Cooking's cool for new crop of home chefs

Kuhle Ntsele spent her 10th birthday in the kitchen.

The Durban pupil whose dream is to appear on reality food show Man vs Child and who religiously watches Siba's Table chose to celebrate her birthday party by taking her best friends to a cooking school where they spent the day making pizza and cupcakes.

She and her friends were decked out in chef's hats and aprons.

Kuhle is not alone. Her mother, Mamello, who said that she and cooking "are not friends", is planning on hosting a cooking event for her own birthday. She will pay between R450 and R480 a head.

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"It is well worth the cost," said Mamello. "It's memorable, fun and so much better than going to a restaurant. At a cooking party you have no chance to be antisocial, sitting on your phone sending a WhatsApp."

Things are clearly heating up in the kitchen.

The Ntsele family are among a growing number of South Africans of all ages and races who, according to cookery school owners, want to bond and have fun in the kitchen.

Kamini Pather, MasterChef South Africa winner, food writer and host of TV show Girl Eat World, said TV shows such as MasterChef, Top Chef and Chopped had made being involved with food "cool".

"Everyone wants a piece of the proverbial and literal pie," said Pather. "People believe what they see on TV. So many more men, women and children have been empowered and inspired by TV chefs.

"Food TV shows have rebranded cooking from menial work into rockstardom."

Megan Harker owns Gecko Culinary Adventures, the school in Durban that the Ntseles chose for their birthday events.

Harker said she had noticed a clear change in her audience over the 10 years she has been running the school. "In the beginning it was mostly women, and then in 2012 Deena Naidoo won MasterChef South Africa. Suddenly men who had never thought about cooking started to attend classes. It was as if it was suddenly OK to cook."

Among her clients are a group of men in their late 60s and 70s who spend a Saturday morning once every couple of months cooking. They've tackled a curry cook-off and a fish course and they have booked for another session in April.

"They arrive at 10 on a Saturday morning, leave at 2pm, drink lots of wine and have a fabulous time," said Harker.

She said it was not just TV that had changed people's views of cooking — social media had also had a huge influence, "Those little instant recipes that flash up on Facebook, for example, or the pictures of food on Instagram, have really had an impact on our consciousness."

Celebrity chef, TV star and cookbook author Jenny Morris agreed. Her Cape Town cooking school, The Giggling Gourmet, opened in 1998.

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"We were one of the innovators of cooking as team-building. At the time I thought people might be sick and tired of jumping out of helicopters."

She has also noticed a change in her audiences. "We have a lot of men and it's completely across the board — we are talking granddads, fathers and sons. They lie on the floor and watch their bread bake."

Morris has also noticed a change in the South African palate thanks to cooking shows — particularly among children. "I'm talking about kids moving away from fishfingers and drumsticks to sushi, and pasta with garlic and basil. TV has opened our minds; it has taken us on journeys."

Pather said the increased interest in food TV had brought with it a wave of health and better-living messaging. "People now have a heightened sense of awareness around wellness and how food affects the body in the long term, as well as lifestyle diseases."

And youngsters had particularly been affected by this trend, she said. "The '80s and '90s packet-meal scourge is now over. Teenagers understand what fresh ingredients to use and it's no longer part of pop culture to only eat mass-produced cheeseburgers."

Kuhle now wants to do a cooking course in the holidays. She loves sushi and prawns, and said that because of watching TV she was willing to try more food and to eat better.

"When I see new things I want to try them and also try to make them," she said.

"She asks for fruit like blueberries," said her mother. "All I wanted when I was small was bananas."