Salud! Cooking School is a chain of cooking schools located inside certain Whole Foods Markets. At…read morethe time of writing this review, there are two in the Atlanta area: this location at the Whole Foods at Avalon in Alpharetta and another in Duluth/Johns Creek. I've taken classes at both locations. There are also locations in Charlotte, Memphis, and Nashville.
For a friend's birthday, my friends and I participated in the class entitled "Divine Doughnuts with Dutch Monkey" on March 11, 2018. This was a doughnut-making class conducted by chefs Arpana Satyu-Burge and Martin Burge, the founders and owners of acclaimed Dutch Monkey Doughnuts in Cumming. I enjoyed the class, but it was not what I expected.
At the class I participated in at Salud! in Duluth/Johns Creek, we rolled sushi: https://www.yelp.com/biz/yelps-fit-club-cmye-whole-foods-tour-sushi-making-class-duluth. Each person had a seat with their own individually portioned set of ingredients. In general, we followed, step-by-step, as the instructors in the demonstration kitchen walked us through all that was entailed in making a sushi roll, from prepping the ingredients to assembling the roll. It was very interactive and hands-on.
The doughnut class was different. While it was advertised as a "hands-on" experience, the interactivity was limited to some students taking turns doing a different task in the demonstration kitchen. Therefore, this was more of a demonstration class than a hands-on class. Examples of hands-on tasks included mixing various ingredients in bowls, rolling dough, and hand-cutting doughnuts out of the dough. Most of the class time was spent watching chefs Arpana and Martin cook in the demonstration kitchen. I know a lot of cooking classes are set up in this style, sort of like watching a cooking show on Food Network or Cooking Channel, but I was expecting to be making my own doughnuts.
The class cost $55 per person and lasted a little over 2.5 hours. The official class time was 2pm to 5pm. When you sign up for a class at Salud!, you must book and pay online in advance. On the day of the class, you should show up a few minutes early and check in at the Whole Foods customer service desk at the front of the store. After entering the store, the cooking class is located in the back-left, up the stairs.
We were each handed a class lecture packet, a pen to take notes, an apron, and name tags. There was bottled water and snacks. The snacks included chips and dip (guacamole), a couple cheeses (e.g. brie), grapes, nuts, crackers, and toast.
The class lecture packet included recipes for 2 doughnuts chefs Arpana and Martin showed us how to make: (1) cardamom cake doughnuts with apricot sabayon and (2) buttermilk cake doughnuts with lemon curd and vanilla meringue. We watched as chefs Arpana and Martin made each of the following components from scratch: buttermilk cake doughnuts, apricot sabayon, lemon curd, vanilla meringue, and almond croquant.
There were only 13 students, the 2 chefs/instructors, 1 person who worked for Salud!/Whole Foods, and 4 Salud! volunteers. That meant the student to instructor/employee/volunteer ratio was very high (13:7). This was a fairly casual and intimate experience. We huddled around the demonstration kitchen, watched, listened, and asked questions. Both Arpana and Martin are soft-spoken so there were a few times when some of us could not hear what they were saying. In this case, a microphone-speaker setup might have been nice.
The classroom is outfitted with video cameras and displays, but they were not in use for this class. When I took the sushi-making at Salud! in Duluth/Johns Creek, they used the cameras and displays to make it easier for the students to see ingredient prep, etc. For this doughnut-making class, I think the cameras would have been useful for several of the mixing bowls since the insides of the bowls were hard for some of us to see.
After about 2 hours, the freshly-made doughnuts were ready for us to eat. They looked and tasted absolutely magnificent. These were gourmet doughnuts to a tee. Rich, luscious, and decadent. It was easy to see why Arpana and Martin have become successful. Martin finished off the lemon curd and vanilla meringue doughnuts with some blowtorch action. Arpana plated the cardamom cake doughnuts with apricot sabayon perfectly. (I think my pictures speak for themselves.) Whole Foods Allegro Coffee was served with our doughnuts. I believe normally up to 2 glasses of wine per student are served per class, but coffee pairs better with doughnuts.
Thank you to chefs Arpana and Martin for conducting the class, to Shannon Marsh, Whole Foods' cooking school administrator, for organizing everything, and to the volunteers for their help. Everyone was nice.
If you're interested in taking a cooking class at Salud!, be sure to sign up early because classes fill up fast. Also, grab a loyalty card. If you purchase 7 classes and you get an 8th class for free.