Aveqia cooking class – review

By : gastronomictravels | 0 Comments | On : June 20, 2012 | Category : Modern, Reviews, Swedish

We had bought a promo from Lokaldealen for a cooking class scheduled for the 5th April. Unfortunately, there was a mix-up and we waited 1 hour outside their door before going home. As compensation, we were offered a free class. I had read a review somewhere that the class was unorganised so it was with trepidation that we went last Saturday in spite of the fact that we were feeling under the weather.

We were warmly welcomed by Céline and offered a cremant from Loire along with a amuse-bouche of pickled fish – very tastey. We were 15 students in all, from our age group and younger.

The location is very new and one comes in to the bar which looks stunning. Our instructors Céline and Kenta introduced themselves and the menu consisting of 4 courses and we were divided into groups. We were paired with a young couple and straight away I went for the main course as meat’s my game!

Our main was an entrecote with seared broccoli and asperagus and stuffed jacket potatoes or pomme Maxime and served with Bernaise sauce.

I think that this was the most complicated dish of the day as we were still working away while the other groups had already finished theirs.

Each person was assigned a task and I volunteered to be in charge of the entrecote being the big meat eater that I am ! The first job was to dry the meat with paper towel and then coat the surface with oil and then salt – surprisingly quite a lot of salt. Then I had to brown them on both sides and then pepper them before applying a coating of soot, yes you heard right SOOT before going into the oven. This was a flavoured soot consisting of leek, lemon zest and garlic. I won’t go into more details but I’m so glad to have mastered the art of cooking steak in large quantity!

Dessert was heavenly, as seen in the above picture. There are loads of different elements here though.

The food was out-of-this-world, especially the main as it was done partly by yours truly! The ambiance was amazing as everyone was very friendly and open. The wine, however, was in miniscule amounts!

On the website, it said 4 glasses of wine, one with each course but the glasses were 1/4 filled although I have to add that the wine glasses were pretty big. Still, I wish that we had more wine with the food and less during the cooking (there was a help-yourself wine/cider station).

Overall, the cooking class was fun and instructive. I wish though, that they had the right condiments for each station as I had to run around looking for the oil to brown my meat. This was irritating!

Also, we could’ve learned so much more had they an instructor for each station or better written instructions. As it was, there were only 2 to be shared amongst the four stations. I now know how to grill perfect beef but I wish that we could’ve done more cooking instead of each person being responsible for 1 element in a course.

I’ve had a look at the recipes posted on their website and they’re not at all clear nor detailed! For example, there is no direction on how to make the soot. I guess they want you to keep coming back. As these seem pretty difficult to follow, I would give it a rating of 3/5.

I’d love to hear your experience of Aveqia and if anyone has tried to make their recipes at home. Was it a success?

Rating:

 

Food:	4.75/5
Instruction:	2.5/5
Recipes:	3/5
Organisation:	2.5/5
Value:	2.75/5

Aveqia, Tulegatan 11, Stockholm (metro: Rådmansgatan)