New Cooking School in Soquel Caters to the Home Chef

Patricia Poritzky’s friends would often ask her for the recipes behind the meals and sweet concoctions she created from her kitchen.

Seeing the interest in recreational cooking in Santa Cruz County, she decided to jumpstart a school for home chefs like herself: Let’s Cook! in Soquel.

Tucked into 2,000 square feet of commercial kitchen space at Research Park, the school boasts 15 local farmers, restaurateurs, and homestead artisans as its instructors. Starting in January, it will offer hands-on and demonstrational classes that start at $55 for a three-hour session. They include Knife Skills, Fresh Pasta Making, Mushrooms Gone Wild, and Chicken 101.

Poritzky said she feels the school fills a niche that is not achieved by traditional cooking programs, like that at Cabrillo College, which train professional chefs

“The Cabrillo program is more for people out in the field,” said Poritzky. “This is for people who receive their CSA baskets and are wondering what to do with them. It teaches recipes that people can go home and repeat for their friends and families.”

It’s also a school for locavores, sourcing as much of its ingredients as possible from within a 100-mile radius, Poritzky said. She plans to use “humanely raised and processed meats,” especially in the spring when the school offers a “snout to tail butchering class” alongside barbecue making and sausage grilling.

In the year she spent planning the school, Poritzky reached out to several community chefs, like Cabrillo Culinary Arts Professor Sue Slater. Trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, Slater is offering a “France Romance” class in February, aimed towards couples, but open to anyone who wants to learn the art of a three-course meal.

“The school is a great thing for the community,” said Slater, who plans to break her students into teams, each working on different portions of the meal. “And it’s not price prohibitive.”

Jennifer Ashby, founder of Ashby Confections in Aptos, wanted to teach a class for a while but did not see an immediate venue to do so. That changed when Poritzky called her a few months ago, asking her to create and instruct the Chocolate! Chocolate! class.  

Through her course in early February, Ashby is teaching students how to temper chocolate and make ganache, a filling made of chocolate crème, butter, liquor, herbs and spices.

More than just a school, Poritzky hopes Let’s Cook! will become a go-to spot for date nights, girls’ nights out and team building events.

“It’s something diverse,” she said, “and a fun alternative to a night out at a bar.”