The first rule of the Good Food Youth Club is that we do talk about the Good Food Youth Club! This is a project that EFS has run in a couple of different ways over the years and now takes the form of six cooking sessions over a three-week period.
Held in the EFS kitchen throughout the school summer holidays, the aim of the programme is to get young people aged between 13-17 excited about cooking, tasting new and seasonal ingredients as well as having something fun to take home at the end of the day. Building confidence in the kitchen is a hallmark of success for all our EFS projects, particularly with young people. For this summer’s Good Food Youth Club, we had high hopes for lots of laughs and tasty meals at the end of the programme.
The first week was busy with four back-to-back sessions. We knew we needed to keep the energy high and make the dishes engaging and exciting for all involved. With an emphasis on taking exciting things home, we started with jam. The concept of ‘jammin’ is a great one for cooks of all ages and experience levels to get to grips with. The group took their flavour profiles in all sorts of fun directions using clove and juniper to add to their fruit mixes.
After the jam adventures, we moved on to a dough day. Ooni kindly recently donated a pizza oven to us and we thought this would be a great time to give it a debut run. Together with the young people we made a simple pizza dough, with the principles of kneading, folding, and proofing all covered. Of course, the pizzas would require a dynamite sauce so the group set about preparing garlic, onions and tomatoes for a sauce any Italian nonna would be proud of.
Whilst working with flour we also knocked up a lovely pasta dough. This meant that by the time everyone was heading home they had been through a real workout with all the dough kneading that day! The young people rolled out pasta shapes and served their dishes with braised broccoli. Creative cook Jude even experimented with adding his homemade strawberry jam to his pasta, in a memorable(!) sweet and savoury dish.
The Scottish summer has not been anyone’s friend this year so the outdoor pizza cooking was slightly more challenging than expected (picture a stubborn dad at his BBQ in a tempest). But we made it work and the hot oven fired out some lovingly made pizzas. The favoured toppings were our gorgeous sauces paired with buffalo mozzarella and anchovies, which continued our exploration of new umami flavours.
The next cookery session of the week was how to make homemade Nandos. This involved a butchery session that was hugely popular with the young people. Possible future butcher, Lyla, exclaimed,
“I had an awesome time, learning how to cook! Butchering the chicken was my favourite!”.
We started by learning how to completely break down the chickens into their component parts as this is a skill that covers so many butchery principles.
To accompany our chicken, we then made fermented hot sauces which left a spicy and vinegary aroma in the kitchen. It was fair to say that this session was exciting, challenging and above all, delicious. The group was making excellent progress and as the first week drew to a close everyone was very pleased with their learning so far.
The final two sessions covered baking (enter our favourite secret veg-packed beetroot brownies) and pastry skills, including how to make Italian meringue. This is always a lot of fun as it means we get to demonstrate how to safely use a blowtorch to scorch the sugar. The next baking recipe we tackled was blueberry muffins, showing the young people how to bake with healthy fruits.
This summer’s Good Food Youth Club sessions encapsulated a lot of what we hope to achieve at EFS: we had young people engaging with cooking and viewing these essential skills in a new and exciting light. On our last day, young chef Jude declared to the room,
‘it just shows that making something tasty doesn’t need to be hard work’.
