The really big story around here recently has been the arrival of our new School of Wok products.
The beginning
We first met Jeremy Pang just over a year ago. He’d bought some of our woks to use in his cookery school and was really pleased with the way they performed so he called us and invited us to meet him at his cookery school, the School of Wok in Covent Garden.
After showing us how to make his favourite stir-fry we all talked about working together to develop a range of woks and accessories.
Jeremy Pang
Jeremy comes from three generations of Chinese chefs who have worked in London’s Chinatown. A sense of taste and texture was imbued in him by his father as a boy, and still influences him strongly today. A Biochemical Engineer by training, he then went to the Cordon Bleu Institute, where he had the opportunity to build on his food knowledge and hone his cooking techniques. He travelled widely, partly as a journalist in South East Asia, before setting up his cookery school in 2009. This was soon followed by a mobile cookery school so that Jeremy could teach people Chinese cookery in their own homes.
School of Wok
There was such demand for this that in 2012 he formalised it into the School of Wok in Covent Garden, since then he has been featured regularly in the media, and has been a finalist in awards for Best Young Rising Star and Best Specialist Cookery School. His formula is simple: passionate, jargon-free lessons that give his students the confidence to cook oriental food for themselves.
It takes time to put together a range of cookware, but, from the start, we all treated it as more of an adventure than a challenge. Jeremy has very strong ideas about the details needed to turn something good into something excellent, and we spent hours round a table together at the School of Wok (often at lunch time it has to be said), discussing the finer points of the angle of tool heads, or the type of wood needed for the best wok handle (bamboo, of course!). But he is a listener, too, and he was aware from the very beginning that he needed to start this pilgrimage where the average British hobby chef was right now, not where they might be in a few years time.
We are both proud and excited with the result, and the best bit is that we know it’s just the start of a long adventure! As Jeremy never tires of saying: ‘Learn. Laugh. Eat.’
We will soon be featuring some of Jeremy’s recipes on our website. And watch this space for a great offers on cooking lessons at the School of Wok.