For gourmands, a great holiday consists of great cooking and great eating. SANDRA O'CONNELLrounds up the best foodie breaks, while DEIRDRE VELDON takes a class at the Rococo Chocolate School in London
1 Loire de luxe
Deep in France’s Loire Valley, The Walnut Grove Cookery School runs five-day courses that start as they mean to go on, with a champagne welcome. Cook all day, spend your evenings eating the fruit of your labours and your nights digesting them. If nothing else you’ll get to test the French paradox for yourself, with typical dinners consisting of six gourmet courses and ending with truffles.
Courses cost €1,595 per person sharing plus a €210 single person supplement, even if you go home weighing enough for two. 00-33-243985002,
www.walnutgrovecookery.com
2 Dining down under
They don’t do anything by halves in Oz, so expect the inaugural Crave Sydney month-long celebration of tucker to be spectacular. Crave Sydney, which runs for the whole of October, incorporates the Sydney International Food Festival and the World Chef Showcase, from October 9th to 11th, with arts events.
The highlight is likely to be Breakfast on the Bridge, a giant beano that’ll bring the city’s iconic Harbour Bridge to a halt on October 25th.
www.cravesydney.com
3 Brazilian buffet
This month Yara Roberts’s The Brazilian Table, a regional history of Bahia, Amazonas, the Cerrado and Minas Gerais, hits Irish bookshops. Upmarket holiday company Casanove Loyd can brings people to the cookery school run by Yara and husband Richard in Paraty. Boat trips to local seafood restaurants, talks about Brazilian produce and private cooking lessons in the couple’s home, followed by dinner, are among the highlights.
A seven-night trip staying two nights in Rio and five nights at Pousada Pardieiro in Paraty costs from £1,492 (€1,740) per person, including UK flights. www.cazloyd.com, 00-44-207-3842332
4 Cooks on safari
Cazenove Loyd is also offering a combination of a game reserve holiday in South Africa with cookery lessons from food writer Marianne Palmer, author of Prickly Pears and Pomegranates, shortlisted for this year’s Gourmand World Cookbook Award. Palmer is hosting a cookery course at Samara Private Game Reserve in South Africa’s beautiful Karoo region on August 22nd and 23rd. She lives on a farm that borders Samara, and her book celebrates the local cuisine and features recipes handed down through five generations of her family, all using local, seasonal ingredients.
And when you’ve had enough of all that – as if – the luxury game reserve has 70,000 acres to explore. Just make sure you’re not some lion’s lunch.
A week at Samara plus cookery school costs £2,870 (€3,350), including flights from the UK. 00-44-20-73842332,
www.cazloyd.com
5 Tasty French tours
The Travel Department is offering a taste of France in the Cote D’Azur on September 14th, with cookery classes from English-speaking chefs. The five-night culinary break costs €849 and includes flights, hotel accommodation and evening meals in local restaurants. 01-6371600, www.thetraveldepartment.ie
6 Thai highs
If there is a cuisine more delicious than that of Thailand, we’ve yet to find it. Specialist activity travel club Whydontyou.com (Ranulph Fiennes is a member, as is David Bellamy – who looks like he likes his grub) has a 12-day itinerary that takes in Bangkok and Ayutthaya, and includes a visit to the ruins at Sukhothai. Book-ending this are cookery lessons at the Kanchanaburi and Chiang Mai cookery schools as well as an opportunity to spend a night with a Thai family in a traditional teak house and enjoy a special lunch banquet. Tour-only prices for the cookery classes start at €777 (€900) per person. 00-44-84-58386262, www.whydontyou.com
7 Savouring Spain
Tasting Places has a four-day break with award-winning husband and wife restaurateurs Sam and (confusingly) Sam Clark in Mairena, southern Spain. The two Sams, who own UK restauraunt Moro, have a home nearby and their course specialises in Alpujarran food, which has more than a flavour of north African about it.
The trip begins with a flight into Malaga and includes a chance to visit local vineyards, cheese-making demonstrations and visits to local, organic farms and olive oil mills.
Chris Stewart, author of Driving over Lemons will be there too, to talk about his experience of this little-visited corner of Spain. Residents stay at Casa de las Chimeneas, a restored country house stuffed with antiques to feast your eyes on. If that doesn’t sate your appetite, extend the trip with a four-day optional stay in Granada, to include guided tours, tapas lunches and dinner in a three-star hotel.
Prices for the basic tour start at €850, including three full cookery classes. A single supplement of €180 applies. The longer trip costs €1,300 and departures are on October 2nd. 00-44-20-89645333, www.tastingplaces.com
8 Tempting Tuscany
There’s something a little distasteful about foraging for food, but there is one exception: hunting for truffles in Tuscany. Sanctuary Retreats has tailor-made foodie holidays that include truffling, vineyard viewing and wine-tasting in gorgeous Chianti (see also page 10). Autumn is the perfect time to explore the region; the sun is milder, the grapes are in and the hairpin bends that little bit emptier. It’s also awash with local delicacies such as olive oil, artisanal breads and regional cheeses. Work up an appetite for all of it by chasing after specially trained hunting dogs that can ferret out white truffles and porcini before you can say: “Dinner’s ready”.
Autumn rates start at £8,294 (about €9,675) a week for villas with pools and plasma TVs. 00-44-20-78457800, www.sanctuary-retreats.com
9 Moorish meals
For total decadence, and more than a hint of the exotic, check out Peggy Markel’s Culinary Adventures. Her tasty 10-day trip through Morocco will set you back just under $5,000 (about €3,500). You can either think of how much food you could get for that at Lidl or you can blow the lot with abandon on the food adventure of a lifetime. The trip takes in Marrakech, home of one of the world’s greatest markets, and the old Portuguese port of Essaouira. In between is a vast expanse of cookery classes, farm visits and more tagines than you could shake a wooden spoon at. It’s not all work, either, with afternoons spent soaking in the hamam, playing tennis or wandering the medina with expert guides.
Dinners are held under the stars, nights are spent in private villas, and at every turn you’ll find food gorgeous enough to make a belly dance. 00-1-303-4131289, www.peggymarkel.com
10 Delicious Dublin
For a slimmed-down alternative, Eveleen Coyle’s Fabulous Food Trails will take you on a culinary tour of the capital. The half-day walking tour reveals the hidden tastes of Dublin, stopping off at vendors who have been putting food on Irish tables for generations, as well as new kids on the chopping block who have introduced modern flavours to the Celtic palate.
Departing at 10am on Fridays, the weekly 2½ hour walks take in food halls, fruit stalls, cheesemongers, fishmongers, butchers and bakers, and are led by foodie experts who are also good fun. The price is €45 and includes enough tastings to make lunch – and probably dinner – unnecessary. 01-4971245, www.fabfoodtrails.com
Taste test: chefs' top travel tips
Paul Flynn
The Tannery, Dungarvan
I go back to Paris again and again. I love to experience the brasseries and bistros. I’m fed up with high-end restaurants. What I love is to get back to basics, where it’s all about the food and not the technical aspects of it. Paris is the place to get all of that.
Garrett Byrne
Campagne, Kilkenny
My wife and I always choose our holidays for the food, and the place we love most is L’Astrance in Paris. Everything about it appeals to us: the food, the wine, the service. It’s just across the river from the Eiffel Tower and we always stay at the Hotel Louvre Sainte Anne.
Mickael Viljanen
Gregan’s Castle, Ballyvaughan
Whenever I get a few days off I head for London. I do the two- and three-star Michelin restaurants for lunch and the one-stars for dinner – amazing value. You can get lunch in a two-star restaurant in London for £28. My favourite is The Ledbury. I go to Denmark and Sweden a lot, too, because their cooking is in a league of its own right now – particularly Noma in Copenhagen.
A masterclass in chocolate-making
LAURENT COUCHAUX tips a bowl of molten dark chocolate into a perfect O on the marble worktop. Marble, he says, is the only surface to use when tempering chocolate. Granite will do the job, but forget about wood or formica. This is the first thing I learn from Couchaux, the Professeur du Chocolat, in the chocolate masterclass at London’s Rococo Chocolate School.
He fans the liquid out with a palette knife and, in the same action, uses a metal scraper to gather it back into a pool. He inserts the heat probe, looking for a uniform 28 degrees Celsius. We talk thermometers. Instead of revealing the name of the oh-so-expensive chocolate thermometer prized by an elite group of chocolatiers, Couchaux enthuses about Ikea’s probe thermometer. Cost? £6.99.
Once the chocolate has reached the ideal temperature, it can be worked with, moulded and cooled. Tempered chocolate is stable and hard, with a good sheen, and it cracks satisfyingly when broken. Just to test the temper quality, we pour a couple of bars of chocolate into moulds and leave to cool.
The masterclass is the highlight of the Art of Chocolate, a themed stay at the Jumeirah Lowndes Hotel in Belgravia. On the package, there are chocolate gifts and an apron, promises of chocolate martinis, and, more dubiously, a chocolate brunch at the hotel restaurant. It’s a bit of a lark for the average chocoholic.
The class at Rococo, around the corner, is a lovely introduction for the amateur chocolatier. It helps that Couchaux and owner Chantal Coady know their stuff. She started her chocolate-making business more than 25 years ago, while he’s been a pastry chef and master chocolatier at the Valrhona L’École du Grand Chocolat. Coady part-owns an organic chocolate farm and factory in Grenada. “The idea of the chocolate school is to get people to experience chocolate making first hand. It should be inspiring and fun, and also really practical. Everyone who does these should really take away a huge amount, apart from the chocolate,” she says.
The idea is that after a few exhausting hours of stirring chocolate, one can retire to the hotel, or cruise Belgravia’s finest shops. The Jumeirah Lowndes, though not hugely promising from the street, is very comfortable, with soothing and tastefully designed rooms featuring rich fabrics and novel touches, such as Nespresso coffee makers and digital weighing scales. A recent redesign has taken the look upmarket, with the addition of some chic pieces from interiors “names” such as Julian Chichester and Porta Romana. You’ll feel quite the pampered pooch on return to Dublin.
** Deirdre Veldon was a guest of the Jumeirah Lowndes Hotel (00-44-20-78231234, www.jumeirah.com), and Rococo Chocolates (5 Motcomb Street, London, 00-44-20-72450993, rococochocolates.com)
** The Art of Chocolate package costs from £445 (€520) per room per night based on two people