In Maine, cooking classes are like clams.

Both come in several shapes and sizes, so for an experience that meets your expectations, you need to know what you’re looking for. Like clam diggers, cooks who hope to hone their culinary skills are forced to dig through much internet advertising muck on online classes to find a local in-person class that suits their palate and pocketbook. And in Maine’s highly seasonal economy, cooks must grab those open class spots when they see them, or risk food-focused tourists gobbling them all up.

Allow me to push the analogy further: There are both soft-shell and hard-shell varieties of cooking classes.

The dinner-and-a-show model is the accessible soft-shell sort, where the learner sits, possibly sipping a glass of crisp sauvignon blanc, while watching the teacher prepare the meal. That teacher could be a talented home cook demonstrating how make perfect scones, a local restaurant chef with a night off, a kitchen supply store employee who’s mastered the use of a certain tool the store sells, a cookbook author on tour to promote a new book, a master canner at the height of berry season, or a food-business owner working to raise the profile of their product by demonstrating how to cook with it.

The teacher, using knives, bowls, cutting boards, rolling pins and heat, shows and explains how it’s done. Aided by overhead mirrors or video cameras trained on the teacher’s hands, participants follow along, marking up the printed recipes provided. Unless they volunteer to toss a salad or stir a pot, students needn’t work for their supper. But they do get to eat what the instructor has cooked during class time.

This style of class was offered by the Stonewall Kitchen Cooking School for 13 years before it closed in 2021. A few of the upcoming classes offered at Now You’re Cooking in Bath also use this demonstration model, including those on summer tomatoes, Jewish-Mexican cooking, and South African-style meatballs. Kitchen coordinator Stephanie Danahy says each of the dozen seats in the store’s renovated teaching kitchen give attendees a bird’s-eye view of the cooking process.

But Danahy says most of the four to six classes the store offers each month ($65 per seat) address the growing demand for hands-on classes, such as a series of upcoming classes taught by Chris Toy, a local cookbook author with a background in Asian cookery and a devoted following on the local cooking class scene.

Hands-on opportunities

You could say hands-on opportunities make up the hard-shell variety of classes. They’re hard to get into because they fill up fast. And they are harder work than demonstration classes because the students do most of the cooking themselves.

Jill Strauss offers hands-on classes at her Kennebunkport home, aka Jillyanna’s Woodfired Cooking School, where she has an indoor teaching kitchen and outdoor wood-fired pizza oven. Upcoming classes range in price from $230 to $525 per person and in subject matter from grilled pizza to seafood to pasta-making.

Bravo Cooking School operates in the former Rosemont Market Bakery commissary on Brighton Avenue in Portland. A cast of rotating chefs teach 10 to 15 classes each month. Upcoming classes include one on macarons (Aug. 8, $90 per student) and United Kingdom date night with Beef Wellington as the menu centerpiece (offered twice, on Aug. 22 and Sept. 5, $200 per couple).

When it opens its doors in October, the Zephyr Maine collaborative arts center in Freeport will offer classes on garlic preserving, making fire cider and making elderberry syrup. Founder Kat Schwenk hopes to bring in veteran cooking teachers like Toy as well as Topsham-based bagel maker Jeff Mao of Knead & Nosh to lead classes in the center’s commercial kitchen.

“Cooking is certainly a creative art form, and the goal here is to invite people in to share food, stories, music and art,” Schwenk said. She expects the classes to cost about $60, a price she hopes is both accessible to students yet also enough to pay the teachers fairly.

Mao and Toy — both are former public-school teachers and administrators — also teach in local adult continuing education programs, including Merrymeeting Community and Adult Education in Topsham. In one unusual class offered by that venue this October, Toy will team up with wood carver Ken Wise for a three-day weekend workshop ($250) in which students will learn how to carve chopsticks, spatulas and spoons, and then use their handiwork to cook recipes from Toy’s cookbooks.

Mao, who also offers adult education classes through several other school districts (among them Boothbay, Scarborough and Windham) says the classroom management skills and class prep processes he developed as a middle school math teacher and as the state’s Department of Education’s technology director help make his cooking classes run smoothly.

“Teaching a new skill to people and watching them make it their own is still my favorite part of the job,” Mao said.

Mao also leads bagel and dumpling-making classes at The Maine Tasting Center in Wiscasset, a nonprofit focused on promoting local food products. The center’s roster of cooking classes runs from early June to late October and all have a distinctively locally sourced mantra.

A recent charcuterie board class taught by the center’s founder, Sara Gross, introduced students from as close as Newcastle and as far as Chicago to products like garlic chevre cheese from Fuzzy Udder in Whitfield, salami from the Sausage Kitchen in Lisbon, pickled carrots from Maine Homestead in Lyman, and spiced butter rum jam from Olde Haven Farm in Chelsea.

People often ask Gross why she doesn’t offer technique classes like knife skills or cake decorating. “Our approach to cooking classes is exclusively (focused) on the Maine ingredients, the people who grow and make those ingredients, and on encouraging the public to seek out and interact with those ingredients more intentionally in their everyday lives,” Gross said. 

The classes are taught in the Learning Center, which is sparsely decorated with posters highlighting local food. The teacher, on an elevated platform, demonstrates tasks that the students, seated at worktables around the room, then copy. The Discovery Center on the same campus offers a gallery space with rotating exhibits about the history and diversity of the state’s food system, while another building houses the tasting center.

More charcuterie workshops are scheduled for later this summer as well as classes on how to use alcohol to preserve fruits and vegetables, how to make Indian food with Maine ingredients, and an introductory session on cooking with insects. Classes cost roughly $40 to $70.

If you’ve a house full of summer visitors looking for a food-related activity and you didn’t have the foresight to book a class in advance, don’t fret. The Maine Tasting Center offers drop-in classes every day of the week, though you do have to buy the $15 tickets at least 15 minutes before the start time. In 45 minutes flat, tasting center staff provides a curated tasting menu while explaining the history and significance of the ingredients in Maine’s food system.

For instance, you can learn about bean hole Marfax beans and the story of indigenous people’s three sisters system for companion planting. In a recent class, campus manager Caroline Chung used a single crostino as a prop to talk about the growing number of local bakers selling bread at Maine farmers markets. She also touched on Maine’s ebbing dairy production and the financial incentive of value-added products, and how technology can add value to a native crop, using freeze-dried Maine blueberries as an example.

More advanced classes at The Maine Tasting Center tackle the state’s beer, cider and mead industries, the local cheese scene, and products grown and fermented in Maine.

Mastering the Culinary Arts

Between May and November, Salt Water Farm Cooking School in Lincolnville offers a variety of classes in a bucolic setting where flower and vegetable gardens cascade down to Penobscot Bay. The school is located on the grounds of cookbook author Annmarie Ahearn’s multigenerational family summer home. The aesthetic is French countryside retreat, all simple elegance and hospitality. Think sturdy farm tables, linen napkins, vintage coupes, and straw hats to wear in the garden as you stroll about admiring the edible flowers and greens that you’ll soon be cooking with.

Ahearn learned to cook from her parents; from studies at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York; from living (eating and cooking) abroad in Aix-en-Provence, Paris, Barcelona and Mexico; and from stints working for celebrated chefs Dan Barber and Tom Colicchio.

The school offers four-hour ($250) classes, three-day intensives ($750-875), and weeklong mastery classes ($2,500-4,500 including lodging). In a recent four-hour class on making a French bouillabaisse using Maine seafood, Ahearn calmly connected with each of the 12 students, who came from as near as Rockport and as far as Los Angeles. The students worked together on four recipes around the kitchen island. Ahearn simultaneously instructed them, demonstrated how to break down a lobster, and kept an ear on three oven timers and an eye on boiling pots — one a Flame-colored Le Creuset enamel pot she said has been in her family longer than she has. 

At Salt Water Farm, the wooden cutting boards are thick, the knives are sharp, and the mixing bowls are mostly ceramic in tasteful shades of beige. It’s  easy to see why her classes, while not inexpensive, sell out almost as soon as she opens them up each spring. A delicious, impeccably presented meal caps the four-hour classes, and includes a cocktail, appetizer, salad, main course and dessert, which students eat while gazing out on the lovely view.

Hot tip: At press time, a few classes actually still have space for students, including a three-day regional Italian workshop and one-day classes on topics such as southern food, seasonal hors oeuvres, and the food of Normandy.

Bespoke classes

All the venues I’ve mentioned will work with you to create private classes on culinary topics of your choice. You can also find chefs who will come to your kitchen to teach you the kitchen skills you’d like to acquire.

Rachel Sagiroglu, owner of Experience Maine, a meeting and event planning and travel company in Portland, responded to the growing demand for bespoke cooking classes by establishing a culinary arm of her business.

“We have corporate clients looking for team-building experiences, multigenerational families visiting Maine who want to cook lobster together, and bachelorette parties wanting to learn how to shuck oysters and explore the best wines to serve with them,” she said.

Experience Maine Culinary connects private chefs with its clients for these tailor-made classes. They typically cost $750 to $1,000, but the sky is the limit if you’ve got deep pockets.

Eva Mrak-Blumberg, owner of Spoondrift Kitchen, a private chef and boutique catering outfit in Portland, estimates she teaches 10 to 20 private cooking classes in clients’ homes each year. Her classes combine demonstrations with hands-on work and can accommodate up to 12 students. At class’s end, participants eat the dishes they’ve created together. Prices range from $750 to $1,800. Mrak-Blumberg’s classroom approach is a little unusual: She doesn’t use recipes.

“I teach guests professional techniques and how to use their sense of smell and taste to flavor and time each component,” she said. She believes the approach helps people to become more intuitive, confident cooks.

Kids Menu

At the intersection of Gordon Ramsey’s Master Chef Junior television show and parents’ need to find summertime childcare sit kid-focused cooking camps. In Scarborough, Measuring Up Kitchen provides half-day classes for kids aged 5-17, conducted by certified classroom teachers for $95 for a single day or $350 for the week.

Merrymeeting Community and Adult Education is running a weeklong camp at Brunswick High School for tweens starting in August that features recipes from around the world. Both morning and afternoon sessions are available.

Farm to Table Kids has sessions in Freeport and Arundel for kids aged 5-10 that combine growing, cooking and eating food for $350/week.

Tips and tricks

Whatever their approach, good cooking class teachers liberally drop tips and tricks on how to cook faster, better and more like the pros. Such advice can be Ahearn explaining that a Persian chef taught her that grinding saffron threads in a mortar and pestle and adding oil to form a paste helps the fragrant, expensive spice permeate a dish. It can be Mrak-Blumberg explaining when to use kosher salt and when to use flaky sea salt. Or it can be Gross showing students how a Maine-made meat stick can add attractive height to a charcuterie board crammed with local meats and cheeses.

Such tips are a big draw for students, said vacationer Gina Collins, who was participating in Ahearn’s bouillabaisse class while visiting Maine from her home in New Orleans. After listening to Ahern’s instructions, she excitedly pulled the entire lobster tail from its shell.  “Oh look!! I did it even though these bugs are so much bigger than the crawfish I am used to,” Collins exclaimed.

Over the 15 years I’ve been writing about food, I’ve taught several hundred cooking classes. To get my own culinary degree, I took my share of classes, too. Both studying and teaching have made me a better cook. I’m willing to bet cooking classes will make you a better cook, too.

Buttered Toasts with Local Crab, Cucumbers, Chive Mayonnaise and Tarragon

Annemarie Ahearn, chef and cookbook writer, developed this recipe for a cooking class she taught at her Saltwater Cooking School in Lincolnville in early July.

Serves 8 as an appetizer

12 ounces fresh crabmeat, picked over for shell bits
1 medium cucumber, peeled, seeded and finely chopped
1/2 bunch chives, finely chopped
1/2 bunch tarragon, leaves picked from stems, washed and finely chopped
Grated zest and juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
1 teaspoon whole grain mustard
Kosher salt and fresh ground pepper
1 sourdough baguette
1/4 cup butter, melted
Chervil

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Combine the crabmeat, cucumber, chives, tarragon, lemon zest and juice, mayonnaise and mustard in a bowl. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Slice the bread thinly, brush with melted butter, and toast in the oven at 375 until golden. Serve crab salad on toasts and garnish with chervil.

Mexican Street Corn Salad

Cooking instructor Katie Walter will demonstrate this recipe in an upcoming class at Now You’re Cooking in Bath. She says the recipe works best in the summer when fresh corn is in season, but in a pinch, you can use 3 cups of thawed frozen corn.

Serves 4 as a side

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 cups corn kernels (from 3-4 ears corn)
Salt
½ cup cilantro leaves, chopped
1/3 cup finely crumbled Cotija cheese
1/3 cup diced red onion
1 jalapeño chile, stemmed, seeded and minced
1 to 2 medium garlic cloves, minced or grated
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
1 tablespoon lime juice
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper (or more, to taste)

Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the corn and a few pinches of salt and cook, stirring occasionally until charred (8-10 minutes). Remove from heat and transfer to a medium bowl. Add cilantro, cheese, onion, jalapeno, garlic, mayonnaise, lime juice and cayenne pepper and toss to combine. Season to taste with additional cayenne pepper or salt. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Local foods advocate Christine Burns Rudalevige is the former editor of Edible Maine magazine and the author of “Green Plate Special,” both a column about eating sustainably in the Portland Press Herald and the name of her 2017 cookbook. She can be contacted at: cburns1227@gmail.com