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Cooking course lesson 2; chicken and fowl

Simone (junglefrog) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:22:21 +0000

Photo of me taken by Stanley

Last saturday it was the second lesson of the cooking course at Kookstudio Amsterdam and the lesson was this time chicken and other fowl. I should have waited with making the stock for the Daring Cooks challenge as I would have had plenty of bones!! But as we all know the date for the Daring Cooks was shortly before the date of our lesson so that wasn’t possible.

We’ve mutilated a couple of chickens and cut a quail into appropriate size portions… I am not going to be making this a very long post as I have been behind the computer too long and my right wrist is kind of bothering me, so I have to take as little computertime as I can; which is hard in my profession!! But ok, so I will let the photos speak for itself plus this little video below that I shot as well of Rob cutting the quail. It’s in Dutch but the video speaks for itself I think. Have fun and I hope I will be able to have more text next week. Fingers crossed!!

Our produce for this week

Guess who is burning stuff again??

Cooking course is back!!

Simone (junglefrog) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 07:54:58 +0000

Rob making mayonaisse

Remember when we did the cooking course in Amsterdam at the Kookstudio in March of last year? That was the so called beginners course and we followed the advance course after that but when it was finished we kind of felt we wanted to do some more. The problem is that you can find loads of cooking workshops in the Netherlands but not a lot that actually teach you about product and techniques rather then simply following a recipe in a class.

I am not interested in someone showing me a recipe and telling me that I can follow the recipe. I know I can do that by myself at home if I so desire. I am interested in finding out how to treat the various products, how to recognize good from bad and how to cook from scratch really. So…. after some discussion between Tom and myself we decided to do the same course we did last year again… Is that silly? Our reasoning is that we got so much information that it’s hard to remember it all plus we do look differently at things compaired to last year. But anyway we signed up again and last saturday was our first lesson.

And I have to say it’s actually very usefull doing this for the second time. When you are trying to learn something new at school it’s the power of repetition that works there too right? It’s the same in cooking class. The first lesson is all about cutting, making mayonaisse and roux and transforming that into croquettes and cutting fresh fries from potatoes. So ok, probably not the most exciting lesson to do for the second time, but still I found it useful. I remember from the first time that all that information was quite overwhelming. The second time around I was more like; ‘Oooo, now I get it!’

As far as cutting goes; I know how it should be done in theory and I have becoming much much better in cutting but it is still work in progress. I guess that is really a case of practice makes perfect (and using good knifes)

What I did do this time around that I had not done before is that I made a basic salpicon (base for a croquette) in the Taurus Cook. It’s supposedly a machine that does most of the work for you. It cooks, blends, mixes etc and it – or so I have been told – perfect for making a roux or for making soup and sauces. To be honest; when I saw the thing I was a bit overwhelmed. I mean; making a roux is fairly straightforward when you do it on the stove so why would you even spend all that money on a machine that makes the whole process look more complicated then it really is?

But it was new and I did want to see if it would do the job better in the machine then if you would do the same thing by hand. The machine has a couple of buttons but what you basically have to do for each step of the process is to set the right temperature, the mixing speed and the time required for each ingredient. Unfortunately you still have to do the chopping yourself.. I would have thought a machine like that should do that as well. If you’re gonna be making life easier then why not add that functionality as well. But it doesn’t so chopping the ingredients is still required but that is really the only work you need to do.

You add the onions, cook for about a minute, then add the next ingredient and so forth and after a couple of minutes out comes a salpicon. In terms of speed and ease of use it gets good points from me. Once you’re over the initial hurdle of getting familiair with the various buttons it’s really quite simple. The biggest disadvantage is the fact that it’s really hard to taste in between the various steps, so adding salt and pepper or other seasonings during the process is not easy and becomes a bit of a hit and run kind of thing. We could have used a bit more seasoning as the taste was very bland.

But before we could transform the salpicon into little croquettes it had to be chilled in the fridge. As soon as it came out it became apparent that the “perfect” process in the taurus does not make a “perfect” salpicon. The structure was just wrong; very plastic and rubbery almost. We did roll them into balls and fried those, but apart from the taste that wasn’t as it should be, the texture of the thing was just not good. You know when you make it the traditional method on the stove I think it is almost the imperfections in the process that make it perfect…. Does that make sense?

In this case everything was cooked at the right temperature for exactly the right time but probably the gluten in the flour therefore got activated more bringing it all together much more then if you put it on the stove. I don’t know… I am getting way to technical here…lol Bottomline is; easy to use, but the results were very disappointing. It would be interesting to see what the machine would do to a soup, but quite franky I fear it will do the same. Plus…. the biggest drawback is the fact that I miss the action!! What is the fun in cooking if a machine does it all for you?(I know for a fact that there are many people out there that would buy it for that reason alone.. But not if you love to cook!!)

I love my tools such as the Magimix and the KitchenAid but they do not do all the work for you. They merely make it a little bit easier. This machine is different in that it does it all. I certainly would not bother spending money on a machine such as that. But that’s just my opinion ofcourse.

Machine at work

I did find it interesting to be able to try out a machine like that and it does look impressive with all the steam coming out don’t you think?

Next week is going to be the chicken and poultry lesson. One of my favorites!!

Tom likes to burn stuff...

Cooking class 6; The grand finale!

Simone (junglefrog) — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 21:34:42 +0000

Appetizers

Unfortunately today was already the very last day of our cooking course… It’s been so much fun that I don’t think anyone of us was really happy to get to the end, but all good things do – apparently – have to have an ending….

Now the intent of today was to make a three course meal out of a variety of ingredients that we were presented with. Ofcourse Tom and I had been thinking about it for the entire week, trying to come up with things that we might be able to make out of the ingredients that would be there, but to be honest – we could have saved ourselves the trouble… It was a good exercise anyway, but when we were presented with so many things this morning; the whole plan changed.

Ingredients, ingredients

What we also did not know was that we had to cook for the entire class. Rob explained to us that each team of 2-3 people would make a starter, a main and a dessert for all 14 people. Which would in turn mean that we would get a total of 5 dishes for each course. You can imagine that we did not want to make full blown dishes in terms of size as that would have been impossible to eat. But still the idea of making something for 14 people out of the bounty of ingredients was… well daunting to say the least. Rob explained the ingredients, for so far we did not know them and there really was more then enough. Tom and I teamed up with Piet and our first goal was to come up with what we wanted to make and then gather the ingredients necessary.

Initially we wanted to make a shrimp cocktail but the shrimps available had been frozen and Rob suggested that we choose something else.. So we picked the tuna as a starter. Our main would be grilled monkfish on a bed of pasta with basil cream sauce. And for dessert… chocolate mousse. I made the mistake of asking Rob if he had pasta…. Haha… ofcourse! Here is the flour, the eggs and this is the recipe to follow to make your own! Had I known upfront I might have opted for something simpler…:)

Waiting to get started on the starter...

We had about 1,5 hour for the mise en place to be finished and at 14.30 we had to have our starters ready to be served. Now I have to confess that our starter was pretty simple. Fresh tuna which we grilled with sesame seeds and served with soysauce and some wasabi and pickled ginger. It doesn’t take a lot of time, so we had more time to prepare the chocolate mousse which had to be chilled and prepare the dough for the pasta which also needed to be chilled an hour before I could process it further. Tom was our fishman and he made filets out of the monkfish and the Pieterman (don’t know the english name for that!) as well, while I prepared the dough for the pasta and prepared the chocolate mousse, with help from Piet.

Seafood risotto

A little over 14.30 we sat at the table and I was amazed at all the beautiful starters that our group had created!! If you take a look at the photos… be honest… does that look like appetizers made by a group of beginners?? I think it looks amazing and the taste of all the dishes was excellent! There was a lot of seafood and fish. Now that I think about it, there were no meat dishes in the starters if I remember correctly. The presentation was also quite good and even though the portions were all very small, they were still a bit too much.

After our appetizers we had to swiftly get back into the kitchen to prepare the main courses. I was making the pasta but I messed it up the first time as I was taking photos and trying to do the pasta at the same time. That, my friends, does not work very well. Plus I didn’t use any flour so all the dough was sticking together, which meant having to start over again. It was made into tagliatelle and while Tom and Piet were busy with griling the fishes and preparing the sauce I was busy cooking the pasta (and taking photos in between) Ofcourse we were late again for the main course, as that was planned at 15.30. While our tuna was absolutely delicious and very tasty I thought our pasta could have been better. The fish was a bit too bland and the sauce needed to have more taste as well, but still not bad! Again, the creativity of our fellow cooks was amazing and varied from beautiful lambracks to duck with sweet sauce that was apparently so good that it had all been eaten before I had a chance to taste it, so I am sure it was good. It looked amazing anyway…. There was a risotto with shrimp and broccoli, a saltimbocca, the lambrack, our tagliatelle and the duck.

Mains

Does that look amazing or what? Last but not least was the dessert ofcourse and I was happy that we had already done the dessert and only needed to whip some cream for the topping.

Dessert

Now you can say whatever you like but I think we were all proud of our results… Now the main thing it to keep trying new things and to keep using the stuff that we learned here, as that will eventually (hopefully) increase our cooking skills. All in all this is one hell of a course and if you’re ever in the area of Amsterdam and would love to learn lots of new stuff on cooking you have to try this course at the Kookstudio Amsterdam. Rob also has courses in France which we really wanted to do this year but due to restrictions in our vacation days that wasn’t possible for this year, but we will definitely go next year!!

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Cooking course lesson 2; chicken and fowl

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