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These eight recipes, chosen from across our Leiths Online courses, may require patience, care, and attention, but the end result is a true masterpiece. Add them to your cookery bucket list.
Some recipes are more than just meals, they’re milestones. They ask for your time, focus, and hands-on effort, but what they give back is something far richer: confidence, skill, and the deep satisfaction that only comes from making something extraordinary from scratch. These nine dishes, taken from across our Leiths Online courses, are perfect examples of how learning to cook well is as much about the journey as it is the destination. Add them to your bucket list or sign up to a course today.
From Essential Bread and Patisserie and Basics to Baker
Making laminated dough is one of the ultimate baking challenges — and an unforgettable rite of passage. Mastering butter layering, proofing and shaping takes time (and fridge space), but when you bite into that first golden, flaky croissant, you'll understand: it was worth every fold. The precision you gain in pastry work is a skill you’ll use forever.
From Chef Skills
This showstopper is a lesson in timing and technique. You’ll make sponge, homemade ice cream, and Italian meringue and then assemble and bake it all at just the right moment. It teaches you how to plan, pace, and pull off something spectacular under pressure. The kind of confidence that translates across the kitchen.
From Chef Skills
Deceptively simple, gnocchi demands time to bake your potatoes beforehand and slicing up each individual piece. When you get it right, you achieve perfect pillows of potato that soak up sauce like a dream.
From Fish Fundamentals and Essential Cooking
This lesson starts at the source, with a whole fish. You’ll learn how to fillet it yourself before turning it into golden, crisp goujons. The time is in the prep, but the reward is the empowerment of knowing exactly how to handle and cook fresh fish, a vital skill that transforms how you approach seafood.
From Essential Cooking
First, you learn to joint a whole chicken, then you transform the leftover bones into a rich, golden stock. This isn’t just about thrift; it’s about layering flavour, understanding depth, and embracing the foundations of great cooking. The result? The most flavourful soups, risottos and sauces you’ve ever made.
From Chef Skills
Jam-making is part science, part tradition. You’ll learn about setting points, sterilising jars, and working with natural pectin. It takes patience and precision, but the end result is pure joy, perfect in a Victoria sponge or dolloped into warm homemade doughnuts.
From Essential Bread and Patisserie and Basics to Baker
The ultimate slow food. You’ll build and care for your own starter and shape loaves with your own hands. It’s a process that stretches over days — but the moment that crust cracks in the oven, and you slice into an airy, chewy crumb? Utter pride.
From Essential Bread and Patisserie and Basics to Baker
Enriched brioche dough is a world of its own. It’s soft, elastic and luxurious. Babka teaches you to work with dough that’s rich in butter and eggs, fill it with spiced chocolate swirls before carefully lowering it into a bundt tin. Our Chocolate Orange, Halva Babka is a visual and culinary triumph and a testament to your precision.
From Essential Cooking
This one really is all about letting time do the work. A low and slow roast transforms lamb shoulder into tender, pull-apart perfection — while the bright, punchy salsa verde cuts through the richness.
