Independent notes on cooking and baking courses

DriftBicycleMeter

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Who Writes These Course Notes

We're two home cooks who spent years booking classes, some brilliant, some disappointing, and noticed the difference nearly always came down to level. This site is the guide we wish we'd had before our first booking.

How we work
Empty teaching kitchen with wooden benches, mixing bowls and tall windows letting in daylight
Portrait of Maya Okafor, bread and pastry writer, smiling in a kitchen

Maya Okafor

Bread & pastry

Maya worked early shifts in a neighbourhood bakery before teaching community sourdough sessions on Saturday mornings. She writes the bread and pastry stations and still bakes the same country loaf every week.

Portrait of Tom Hadley, savoury cooking writer, wearing an apron

Tom Hadley

Knives & formats

Tom is a self-taught home cook who has sat through more evening classes, online sessions and weekend courses than he'd like to count. He covers knife skills, savoury basics and the formats comparison.

How we research

  • Course pages first. We read what schools publish about levels, recipes and class sizes.
  • Questions second. Where pages are vague, we ask schools the same checklist we give you.
  • Kitchen time. Our tier advice comes from classes we've taken and taught.
  • Regular reviews. We revisit each page and note the update date.

Independence

DriftBicycleMeter is not affiliated with Le Cordon Bleu, Ballymaloe, Leiths, King Arthur Baking School, the Culinary Institute of America or any other school we mention. We take no commission, sponsorship or free places. If that ever changes, we'll say so clearly on the page concerned.

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