Heart of Hall is Melbourne's newest cooking school and if you take a class here, you will be in excellent hands. Kate McKay has cooked and taught cooking in many places around the world and she exudes the sort of enthusiasm all inspiring teachers should have.
Hi Kate. Now I’ve read a little bit about you on Broadsheet and other places. The big thing everyone likes to plug is that you worked for Jamie Oliver at Recipease Cooking school.
I know, I can’t seem to get away from that. It is part of what I do, but so are the other places I have worked. I was at Foodish Cooking School in Canberra as the resident Chef for Belconnen Fresh Food Markets and I was the resident Chef in a retail space conducting demonstrations and cooking classes at the Lakehouse Homestore in Canada.
How did it all start for you?
Oh gosh. Well I have always been very interested in food and loved food. I cooked from a very young age with my grandma and my mum was always cooking when we were very young. I fell in love with it at a very young age and knew I was going to do something in the food industry but I wasn’t sure what and then I just fell into cheffing after a year in Belgium.
I actually came back, didn’t know what I was going to do and someone suggested that I do my apprenticeship and so I went ahead and did that. I do not regret doing my apprenticeship whatsoever and becoming a chef. It’s hard work, but I love it and it has been taken me to London, Canada; wherever you go in the world, people need chefs.
What is it that you love about it because as you say, it’s hard work.
It is hard work and it’s a stressful job. But for me and the way my career is going with the teaching side of things now, I just like interacting with people and showing people how simple food can be. It doesn’t have to be complicated Michelin star dishes. Teaching people the basics of cooking and making them fall in love with food the way I fell in love with food, yeah, that’s why I’m doing it.
It’s interesting because I think once you start teaching something, you really get to the heart of what it’s all about so that you can convey that to the people you are teaching. You would really have to think about technique to be able to teach that to people.
Absolutely and cooking is one of those hard ones now with MasterChef and MKR and all that, a lot of people come in and think that they already are chefs. That’s fantastic and I love that that is there but I do have to bring them back and say that it’s not all about contest food, it’s about bringing people together and knowing your basics and going from there.
Do you think people get that because…well I’ve been to cooking classes where I learned how to make a macaron and that’s all I got from it. And I wouldn’t then know how to take that to any other level. There are so many hours and years behind what you do. How do you distil that into what you teach?
I think it’s about stepping out of the chef role and into the teaching role. Tha’s what it comes down to. Cheffing is my background but I’m actually doing my teaching degree as well at the moment so I am fully moving into that. It’s about giving people tips and tricks and making them feel more confident in what they are doing in that class. I will never make macarons in my class. I tried it once and failed and I will never do it again.
When I started doing the lessons in London, it was very apparent that people don’t know the basics of cooking. People would pick up a vegetable peeler and ask us what it was for. They were so used to have completely packaged food in London. You could buy your carrots and potatoes peeled with butter on them in a container ready to go. The classes are about bringing people back to that; showing them an easy technique to prepare vegetables or something to make your food tastier or cook something nicer than what you might do as a standard. I want to make people less afraid.
We have everything; classes for people who have been in kitchens before but also taking people right from the start. We offer a knife skills class. That’s not to intimidate people; it’s not us juggling knives, it’s about us bringing you all the way back; showing you hoe to look after your knife and what you need to do to make sure you keep your fingertips, things like that.
I think along the way you always pick things up from kitchens that you like or things you wouldn’t do and things that you’d take into the future.
I want to pick up on your comment about helping people be less afraid. I do think there is a certain fear of…well, not a fear of food, although in some cases maybe, but a fear of doing something wrong, making a mess of it and things not working out. I had a chat to Annie Smithers , she has Du Fermier in Trentham, and she was saying that cooking is something she does all day every day and so that muscle is very well trained for her and we can’t expect to just come in and be able to do things effortlessly straightaway. It’s a big thing that we talk about a lot as teachers as well, that it is important to fail and to learn from our mistakes. Especially with food, you want to be enjoying the process but maybe observing a little bit about what is happening so that you can get a feel for what ingredients do or don’t do together.
I think that’s what cooking is, right? If you look at the Tarte Tatin, the upside-down apple cake. It was an accident that was the made into a dish that is now recognized worldwide. We do cover a little of that in my classes because obviously they’re not staged and accidents happen. Things go wrong and when accidents happen, I pull myself up and say that wasn’t supposed to happen but we can now do this. It’s about getting people used to fixing their mistakes as they go and obviously trying to eliminate waste as well. We don’t want to burn things or doing things and throwing them out and starting again. We want to be able to utilise all the ingredients.
Have you been in Melbourne a while?
No I just moved to Melbourne on the 3rd January. I’m actually from regional New South Wales but I have moved around a lot. Since leaving school I haven’t stayed in a place for a very long time.
Melbourne has a reputation for being a foodie city. Are you feeling that?
Definitely. I am down here in Williamstown and I haven’t really got into Melbourne very much. But definitely here in Newport and Williamstown, you can tell by the cafes and restaurants that are here that it’s important to this area.
What the girls are doing here is right up my alley. It was absolutely a perfect fit. It was a miracle that I was driving over the overpass and could see the building before it opened. I said to my partner, “turn around, turn around, I have to go back, it said cooking school.” That was the first day we drove into Melbourne so everything has just fallen into place. We came to the city without a real plan so to discover Heart of Hall was amazing. Everything these ladies are doing is exactly what I would be doing if I opened my own place.
Is that a dream for you one day down the track?
I think it’s every chef’s dream. There would be very few chefs who would say they wanted to stay working for someone else and doing someone else’s menu. It’s something I’d aspire to later in life.
Did you have people along your path who were great teachers for you?
I’ve always come across chefs who have impacted my career and where I’ve gone with food. Definitely working at the Jamie Oliver company years ago was a huge step in the direction I am now going in. I also worked for a fantastic company in Canberra called Foodish and helped with the Belconnen Markets cooking school. Alaine in her own way inspired me as well. I think along the way you always pick things up from kitchens that you like or things you wouldn’t do and things that you’d take into the future.
I see you have a wide range of classes here, from cheese making to International cuisines and pasta making and so on. How do you decide what to offer?
We choose classes that will allow a standard student to succeed. Also it has to be things that can be done within the timing of the class. The season plays a role in what we put on. It’s probably more about what the customers want. People are coming into the café, realising it’s a cooking school and asking whether we do pasta classes or knife classes. If we’re not already doing it, we look into doing it because that’s what people want.
17 Hall Street, Newport