The celebrity chef has backed the the Tesco Community Cookery School programme, developed by charity FareShare

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has been using his expertise to help train community cooks across the UK.

The Channel Four star made a surprise visit this week to a class of community cooks learning how best to use surplus food donations to create tasty, nutritious dishes.

His visit was to celebrate 1,000 cooks passing through the Tesco Community Cookery School programme which he launched with Tesco a year ago. The community cooks learn everything from knife skills and nutrition to recipes for versatile base sauces, which can be adapted to complement a wide variety of donated food.

The Tesco Community Cookery School was developed in partnership with food redistribution charity FareShare, and builds on Tesco’s Community Food Connection scheme which supplies a million meals each month to 7,000 charities and community groups across the UK.

Oliver, who helped to devise the recipes, spent time with the cooks talking about the work they do in their communities and how the surplus food they receive gets put to good use.