Aldeburgh, Suffolk
Six people, one long table.
Saltbox is a small cookery school in a converted fisherman's store in Aldeburgh. Classes are hands-on and deliberately tiny — everyone gets their own station, and nobody watches from the back.
Every class ends the way it should: sitting down and eating what you made, with a glass of something, while the washing up waits.
Classes
What we teach
Sourdough from a cold start
Build a starter from flour and water, learn to read it, and take home a loaf and enough starter to keep going. No machines, no shortcuts, no sourdough mysticism.
Fresh pasta and one good sauce
Egg dough by hand, rolled thin enough to read through, cut three ways. Plus one sauce done properly rather than four done approximately.
Whole fish, filleted and cooked
Buy it whole, break it down yourself, cook it three ways and use the bones. Fish from the boats at Aldeburgh, so the species depends on the morning.
Dates
Book a place
Six places per class. When they are gone the date closes itself — the count below is read from the database each time this page loads, not typed in by hand.
Nothing is open for booking at the moment. New dates go up at the start of each term.
About
About the kitchen
Run by Nell Harrow, who cooked in restaurants for eleven years and then stopped.
I spent eleven years in professional kitchens and left because I wanted to cook for people again rather than at them. Saltbox is the result: a domestic kitchen, six stations, and however long it takes.
Classes are for anyone who cooks at home and wants to be better at it. There is no filming, no branded apron, and no upsell at the end. If a technique needs doing four times before it lands, we do it four times.
The building was a fisherman’s store until the 1970s, which is why it is cold in February and why the bread proves slowly. Both are on purpose now.
Contact
Ask before you book
Questions about a class, access, or whether it suits you? Write directly — it comes to the kitchen, not a ticketing system.