TitsOut4Snacks is a female-led cooking collective creating feasts for the future. For this workshop series, they play on their core mission of embracing new and imperfect attempts, and dissolving the boundaries to entry in the kitchen. They want to focus on some of the foundations of cooking, from the mixing of core spices in different cuisines around the world, to timeless techniques of pastry-making, preserving food, and adjusting to unexpected ingredients. These core skills are accompanied by the stimulation of discussions around the cultural context of ingredients and techniques, cultural heritage, and food as it moves around the world. Each workshop in the four-part series will consist of three elements:

1. A ‘Hard Skill’: A practical and elementary culinary skill, with room for improving technique over time.
2. ‘Creativity’: Encouragement and materials to make your own choices of components, fillings, marinade etc, to see what can grow from your foundation.
3. ‘Discussion’: Dialogue around the origin of ingredients, their entanglement with history, and significance in culture and diaspora.

Participants will be invited to learn how to make a simple pickling brine, explore different cutting techniques for the vegetables, and discuss the socio-cultural importance of preservation.

Participants will learn the history and different uses of pastry around the world. The workshop will teach the basics of how to make pastry dough and play with sweet and savory fillings.

We will discuss the movement of food around the world as shaped by colonialism and our built environment. Attendees will be asked to bring a food item that is culturally significant to them. They will then be placed into groups, and challenged to make a dish from a medley of ingredients. At the end, we come together to eat, reflecting on the concept of “MIGANNAJ”, table-settings, and ways of eating.

Participants will be learning about different spice families and how to play with mixing the base flavors of different culinary traditions. For example the mirepoix and sofrito from French and Spanish cooking.