PRESS RELEASE: The Food Gymnasium is coming to your kitchen

Check in to do Kitchen Fitness, live-steamed in your kitchen every weekend. Chat, engage, and interact with professional chefs and Kitchen Coaches, to build your Kitchen Fitness by learning professional food management and cooking skills. The Food Gymnasium is a program launching on CooksClub.tv, live on Saturday April 9, 9 am to 12 pm, with a highlights recording OnDemand.

The Food Gymnasium is not your classic cooking show. Kitchen Fitness is a virtual team mise en place session that you can use to prepare your week’s meals. Designed by restaurateur and CooksClub Founder, Rob Keogh, your workout is led by a French Executive Chef, Loic Lemaitre and Italian Cook Kathy Ferris.

Each Thursday, participants receive a Designer Menu offering choices from a variety of different meals, all created from common ingredients. The menu suggests a range of dishes from a provisioning list of three key proteins from beef, poultry, lamb, pork, or fish, with a grouping of aromatics and vegetables. You can either select dishes from the menu, or design your own meals by choosing a key protein, a flavour profile, and a cooking method.

Keogh says, “the vision for CooksClub.TV is based around planning and provisioning;” what he calls a Food First framework. The essence being that “the secret to living well is to always have wonderful food at your fingertips.”

“When you have wonderful food in your pantry, fridge, and freezer you can cook whatever you want from what you have. The idea of food first is to equip people to cook intuitively and produce a wide repertoire of wonderful meals without a recipe.”

Food education in Australia lags other countries, where results show benefits including, an increase in confidence, better dietary behaviours, as well as links to improved mental health. Beyond keeping us alive, a good food lifestyle is a key to how happy or contented we might feel, how healthy we are, and the opportunities we have to engage socially with friends and family.

Conversely, what we don’t know about food keeps us poor, impacts stress and anxiety, risks our health, and contributes to around 6% of our greenhouse gasses through 20% of our food going to waste. According to the ABS, food is the second-highest household cost, after housing and before transport, yet we could fuel our car for a year, with the money we spend on wasted food.

CooksClub.TV is a new independent cooking channel that, along with The Food Gymnasium, offers a range of resources including a 12-week Food First course, “How to use your kitchen like a restaurant”.

In launching the new program Rob Keogh said, “We have many great food shows, but they mostly focus on cooking and recipes. While this would seem to make sense, when you run restaurants, you soon learn that cooking is just one food skill that comes after, planning, provisioning, preparation, and preservation.”

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