July 19, 2027
4:30 pm
Take your vegan French cooking in a more contemporary direction with our Contemporary Advanced French Cuisine course. This course is designed for people who already enjoy cooking from scratch at home and want to explore more ambitious dishes, modern techniques and creative presentation.
There are no prerequisites, and you don’t need professional training. If you’re comfortable cooking regularly at home and following a recipe, you’ll be absolutely fine. The course is more detailed and creative than our Traditional French Cuisine course, but it is still very much designed for enthusiastic home cooks.
What makes this course different is the way we put dishes together. Rather than concentrating on individual recipes, we’ll create beautifully composed plates with multiple components, carefully balanced flavours, contrasting textures and decorative touches. Think the sort of sophisticated, imaginative food you might expect in a high-end restaurant, but created in a home kitchen.
It’s also a playful course. We make things such as vegan eggs Benedict, vegan bacon and salmon-style steaks — not because anyone is going to mistake them for the originals, but because they’re fun ways to explore flavour, texture and technique. The aim is food that is imaginative and delicious in its own right.
Presentation is a big part of the week too. We spend time on plating, colour, contrast and composition, treating the plate almost like a canvas. It’s creative, hands-on and often one of the most enjoyable parts of the course.
Our Traditional French Cuisine course focuses on veganising classic French dishes and techniques, with an emphasis on the sort of cooking you might do regularly at home. This course takes a more contemporary approach, with greater emphasis on elaborate dishes, creative combinations, modern restaurant-style ideas and presentation.
You do not need to have taken any of our other courses first. If you regularly cook from scratch at home, you’ll be absolutely fine. And if you’ve already completed one of our other French courses, you’ll find plenty of new techniques and ideas to explore.
Group sizes are small — typically six students, with a maximum of eight — so there’s plenty of time for individual guidance, questions and hands-on support throughout the day. You’ll cook in my own kitchen, using techniques and equipment that translate easily to your own kitchen at home.
French cuisine has always been about far more than individual recipes. It is a way of thinking about flavour, technique, texture and presentation. This course gives you the chance to explore those ideas in a contemporary vegan context, combining classic French principles with modern techniques and a much more playful approach.
The word advanced refers to what we explore rather than to an intimidating level of entry. We’ll make more complex dishes, work with multiple elements and spend more time on refinement and presentation. The aim is to produce beautiful, impressive plates of food without requiring professional training or experience.
Of course, you won’t necessarily want to produce elaborate restaurant-style plates every evening. Almost everything we make can be simplified for everyday cooking, and the individual techniques and components can be endlessly adapted and repurposed. A sauce from one dish, a garnish from another or a different way of preparing a familiar vegetable can transform something quite ordinary.
By the end of the course, you’ll have expanded your repertoire of contemporary vegan French cooking and developed new ways of thinking about flavour, composition and presentation. You won’t just leave knowing how to recreate a collection of elaborate dishes, but with a whole repertoire of techniques and ideas to draw on whenever you cook.
This course can be booked with or without accommodation. Often we don’t have enough rooms for everyone, so we’ve teamed up with a range of excellent local accommodation providers, all of whom are a very short walk away, which means that everyone who wants a room can have one. All our rooms are single occupancy with en suite bathrooms unless you book with someone you want to share with.
You are welcome to share your room with someone who isn’t doing the course. However, if they want meals, there’s a supplement of €250 to pay at the time of booking. There is no supplement for people doing the course. There’s more detail on our accommodation page.
Questions? Let’s talk.
Please note that this course is normally non-refundable, so we strongly suggest you take out holiday insurance at the time of booking. However, we are happy to transfer your booking to someone else at no charge. Full terms and conditions are here.
Our online courses are here.
Two of our rooms accommodate two people and we also have a suite, Capucine, that can accommodate four. To book for more than one person, first choose the room you want to stay in then add additional people to your room. There are different prices depending on whether or not they will also attend the course. If you have any questions about this, please get in touch.
