Author: Sommer Hamilton
Dying for a homemade meal but can’t exactly whip one up with your dorm-issue microwave? If making only Easy Mac and Pop Tarts is killing whatever cooking instincts you may have, Hipcooks can help you revive them. Hipcooks is a cooking school based here in LA with locations on Robertson Boulevard and at The Brewery, an art colony only minutes from Oxy. Both locations offer around 40 classes, each with a differently themed menu. Classes are $55 at The Brewery (Hipcooks East) and $65 at the Robertson location (Hipcooks West). The cost includes food, wine and other beverages, and also buys you the lessons of your instructor who will guide you in preparing a variety of meals.
Many of the Hipcooks’ menus reflect owner Monika Reti’s travels around the world. The classes offer specifically Greek, Thai, Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Persian, French, Spanish and at least three different Italian classes. There are also classes about grilling, cupcakes, tarts, soup and brown bag lunches. The menu for a three-hour evening of cooking offers anywhere from four to 12 different foods and drinks, which the class-usually 12 students-prepares and eats together.
Hipcooks is very hands-on, or perhaps more accurately, “hands-in.” At these classes, you often make use of your “impeccably clean finger” for tasting and your “next impeccably clean finger” for tasting again. A lot of handwashing also happens at Hipcooks. Reti’s goal is to give students “confidence in their own cooking ability” and seeks to tear people away from the rigidity of the precise measurements of recipes. Instead, it urges people to add flavors they like, in the amount they desire and to add colors that “make it look pretty.” By teaching people the techniques of cooking, Reti hopes to give them more creative license in the kitchen to determine how to put those techniques to use with a variety of flavors, textures, smells and colors.
The Hipcooks instructors are not only very knowledgeable about the techniques of cooking, but also about the foods themselves. Students are quizzed throughout the classes to identify flavors, determine why certain ingredients are added and why certain products are used.
After three hours of a Hipcooks class, no matter what your level of cooking experience, you will undoubtedly have learned something new. You may also learn that you have incredibly bad, or dangerous, cooking habits. Hipcooks offers several classes that are intensive with knife skills and involve lots of chopping, slicing and the like. The goal is not to involve fingers in this process, but the Hipcooks instructors are often horrified at how close students come to doing just that. The instructors appreciate novices in these classes because they do not have the “bad habits” of holding and using knives that those who think they know what they are doing in the kitchen tend to have.
Oxy students should check out Hipcooks because it is a great value. You get food of much higher quality than students generally eat for less than it would cost elsewhere. Being as intellectually curious as Oxy students are, you get to learn skills, techniques and other food trivia. Check out “A Cocktail Party” when you are ready for slightly more sophisticated drinking habits than whatever happens to be in the keg. The class teaches you how to make great martinis among other drinks and features lots of appetizers (heavy on the goat cheese). Hipcooks also offers the class for both straight and gay singles if the Oxy scene just isn’t doing it for you anymore. Before it gets too warm, try the “Hot Soup Focus Group” for great recipes to indulge in when it’s raining and you just can’t possibly go to class.
So dorm-residers, bribe your off-campus friends with lots of yummy food for use of their kitchen and get cooking!
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