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Earth Fare's Culinary Specialist Offers Cooking Classes To Athenians

by Meredith Roberts
11/27/2007

Standing in front of his Artisan Breads cooking class at Earth Fare Supermarket, Michael Perkins stirs a mixture of fresh yeast and water with the opposite end of a spatula. “No, we're not making French Baguettes today,” he says, dismissing them for their difficulty. “Baguettes can have up to three levels of funkiness.”

In lieu of French baguettes, Perkins makes a loaf of nine-grain bread and a breadstick arranged like a leaf, which he prepared before the class began. Perkins also offers what he calls “the densest bread ever in my life, I think it weighs 8 pounds” in the form of a rye bread saturated with seeds.

Perkins prepares several of his dishes before audience members arrive, as he did with a Braised Red Cabbage dish during his Vegetarian German cooking class. Some things he cooks partially before class, such as tofu for his vegetarian rendition of Wiener Schnitzel. Perkins browned the tofu in soy sauce before class met, then later dredged them with breadcrumbs and fried them in front of the class.

Besides the wide variety of dishes Earth Fare’s classes offer, from German potato salad to soft pretzels, Perkins distributes a handout with all the recipes from that particular class. While the classes are not exactly hands on, besides the lone volunteer slicing up some apple danish for samples, they are a learning experience.

The classes usually begin at 6:30 on Wednesday nights and are always listed by date and theme on Earth Fare’s calendar, which is right inside the store’s front entrance.

Perkins, who says he has no science background, enhances his classes with scientific facts. “Sugar gives dried yeast something to eat when it wakes up,” he says. He also compares the proteins in dough to the famed childhood toy, a slinky.

It is almost as if Bill Nye has replaced his lab and test tubes with a cutting board on wheels and stepped into Earth Fare’s community room.

Perkins, a 29 year old Athenian, lived in Germany where he attended what he calls an artificial cooking school. There he traded guitar lessons and English lessons for the cooking expertise of his Italian and German friends.

Perkins came back to Athens to finish his degree at The University of Georgia and began as Earth Fare’s marketing coordinator/culinary specialist. Besides his training in Europe, Perkins says he reads a lot and is a big believer in DIY cooking.

One repeat attender, Ruth Stricker, says it took her quite some time after moving to Athens from Germany to get involved at Earth Fare. “I like to shop there, because they have a big variety of cheeses and some things that no other shop has,” Stricker says. “I saw that they were offering cooking classes, but it took me nearly a year until I went for the first time. And since then I have never missed a class.”

Since the classes at Earth Fare are free, it is understandable that each audience member doesn’t make his own version of the dish while at Earth Fare. Earth Fare has not set a per-class budget for Perkins, but he says teaching vegetarian classes is always cheaper since there is no cost of meat involved.

Perkins says one of his most interactive classes to date was a French class in which he passed out individual pieces of parchment for audience members to wrap their own zucchini and salmon packages and then they cooked them collectively. For liability reasons, Earth Fare strays away from letting people use knives or get close to heated surfaces.

But audience members can get involved in different ways. Perkins is highly responsive to e-mails and suggestions. Since she is from Germany, Stricker contributed one of her recipes to Perkins via e-mail for a German cooking class. Perkins ended up using her recipe.

Stricker also finds the recipe handouts very useful. After attending her first class, she tried two of the five listed recipes. “One is for pita bread which I make now nearly every month,” she says. “I just love it and it fits a lot of dishes.”

So where is the culinary world going? According to Perkins, things are looking much better from when he was growing up, when grocery stores had only iceberg or romaine lettuce. He sees the restaurant market compartmentalizing to reach certain audiences, such as raw food restaurants or more African inspired foods, such as Ethiopian cuisine.

And what about the fast food king McDonalds in this diversified world of ethnic foods? “I think they will probably nod their heads,” Perkins predicts.

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