We headed to Cornwall to brush up our culinary skills at the Rick Stein Padstow Seafood School.

A day at Rick Stein’s Seafood School in Padstow, or Padstein as it’s been unofficially renamed, is a day we won’t forget in a while.

The cookery school, set up by Britain’s most famous fish chef looks out over panoramic windows of Cornwall’s Camel Estuary – so it’s called thanks to its winding, hump-backed course that plays home to docked fishing boats and a constant flurry of seagulls over head.

The day we visited however wasn’t Cornwall’s finest, the heavens had opened as soon as we left our hotel at 8am and the sky turned to classic British grey. The perfect day perhaps to stay inside and cook up a five-course feast, then.

The cookery classes at Padstow Seafood School start early, we met at 8.45 for tea and coffee with the rest of our amateur cookery team. From here we were run through the day’s proceedings and a few obligatory health and safety briefings, introduced to our tutors and senior chef lecturer, Keith Brooksbank.

But it’s all very casual and lighthearted, everyone from Keith to the pupils and the rest of his kitchen team are here for their love of good food. This particular course was focused on Italian cookery, hands-on dishes that will impress but aren’t fiddly and showing. Just good old fashioned Italian cooking with just the right amount of finesse.

Throughout the course you work in pairs so it’s easier come as a two, but Padstow will team you up if need be.

Before any cooking was to take place we had to look the part. So we donned chef’s whites and classic kitchen aprons before taking our notebooks up to the front of the kitchen for our first briefing from Keith.

Well and truly thrown into the deep end our first task was to kill, cook and prepare a crab. Sure, we’re always ordering it on menus and we’ve no qualms about tucking into a £20 Burger & Lobster now again, but actually killing it, this was a first.

Keith talked the class through the steps, from what we should be looking for when we’re choosing crabs at the fish market, to the most humane way to prepare them, giving detailed explanations of each. It’s Keith’s little tips and tricks like this and kitchen repertoire, built up and refined for over 20years, that was a joy to learn.

Once the crab was on boil, it was on to preparing the seafood for our fritto miso of scallops, prawns and squid – well this is Rick Stein’s school after all. Again, it wasn’t just the delicious dishes we were learning and cooking, but Keith’s tutoring that made the course so worthwhile. It was interesting to see how many bad habits you get into in your own kitchen, such as washing the squid under the tap before cooking (an absolute no-no in a professional kitchen as it makes the squid swell) to handy tricks on how to devein a prawn without damaging it’s shell.

After each course came the best bit, you got to eat it. So we sat down as a group at the kitchen’s vast dining table, first tucking into our fritto miso with lemon, followed by crab with rocket, basil and lemon olive oil.

By midday we’d already prepared, cook, plated up and ate two delicious meals. On to the third and this time sarde a beccafico was on the menu, traditionally a Sicilian dish of sardines rolled up and packed full of zesty Mediterranean flavours.

For this we had to de-scale, gut and butterfly fillet a whole fish. Admittedly it was messy and a few of the members of the class were a little squeamish, but it’s a skill we’ll keep forever and one that’s been a little lost thanks to the convenience of supermarkets these days. The dish itself was delicious and looked impressive as the fish is filled, rolled and squashed between juicy slices of orange with the tails sticking up, before being baked. It’s definitely a dish that’ll go on our dinner party list.

By this point, the wine had been cracked open and everyone was on a culinary high from what we’d already achieved. The fourth and main dish on the menu was an impressive osso buco with risotto Milanese – a slow-cooked veal dish with bone marrow risotto.

Some of the skills needed were ones you’d probably use at home such as sautéing onions and carrots. However, as most haven’t been trained in a professional kitchen we quickly came to realise that most of us had been doing it wrong, despite the simplicity of the task. Keith taught us little tips and tricks about how much salt to use to ensure the veg didn’t burn and what and how much oil to use.

By the time it was ready to serve, the marrow of the veal joint was soft and oozing, which we scooped out and stirred into the risotto for a creamy, rich flavour.  The veal was succulent and perfectly falling away from the bone.

The entire class were impressed with what they’d cooked as it came to the finale dish of the day, but this time we didn’t have to lift a finger.

Now well and truly stuffed and exhausted from a day’s work in the kitchen, Keith took over and rustled us up a linguine ai frutti di mare as we looked on and sipped our sauvignon. It was a pleasure to see a Rick Stein classic that’s been cooked up everyday in the iconic restaurant cooked right there in front of you, by one of their head chefs.

We went home belly-full, a little smug and with a recipe book and repertoire full of dinner party dishes and everyday skills.

It’s safe to say we’ve been in the kitchen ever since.

The One Day Course of Italian Cooking is priced at £198 per person. Check the Rick Stein website for dates and other courses.

Padstow Seafood School, Riverside, Padstow PL28 8BY  

Tel. 01841 532 700

www.rickstein.com/Seafood-School

Heading to Cornwall? Check out our review of Cornwall’s Retallack Resort & Spa.