I Took a Class at the Irish Cooking School Ballerina Farms Attended

I was tired, scrolling Instagram at my desk in London, when I noticed Hannah Neeleman wasn’t in her usual spot.

In the video posted in February, the “tradwife,” known online as Ballerina Farm, was kneading sourdough focaccia in a cottage I didn’t recognize. In the next reel, she frolicked down a rainy country path.

I’m among the hundreds of millions of people who have watched the 35-year-old making everything from mozzarella to lemon meringue pie from scratch in her rustic Utah farmhouse kitchen while tending to her eight young children. This was the first time I’d seen her in a different setting.

A caption told me she was at Ireland’s prestigious Ballymaloe Cookery School, where she and her husband, the son of JetBlue’s founder, were reported to be taking a famed three-month intensive culinary course. It costs $19,000 per person, excluding accommodation. (Neeleman didn’t reply to Business Insider’s request for comment).

On the farm, students learn knife skills, including working with fish and meat, fermentation, baking, and how to prepare a menu.

The content Neeleman shot there hearkened back to a romanticized time before ultra-processed food made up a large chunk of our diets, when meals were home-cooked, and people had hobbies instead of phones. It was the antithesis of my daily life in a global city.

The more of her slow-paced content I watched, the less I thought about the debate over whether Neeleman’s brand of romanticized homemaking is an aspirational celebration of married life and motherhood or sanitized, performative, and regressive.

Neeleman’s life looked like a pretty appealing antidote to the burnout I was feeling from the modern corporate grind.

There was nothing else for it. I booked a flight to Ireland and signed up for a 2 ½-day course that cost 850 euros, or $958, to live out my own free-range fantasy.

Day 1

Founded in 1983, Ballymaloe is housed in a converted apple barn, surrounded by a maze of cottages, gardens, and fields. It’s renowned on the culinary circuit, with almost every ingredient used at the school being grown on the farm or locally sourced.

This farm-to-table approach hits a sweet spot between luxury and rustic, and the school has attracted celebrities such as Kate Winslet and Stanley Tucci.

When I arrived after a short plane ride from London to Cork, I was hypnotized by the harmony of trees, plants, birdsong, and farmhouse architecture. It was almost farcically idyllic.

A staff member led me to my private room in a cottage, which I shared with nine fellow students. I made fast friends with my new neighbor, Alice, a 32-year-old Australian foodie who had been living in Cork for nine months. Like many others I spoke with at Ballymaloe, she had been gifted the course by her family. More than one student told me visiting the school was on their bucket list.

Alice and I spent the afternoon exploring the grounds, traversing muddy paths, and sniffing wild garlic in the kitchen garden. We browsed the little library in the attic — where students can check out recipe books, new and old — and drooled over the Garden Shop’s extensive range of artisan snacks, condiments, oils, and vinegars.

That evening, as the sun set outside the farmhouse kitchen whose white shelves were lined with Le Creuset cookware and local pottery, we chatted with our fellow cottage mates, mostly jovial Irish women in their 40s or older.

I felt very present since no one was on their phones or holed up in their rooms.

Day 2

Each day started with a refined but colossal buffet breakfast at 8:30 a.m. in the school’s dining room. Everything was made from scratch.

The TikTok girlie in me screamed as we sat at brightly colored wooden tables to devour our choice of freshly made bread (baguette, focaccia, soda bread, or sourdough), poached fruits, homemade yogurt and the Middle Eastern strained yogurt labneh, local honey, orange and hibiscus water kefir (a gut-friendly fermented beverage made of water and water kefir grains), porridge with Jersey cream and brown sugar, apple muesli (an unbaked mix of oats, nuts, seeds, and dried fruit), granola, homemade butter, and jams. We could choose from raw, organic pasteurized (served hot and cold), or oat milk.

It was a stark contrast from my typical commuter’s breakfast of a coffee and a snack bar.

Ballymaloe is very much an authentic cookery school, not a wellness or longevity hot spot. Still, the morning spread, brimming with protein, fiber, and healthy fats, hit every current health and food trend. There wasn’t an emulsifier or caking agent in sight.

I could see why a business-savvy homemaking influencer looking to expand their empire might come here for content and inspiration.

Classes — a mix of demonstrations and practical cooking sessions — started at 9:30 a.m.

Rory O’Connell, a charismatic chef who cofounded Ballymaloe with his sister and fellow chef Darina Allen, stood beneath a large, tilted mirror in a demo kitchen like you’d see on “Good Morning America,” so his 66 students could watch and learn.

He made 10 recipes in three hours that morning, including brown seedy bread, wild garlic pesto, chicken stock, and rhubarb cobbler. We were given a booklet containing all the recipes.

Halfway through class, we took a break to eat some scones with homemade jam and cream and decide which recipes we wanted to tackle ourselves.

At about 1 p.m., it was time for more food. We returned to the dining room for a three-course lunch of tomato and basil soup, black-eyed-bean stew, and frozen meringue cake. The tables had signs that read: “Please no phones. Talk to your new friends!”.

Stuffed to the brim with local produce, I took my seat at 2 p.m. for the next demonstration. Rachel Allen, a famous chef who’s Darina Allen’s daughter-in-law, showed us how to prepare seven more recipes, including strawberry tartlets, pan-grilled fish, and rhubarb jam. After her three-hour demo, we tasted what she had made. The flaky, creamy fish was my favorite.

By this stage, I was exhausted from all the listening and consuming, but we still had a garden and farm tour on our agenda. Toby Allen, Darina Allen’s son, guided us for 30 minutes through the grounds, including the herb garden, fruit field, and Celtic maze, explaining what grew where and how the farm worked.

My battery was running too low to socialize any longer. I hurried back to my room at about 6 p.m., had a shower, and read my book under a cozy quilt in bed.

Day 3

At 7:30 a.m., a group of us joined Billy Wall, Ballymaloe’s milkman of five years, in a barn to watch the farm’s seven Jersey cows be milked by machine.

He handed me a glass freshly squeezed from the udder, which I hesitantly accepted. They’re advocates of raw milk at Ballymaloe, and Billy assured me it was safe to drink because they test it monthly. In general, raw milk can carry pathogens that make humans sick.

I took one sip and decided that was enough. It was warm and super sweet, but the fact that I could make eye contact with the cow whose milk I was drinking was somewhat off-putting.

Later at breakfast, I had porridge with cream and sugar, followed by a small bowl of saffron-and-pistachio-infused labneh and puffed rice cereal. Then, we hit the school’s student kitchens for the first time, armed with a set of professional kitchen knives and the gifted recipe booklet.

I chose to make strawberry tartlets, tomato sauce, and pan-grilled fish with beurre blanc, a creamy sauce made of butter, cream, white wine, and shallots.

I think of myself as a good cook, but preparing food under the watchful eye of trained chefs made me nervous, like I was learning an entirely new craft. I was struck by how stringently they followed each step in a recipe, actually waiting for the onions to sweat, for instance. They stressed the importance of timing when demonstrating or instructing from the sidelines. At Ballymaloe, we had the luxury of time.

I had a few mishaps, including forgetting to add sugar to the pastry cream, but my teacher took it as an opportunity to show me that pouring it through a fine sieve would enable me to sweeten it without ruining the smooth texture.

After a lively three hours in the kitchen, we had another extravagant lunch of spiced eggplant, pan-grilled fish, and garlic mashed potatoes, followed by a cooking demonstration by O’Connell.

He made poulet au vinaigre (chicken in vinegar), herbed orzo, and iced coffee cake with chocolate swirls, and we tasted each.

That evening in the cottage lounge, I watched an episode of a food travel TV series by O’Connell with my cottage mates, whom I felt like I’d known for many months.

Final day

With a heavy heart, I filled my breakfast bowl for the last time. That day, I made fettuccine Alfredo with asparagus from scratch and chicken paprikash, a Hungarian dish rich in paprika. I’d never made fresh pasta before, and didn’t realize my arms would ache the next day from the 30 minutes of kneading.

My teacher guided me as I butchered a chicken for the first time, dividing it into separate cuts of breast, wing, and leg. By 12:30 p.m., we made our way to a dining room for the final time to feast on chicken, pasta, pickles, salad, and deeply moist and rich chocolate, which went perfectly with a cup of coffee.

A few hours later, I left three days of farm tranquility and headed for my budget airline flight, a touch emotional that the experience was over. I took my crumb-covered seat, feeling so full it hurt, and thought of how I could use what I learned at Ballymaloe in London.

I enjoyed the Ballerina Farm lifestyle. Spending time in nature, using my hands, and eating whole foods felt restorative on a cellular level. At a time when we can feel disconnected from one another and exhausted by modern life, being hit by that feeling when watching tradwife content is what makes it so engaging.

I soon realized, however, that I simply didn’t have the energy, money, or time to follow a Ballymaloe lifestyle back in London. Predictably, my strong conviction to eat locally sourced food back home — by looking up farmers’ markets and delivery services promising locally grown produce — quickly faded as I reentered the real world.

Though they present a traditional homemaker lifestyle on their carefully curated TikTok accounts, it’s not lost on me that women like Neeleman are full-time content creators, running businesses, and probably earning good money.

I was drawn in by the domestic fantasy. But now I know it was just that: a fantasy.