While at Ballymaloe Cookery School, students can participate in a range of after-hours workshops and activities. Guest chefs, producers and Darina's friends from the food industry are often invited to speak to the students.
Ballymaloe Cookery School is also a proud host of evening events for the East Cork Slow Food Convivium, which educates students on the most important topics being discussed in the global food industry, including sustainability, food waste, artisan food production, climate change, soil biodiversity.
Our students may relax after lectures finish, or choose to extend their day by:
Students can sign up for an evening observing and helping at Ballymaloe House, or in a local restaurant or café. There is also the opportunity to join us at work on our farmers' market stall at the Midleton Farmers' Market.
If students want to be involved in the pop up dinner, they get to organise the whole thing, which includes deciding on the theme, the menu and all the decorations. The pop up is a wonderful evening for the guests who come and it is also a fantastic learning experience for the students that put the whole event together.
During the 12 Week Certificate Course, there are many opportunities to explore the vegetable gardens and glasshouses. One of the student duties is morning veg picking, where two students help to pick the vegetables, herbs and salad for that day's cooking. Every week, one of our gardeners also takes students on a more structured Farm Walk where they explain what is being sown, grown and harvested at that particular time.
Penny Allen and Maria Walsh always have something bubbling in the Fermentation Shed. Every day at lunch we enjoy delicious water kefir from the shed, which is often second fermented with raspberries, peaches, apples or any other sweet fruit from the gardens.
Penny teaches a fermentation class with our 12 Week Certificate Course students where they learn the importance of fermented foods in our lives, how they can make sauerkraut for themselves and what happens in the Fermentation Shed.
Our microdairy here at the school is a working dairy as well as a working classroom. Join us to learn about the art of cheesemaking as you cut the rennet and ladle the curds into the mould to make a delicious soft Camembert-style cheese. The ability to make cheese on a farm in a simple way has been the basis for the resurgence of the Irish farmhouse cheese movement and we are proud to carry on that tradition.
