Teaching Children How to Cook from Scratch

Teaching children how to cook educates them and empowers them to make healthy choices. It’s never too soon – or too late – to get started. Here’s our advice on cooking with kids, from toddlers to teenagers.

How to stop children becoming fussy eaters

Teach children to taste as they go. It’s good practice and will help familiarise them with new or unusual ingredients. There’s no guarantee they won’t be a fussy eater by the end of it but if they know how to make good healthy choices that please them, that’s a win.

How to stop children making a mess in the kitchen

Cooking with children can be messy. Aprons are a must, long-sleeved, wipe-clean ones for the younger ones if you can find them. Try not to get stressed about the mess; you can always clean up surreptitiously as you go along.

At what age can children start cooking?

Even very little ones can get involved. They can put toppings on their pizza, roll up sushi rice, or fill their own sandwich, bao buns, or lettuce wraps for lunch. Vietnamese summer rolls, using rice paper wrappers softened and filled with vegetables, cooked prawns and tofu, are nutritious and fun to make.

What kind of knives can children use?

Use child-safe kitchen knives. Choose recipes that don’t call for precise knife skills; it doesn’t matter if a chopped salad is a little irregular. Fruit salads are a great way of getting children to get more variety into their diet.

What are good dishes to start with?

Show them how to crack eggs and, a little later, how to separate eggs. Eggs are a good starting point for the learner cook ready to start cooking over heat. If you can scramble an egg, that’s breakfast, lunch, or supper sorted. Choose recipes that don’t demand absolute precision. Even children not old enough to cook, can mix up their own choice of nuts, seeds, grains, and dried fruit to make muesli or granola for example. Children of all ages like to feel useful. Nothing makes them feel prouder than seeing the salad dressing they mixed or the cake they made served to visiting grown-ups.

How often should you cook with children?

Sometimes you’re too frazzled to want children in the kitchen with you, and that’s understandable. Try setting one afternoon a week when you can devote your attention to a task together. You don’t have to prepare a whole recipe together. Pick one single task for your child to help with be it peeling, grating, mixing, rolling dough, or squeezing lemons. 

Set your child a kitchen challenge

Set mini challenges appropriate to their age. Can they peel an orange all in one go, for example? Or can they cut all the vegetables to the exact same size? And do they know why it’s important to do so?

How does cooking help children learn?

Cooking is good for numeracy and literacy. Have them count or weigh out ingredients and get them to follow along with the recipe. As grown-up cooks know, it’s good practice to read the recipe through from start to finish before cooking begins. Little ones can count out ingredients. Older ones can weigh them out. Get them using weighing scales, measuring spoons, jugs, and cups.

How can you teach children to cook?

Talk as you cook. With younger children, identify and describe the ingredients, their flavours, and smells; with older children, you can use more technical language for clarity. Explain what you’re doing and why. Show them the importance of mise-en-place. You don’t have to use the term but it’s never too soon to teach them about planning ahead.

Where can you get recipe ideas for cooking with children?

Draw inspiration from books and films and make loaves of bread inspired by the Little Red Hen, retro coconut ice inspired by Milly Molly Mandy, or chai cookies made to Taylor Swift’s famous recipe. Children love anything on a screen. Watch TV cookery shows together, go through cookbooks and magazines, get older ones to search up a recipe for you, or show them what you’re making on your Leiths Online course this week.

Start with Baking

Piping bags and tubes of icing are highly covetable. Icing cakes or biscuits, whether homemade or shop-bought, is an enjoyable activity for children of all ages. Prepare for the inevitable mess and inevitable sugar rush. Once children are past the chocolate crispy cake stage – and that comes sooner than you might think – they can really make themselves useful in the kitchen. If you have teenagers, set them to work fixing family meals.

How to teach teenagers how to cook?

Our Online Cookery Toolbox and Teen’s Kitchen courses are designed for young people aged 13 to 18. Both are six-week courses that cover both baking and cooking. The Teen’s Kitchen course is ideal for learners who’ve already completed the Online Cookery Toolbox as it builds on skills they learned there. As with all our courses, learners benefit from a small learning group and one-to-one support from their class mentor. At the end of their course, they get a Certificate of Completion which they can add to their starter C.V. or college application. On the menu: the ultimate steak dinner, mac and cheese, and a cracking curry.

Does your child’s school offer the Duke of Edinburgh Award? If so, you’ll know that participants all have to undertake a new skill that they practise once a week for three months. Our thirteen-week D of E course meets the requirements of both Bronze and Silver Award levels. Each week, participants learn a new recipe such as sticky Asian chicken, peach cobbler, or pad thai. At the end of the course, their Leiths mentor completes the relevant assessor report needed for the D of A award.

Good foundational skills set children up for a lifetime of cooking.

We love to see our junior learners broadening their repertoire, developing their palate, and acquiring a knowledge of health and safety, food hygiene and knife skills that will set them up for a lifetime of good cooking.

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