“Vegan cuisine will not have a great impact unless we create great chefs.”
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As a newbie vegan chef, in 2010, I expected to dive into a world where my fellow chefs adored their work; creating dishes with love, pushing back the boundaries of cruelty free food......how wrong I was.
It was 2010 and I was working in my first pro-chef job. The kitchen was a maelstrom of grumpy, tetchy chefs, barking at each other whilst churning out food with as much care as a factory robot. Any love for food resided solely with me. The rest of the ‘team’ were not vegan or vegetarian and couldn’t care less about cross contamination. They were grown boys stuck in a career that was the best of a limited choice given them at age 16; work as a mechanic, builder or chef.
For many, becoming a chef seemed like the easy choice. The long unsociable hours, minimum wage and sweaty, greasy conditions soon makes it clear that it is far from easy. This is a persistent problem in UK kitchens and one that adds to our terrible reputation for a severe lack of culinary finesse. When you pair that with the vegan movement the consequences could be even more severe; it has the potential to limit the growth of veganism.
As a vegan chef you are acutely aware that the dish you serve may convince someone to become vegan or help them to remain vegan.
Each good plate of food adds weight to the vegan choice, it says ‘this is delicious, you are not missing out, so yes, you can do this’. For people on the vegan cusp that single plate could mark the deciding moment. For the V-curious, wanting to dip a tentative toe, if that dish is bland they will ascertain that ALL vegan food is bland and steer clear of it in the future.
The culinary art of vegan, sustainable and compassionate cuisine needs to be showcased by talented vegan chefs.
My mission? To provide the vegan movement with progressive learning and innovation so that we can develop a cuisine that it truly deserves and needs.
I launched the school on November 1st, World Vegan Day, 2018. In just 6 days my first course sold out!!!
I decided to kick off the school with a fast-track vocational course designed to propel keen home cooks into their first job as a professional vegan chef. I knew the vegan movement greatly needed this course and the response, from potential students and mainstream media, only confirmed that.
I recreated the chef course as an online course in 2020. This was so that I can reach, and help, many more people realise their dream of a career in vegan food. And, in doing so, help many more people go vegan and stay vegan because they can access great vegan food.
The course is taken by people all over the world. From the UK to Australia and everywhere in between. Offering this course online has greatly increased the reach of this course. And, it spurred me on to create an online course for home cooks.
In the spring of 2020, whilst the world was changing in a way we never thought possible, I created our first online home cooks course.
So many people want to cook vegan food well but they simply don’t know how. This course has given me the opportunity to reach novices and share my knowledge with them. The courses cover the basics but also push people to try more challenging recipes.
At this time I also started hosting daily live cookalongs - Facebook live shows where people cook with me from their own kitchen. This is something I continue today, although on a weekly basis.
I know that, even if people do not make the recipe I am showing them, I will have demonstrated that vegan food is fun, accessible and tasty. That small but steady impact can, in time, help people create vegan food from scratch.
I have now trained over 100 people so that they can make vegan food their career.
In early 2021 I reached the milestone of having trained over 100 vegan chefs. This was significant to me as I dreamed of creating at least 100 vegan chefs. That was to be my gift to the world. Helping it in a way that I very much think it needs helping. I firmly believe that, if we all seek to help the world, in a way that resonates with us, collectively we will make a huge difference.
The students that I have had the good fortune to teach, show me that the future of vegan food is, indeed, very bright. They are passionate, naturally. But they are also incredibly talented; innovative, creative and tenacious. The vast majority of them had no experience in a professional kitchen before taking my course. They were, what I like to call, ‘keen foodies’ - home cooks who had experimented with a variety of recipes and vegan ingredients.
I teach my students, not only the fundamentals of vegan cooking, but also, to have belief in themselves.
Being a chef takes a great deal of confidence so it is a key component to a career in vegan food.
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