Whether you grew up in the kitchen or eating meals that came out of the frozen food section of the grocery store, there’s no time like the present to learn how to cook, cook better or cook adventurously. Here are three opportunities to stretch your skills.
Austin resident Roberto Pérez teaches at Washburne Culinary & Hospitality Institute, but he also runs a side business called Urban Pilón, through which he takes cooking classes to homes in Oak Park, River Forest and beyond.
“Pilón is a mortar and pestle in Spanish,” Pérez said. “For Urban Pilon my focus is Caribbean food, Puerto Rican food. I love to cook food from pretty much all of the Americas.”
His journey to cooking pulls together two parts of his life. First was growing up with a mom who didn’t recognize his passion for the kitchen. She felt it was unmasculine. Then, later in life, a health scare that had to do with taking workout supplements reoriented him to food as medicine.
“A big part of my recovery was food. I really never stopped learning how to cook from that moment,” he said. “I was noticing that a lot of the recipes of my great-grandmother were being lost. And so, I wanted to revitalize, restore them. These throwbacks are usually healthier.”
He started with online classes during covid, then progressed to offering them at Casa Central in Humbolt Park. He focuses on beloved recipes, like a Puerto Rican dish arroz con gandules. And on ones that could be lost, like guanime.
“It’s a pre-Hispanic Puerto Rican tamal made out of corn, wrapped in banana leaves. It’s a lesser-known kind of recipe. It’s something you won’t find in any restaurants in Chicago,” he said.
Sarah Edgar, manager of Schoolhouse Kitchen + Studio in Oak Park, has a passion for getting kids and families excited about cooking. The school at 1011 Madison St. offers camps, birthday parties, and after school options.
“It’s very sneaky education,” Edgar said. “Kids love making food, even if it has a lot of vegetables in it. We are able to really introduce them to different tastes, chopping vegetables, making food in different ways from around the world. There’s so much learning in cooking. There’s so much math in cooking.”
What kids also learn is grit and determination, according to Edgar, “because they really want to eat that cupcake.”
Classes that get the whole family involved are popular too.
“The whole family, they all sign up and they make an entree and a dessert, and then they all eat together, so it’s both kind of a cooking class or having fun cooking with your kids,” she said.
Oak Parker Christina Nixon had been working as an occupational therapist for 36 years when she decided to explore options at Triton College to feed her soul.
“I kept taking more classes while I was there, laminated dough, artisan breads, and I finally studied chocolate,” she said. “I used to, for Christmas time, I would make my various types of biscotti and I’d dip them in chocolate and I’m like, why does it get all powdery? I didn’t understand. I didn’t know the science. I didn’t know how to temper the chocolate. Each type of chocolate has its own temperature zone for ideal temp whether it’s dark milk, white, ruby, golden.”
After more classes around the country and around the world, Nixon started teaching what she knows to locals at Happy Apple Pie Shop and at Cheney Mansion through the park district. Now, she is planning to open her own chocolate school in Oak Park, with an anticipated September opening.
“I will offer basic tempering classes, just to get your hands on and play with it and create a couple of different things and enjoy it,” she said. “And then I would have another level on how to mold chocolate, how to work with it, more couverture type of chocolate and make ganache. There are a lot of people who are very intimidated and fearful to work with chocolate because it is challenging. Bringing it to individuals on a very basic level, saying, ‘Yes, it can be challenging, but it’s not so much so that you can’t learn how to work with it.’ And it’s fun.”
An edible education:
• urbanpilon.com
• iloveschoolhouse.com
• createdbychristina.com