpose-built fully-equipped kitchen with plenty of working space and easy visibility for cooking demonstrations.
We Say: There’s help with your CV and business planning if you want to go professional. Beware – you may well come on a course intending to work in ski chalet cookery and end up going into yacht cookery. It’s happened before.
01454 260444; www.thegablesschoolofcookery.co.uk/