Our ingredients for today

It’s ofcourse a little less impressive in terms of the ingredients that we used for the patisserie lesson. A pile of fish or meat looks quite different then a lot of stuff in various bags and boxes…:) Since the ingredients for any cake or dessert need to be followed much more closely then for instance preparing a piece of meat, this was the first time that we worked from recipes rather then making it up as we went along. We worked in group of 2 or 3 people preparing something and we tried to follow the recipes also in a way that would make sense so not everyone was using the machines at the same time.

Tom and I started with making dough, which we didn’t process any further but it is in the fridge here so I might be making something out of it later this week. Have to think what that would be… Then we went on to make a chocolate cake

Our chocolate cake

and that is what went a bit wrong. I am not sure what went wrong but the fact of the matter is that it came out of the oven looking good on the outside but still completely wet on the inside. Oops…. Keeping it longer in the oven would have meant a burnt outside, so my guess is we should have put it at a lower temperature and for much longer. Although it could also be that we somehow mixed up the right ingredients and did something wrong there. Who can tell?? We took it home and tried it but as soon as we cut a piece out of it, the inside was really liquid.

We made chocolate ganache, we made puff cakes and we made sausage rolls combining puff cake dough with meatloaf to create lovely fluffy rolls. We used the puff pastry that you can buy anywhere and it was so much easier to make then I thought it would be!

And they were quite tasty too!

Rob also showed us how to make a really quick tarte tatin. Just caramelize sugar in a ovenproof baking pan, add apple or pear put some puff pastry on top, pop in the oven and voila a few minutes later you have a very tasty tarte tatin!

Sausage rolls

Very quick tarte tatin

Ofcourse you can make it look nicer, but this was just to show how easy and ridiculously quick almost it is to make something like that. Add some vanilla cream to it and you have something very tasty. We also made vanilla icecream, but since that had to go into the ice-machine it wasn’t finished when we left this afternoon, so we will probably be seeing the results of our icecream next week.

We’re all kind of disappointed that we are almost at the end of this fabulous cooking class, so we’re already thinking of ways to keep cooking together or start a cooking club or something along those lines. It’s a fun group and it would be great to keep doing something together, but more to follow on that!

As has become a habit now we went to get a drink at one of the many bars in Amsterdam after the lesson and while we were having our second glass of something, Rob came in to ask if I wanted to come back to the studio as he just brought in a huge monkfish! They would be having a group 0f 24 people in that night for a bachelor party type of cooking class and he was getting fresh produce from the market.

So after we finished our drink, Tom and I went back to the kookstudio to find this monster lying and waiting

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Our product for the day!

The fourth lesson of our cooking class was – I am sure – the day that some of the guys (I know at least that is true for my guy…:)) had been waiting for; the famous meat-lesson.

As usual when we came in in the morning there was already a stack of various meats lying on the kitchen counter, some of them still sealed, others in their ‘bare’ form, some quite recognizable (o nooo, is that a brain??) and others not so much.

The purpose of today was to learn how to remove the membrane from pieces of meat and prepare it for further cooking, baking, grilling or whatever you want to do with meat. Rob was showing us why a big red piece of meat is not necessarily the best meat. I find it almost incredible if you hear that the good meat that is produced in Holland is being shipped to all sorts of other countries across the world and we then import other meat back into Holland! I mean; what’s the point right? Talking about foodmiles!! If you slaughter an animal there is a stresshormone produced which means that the meat is not edible for about 36 hours after it has been killed. Unlike fish, meat is not at it’s best when it is fresh from the cow or pig as that hormone needs to go away first (also the reason why halal meat is not the best, as the animals have much more stress when being killed the halal way) plus that the longer the meat is hanging the better the taste becomes. In general good meat hangs for about 2-3 weeks before it goes to the better butchers and it can hang up to 4 months. The reason is that it starts to decompose a bit meaning it gets tastier and softer. The moisture inside of the meat also vaporates shrinking the meat to about 20% of the initial body weight.

The meat we can find here in the supermarkets is usually really young meat. Cheaply produced and still with lots of water inside.

Rob showing us how to cut and prepare veal

The story with the chicken is also true for cows and pigs. Young cow’s that are able to run around freely develop muscles, meaning their meat becomes rose instead of white. Here in Holland we – thankfully – don’t really have white veal anymore and the cows are treated in a more animal friendly way, but in Italy they only want white meat for veal. Which is really weird as the more developed muscles also give a different bite and better taste.

Anyway, the meat we buy in the supermarkets doesn’t really have a lot of membrane attached to it, so not much work to do before you toss it in the pan. The better pieces of meat however do have lots of fat (gives a nice flavor) and membrane still there. So our first job of the day was to practice removing all the membranes and tendons from the meat.

I had quite a large piece of meat. No idea how it is called in english but it was called a ‘longhaas’ in Dutch. When we prepared it later it took a little bit of getting used to as it was more stringy then I am used to but after 2 little pieces I started to like it more. I guess we are really conditioned to like the meat we buy in the supermarkets as that is the only meat we get to eat really, but there is other meat out there!

We prepared the meat in various ways. Some pieces of veal where flattened to be used as saltimbocca and schnitzel (o, we had one with a lovely parmesan crust…. love it!!!) and the larger pieces of meat where prepared in the oven or in the pan depending on size and well what we wanted really.

We also prepared a lambrack by putting in garlic and rosemary and thyme in the skin, popped in the oven for a while and delicious! Rob had also bought a couple of regular porc-chops and well, I guess everyone kind of knows how those taste. I’ve never liked them as they tend to be hard and dry and pretty uneventful. But then we also prepared a large piece of Baambrugs pig, which is an organically farmed pig that gets good food and is quite famous. It’s prepared meat is lovely moist, soft and tasteful. Amazing what a difference a bit of quality can make!

Removing the membrane from the meat

So next… was the organmeat…. There was a selection of heart, kidneys, brains, lung (!), liver and sweetbread (or thymus gland) Now I know the french for instance eat just about anything and everything from an animal, as do many many other countries, but here in general; we eat liver and a few people eat kidneys but the rest (with the exception of the sweetbread) is more or less dogfood. With the exception of the brain and the lungs I tasted everything once prepared, but the only two tastes that I liked where liver and heart. Quite surprised to find that I liked the taste of the heart but it has a bit of a livery taste to it. I did NOT like the kidneys and I also think they were still too raw (for my taste anyway), sweetbread is ok, although it really depends on how it is prepared. Tom tasted a bit of brain and told me I probably shouldn’t. He kind of knows what I really don’t like so I trusted his judgment and didn’t take any

Liver prepared

I am not really a big meateater in the sense that I hardly ever have large chunks of meat on my plate and after all that meat I could really not stand another bite… It was just too much meat! It’s not only the tasting that you do throughout the entire day but it’s the smell of the cooking as well. You’re basically standing in the kitchen for 4 hours and that enough fills you up!

Maybe no big surprise that we ate pancakes that night…:) I was just in desperate need of something meatless and sweet.

Upstairs (our group is split into two, one part is cooking upstairs and the other part is cooking downstairs) they also made sate (tasty!!) and other things, while I think we focused more on the basic techniques… At the end of the lesson we took our fabulous groupphoto!!

The cooking group!

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Fresh fish

Today was lesson 3 of our cooking class and the topic was fish. I think I said it would be meat, but I was mistaken, which was very apparent by the looks of crates full of various fish species when we walked in this morning. We learned so much today that it is hard to remember all of it! That is probably also the biggest problem with this course; loads and loads of information and you have to keep using it otherwise.. it’s going to fade away.

So today we first received some explanation on the various types of fish; which is which and how do you recognize a fresh fish. Difference between wild fish and farmed fish, the flat and the round fish etc. Then Rob showed us (only once) how to filet a round fish and how to do a flat one. Not sure if flat and round are the correct terms, but I’m sure you know what I mean…

It all looks so easy when Rob does it, but wait untill you have that knife in your hand and you need to do it yourself..!

Tom with a flat fish

I started with the flat one, which went relatively ok for the first time ever and next came the round one. (a mackerel) You have to forgive me if I don’t write down the names of the fish that we filet or cleaned because… well, I keep forgetting which fish is which….

Once we cut the filets of the fish, checked them a bit to see if we didn’t miss any parts, we scraped the leftovers of the herringbones which we would use later to make quenelles. Heads went separate from the bones. Heads tossed out, bones were used to make fishbroth. (don’t cook for longer then roughly 20 minutes or they will become bitter. Also do not use any insides of a fish with a black inside as that is also bitter)

Next we prepared the filets in the various methods that you have; baking, smoking, frying… I don’t think we looked at cooking, but then again; I don’t like cooked fish.

Also why you need to add a little flour to the fish (so it doesn’t stick to the pan and gets a nice brown and crusty finish. Tom kept cleaning various types of fish as he is going to Norway on a fishing trip and want to make sure that he has the necessary skills to filet a fish in the wild (well, not sure if you can call a camping “in the wild”) for dinner that day…

Me with a fish

We removed the scales of a fish and cleaned them of their insides. I did a dorade; which is actually funny as that was the very first fish I ate when I started realizing that fish is not so bad.

My parents never ate fish when I was young, so I simply never learned how to eat fish. For some reason the first fishes I tasted were completely terrible and tasted ‘fishy’, so I came to believe that all fish would taste fishy and I decided I did not like fish. Years ago though, Tom and I were on a holiday in Greece and they were grilling freshly caught dorades on the barbecue. Needless to say it smelled absolutely delicious and I decided to be brave and just try it one more time.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the fish was not at all fishy and actually quite good! Over the next years I slowly started trying more fish; usually in good restaurants and more often then not I did like the fish. And now I actually really love fish…. funny how that goes isn’t it? I’m still not very fond of all the herringbones in the fish, but I guess that is just a part of what fishes are, but other then that I love most types of fish.

What else did we do? We also prepared one seabass in the oven under a saltcrust (made with eggwhite and lots of seasalt) and I also did a dorade the same way. Surprisingly easy and very very tasty. I did mess up the fish a bit when cleaning it after it was cooked. Stripped the skin ok, but when I wanted to remove the flesh I think  I missed a part so some herringbones were left (and ofcourse Tom had to be the one to get a piece of the bone… haha…) Very very tasty!

Of all the leftovers of the fish that were scraped from the bones we made quenelles which were poached in broth of some kind

Quenelles with sauce hollandaise

of broth I think (I was doing something else so heard only half but Tom was standing by so he knows… That is the good part of being together during a course like this!) and Rob also showed us how to make a sauce Hollandaise as well as beurre blanc (I think that was the name..)

Calamari

He also showed us how to clean a calamari. And – not unimportant – how a well prepared squid should taste!! I think we have all had our share of rubbery squid-rings right? The ones which are soooo hard to eat because they are very badly done. I tasted the above squid and I can safely say that it was delicious with just some salt and not much else…

I think I probably missed half the stuff that we did today as it was so much. Tom and I will be writing most of it down tomorrow together so we don’t forget.

Tomorrow I am going to attempt to remake the photo in Lara Ferroni’s challenge, which you can also find on Flickr in the group SLW: Photo remakes, plus I will be baking the recipe that I have been holding on to for a while from Foodjunkie, Chocolate nougatine with hazelnuts.

Related Posts:

• Cooking class, lesson 5; patisserie
• Kookstudio
• Cooking class 6; The grand finale!
• Cooking class; lesson 4, meat and tripe
• Strawberry soup with icecream – Cooking club