Junglefrog Cooking » kookstudio

Cooking class lesson 3 Fish

Simone (junglefrog) — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 22:13:09 +0000

Steamed dorad

Remember when we had one of the first Daring Cooks challenges and one of the things we had to do was to clean a squid?? Remember how incredibly wrong mine went?? (if not, you can read about it here… But don’t say I didn’t warn you!) Ever since that first very frightful (haha, well… ok messy for sure!) experience with cleaning a squid I had not attempted it again. I mean; squid is not my favorite food in the world so why bother if they have exploding and nasty intestines?

So imagine my surprise when Matthijs, who was doing the fish lesson yesterday since Rob is in France right now, was taking out some squid for us to “play” with… Ofcourse I could not resist and I just had to try it again. I mean; I had read about it before starting on my adventure the previous time and I did watch several youtube videos thinking it would be really easy to do, so I was a little careful this time. I knew what could go wrong!

Shall I do it or not??

Matthijs showed us how to filet a flat fish and a round fish and then showed us how to clean a squid. Again; pretty simple if you look at it, but as you can see by the look on my face I was still not so sure that mine would behave better this time!!

Imagine my surprise when the squid was beheaded, cleaned from insides and skeleton within literally maybe three minutes!!! I couldn’t believe it, which only proved once more that I had a very strange squid that first time. Filled with very unpleasant insides plus everything else went wrong with the damn thing as well. I got mad at the first one all over again. He or she could have made my life a little easier by behaving as the lovely little squid did that I cleaned yesterday. I even cleaned two of them, both equally easy. I still don’t really like the taste except when they are fried. But to be honest I like the outside of the batter more then the squid inside.

But I did it and I am glad to say that I have now successfully cleaned squid in my life. Possibly never to be repeated but hey, I did it! One thing to cross of the list…

I did like the steamed dorad we did a whole lot more as well as the seabass which was baked in a saltcrust in the oven. In addition to that we also fried some tarbot and we made little fishcakes which were also very good.

If I have to choose I think I liked the dorad that was steamed the most. It was so quick and easy and the taste was pure and delicious! And I think it looks good too don’t you agree?

As Mathijs was explaining it is always better to buy a whole fish rather then the filet as at least then you will be able to tell for sure if it is fresh or not. You could still ask the fishmonger to make them into filets but if you pick the fish you decide on the freshness, sort of…

I’ll tell you how to make the fishcakes as I really liked those. We used a little bit too much potatoe but still very tasty. You can use leftover fishscraps from when you are making filets or you can use whatever other fishbits you want. Mix that finely in a kitchenmachine but not too fine. No need to puree the fish!

Add salt, pepper and (depending on the qty you make) half a chili pepper, deseeded and chopped finely. Add chopped flatleaf parsley and cooked potatoes (great for leftovers!!) and roll them into cookie sized things. Roll them into flour and then into egg and bake in a pan until golden.

You can obviously add whatever you want in these little darling and I think they would actually work with just about anything!

I haven’t really done any “normal” posts lately now have I? It’s about time I got to do some proper cooking! I need to try out some things plus I should be doing the Daring Bakers challenge for this month in a hurry as it is close to reveal date and I have yet to start! Hmm…. stay stuned for more to come!

Our loot of the day

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 lesson 5; game

Simone (junglefrog) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:40:52 +0000

Pheasant wrapped with coppa di parma ready to go in the oven

Let me first start by saying that this post is not for the faint of heart as some of the photos are quite bloody. If you are a vegan or vegetarian probably best not to read on! If you are – however- interested in finding out how to skin a hare then please read on..

I was a little anxious about this lesson as we could have gotten just about anything here and my fear was of walking in and finding an entire deer lying on the kitchen counter. It wasn’t a deer, but instead we had two hare, two pheasants and two wild ducks lying there completely intact as you can see below. There was also some pieces of wild boar meat and some deermeat, but that was both already processed.

Now I like to think of myself not being too squeamish, but hmmm, not sure about all these little furry and fluffy creatures on the table as I knew what would be coming next! You see; I grew up with a friend whose parents owned a farm and as a kid I used to be at that farm almost every week. If you live at a farm you know that chickens eventually get slaughtered and since they lived close to the an area with lots of bunnies you even realize that bunnies get shot too. So I had killed and cleaned chicken before and I had even seen someone skin a bunny before. Still…. that was all different from the experience of last night! Probably a good thing too that it was the last lesson and not the first. Someone even suggested of starting with this lesson in the beginners course; you’d would – for sure – not have any people left after the course..lol..

After Rob had explained to us the differences between the various types of game we went to the kitchen area to watch the skinning and cleaning process on one of the hares. Now before I go into that; there are people opposed to hunting and people that are ok with hunting. I will not go into the right or wrong here, just to say that I used to be really against hunting but I have come to see the other side as well and are a bit more relaxed about the whole subject. I mean; if you think about it; If you are a meat-eating person your anonymous piece of meat that you buy at the butcher used to be a live animal as well and I can bet that your cow or pig probably had a lousier life than the hare you see lying in the photo above. So in terms of animal friendly (not getting into the whole pro or con hunting discussion!!) the hare would win over the average cow anyday, right?

Skinning and cleaning a hare

But still…. I had to swallow once or twice when Rob started skinning the hare and part of that was due to the horrible stench coming from the hare. Apparently real game can smell that way when it has been hanging for the appropriate amount of time to tenderize the meat. In this case the hare was shot roughly ten days ago and you probably get used to that smell but it was disgusting! The first thing he did was cut a little slit into the hare’s neck so that you can put a finger underneath the skin. Then the process of stripping the animal of it’s little furry coat is remarkably simple. Just make sure you remove the lower part of all four of the legs otherwise you won’t be able to pull of the skin. Once skinned you can remove the head, which then makes it look a lot more like something you can buy at your butcher… But overall, a pretty bloody process! Also you can see where the hare was shot as those parts have hematomas of where the coagulated blood is sitting. That is also where you will most likely find the little bullets that killed it, so make sure to remove those!

After the hare we got a demonstration of how to clean a duck (nightmare with all those feathers!) and then it was time to take it into practice… At which point I have to make a confession; I chickened out.

I am ok with watching someone dissecting a hare, duck or pheasant, but to do it myself I just didn’t feel like it! Instead I took photos and well, I did pluck a little bit of duck, but that is as far as it goes. I mean, the chance that I will ever be cleaning my own hare is not so big. Unless I am forced to live in the wild and will need to live of the animals that I catch with my bare hands; in which case the knowledge will come in handy.. lol.. In fact I was not the only one having a little bit of trouble with this lesson as only Arjen and Mike where brave enough to start on a pheasant and hare, respectively. Francoise cleaned a lot of the insides of the hare (to be used for something) which deserves an applause in itself as the stench was overwhelming but the rest of the group stayed with the safer meats that were already cleaned (the wild boar and deer)

The guys with their respective trophee...

And obviously at some point some of it had to be eaten. Now I found that the problem with the hare is the smell really. Once you have smelled that stench it stays in your nose and even after having been prepared in the oven we could all still smell it. And since taste is for a large part smell I had a hard time liking it! The boar wrapped with prosciutto was lovely and delicious, the filled boar was also great. The pheasant that Mike is holding on the left was delicious as well (that is the first photo of this post as well) and the coppa di parma really added a nice little crunch to it. The duck has a liver taste to it and I didn’t like the skin as that was thick and fat. Not so tasty, but the meat itself was ok. You wouldn’t expect a duck to have red meat now would you? But it does have red meat.

So in terms of our last lesson it certainly was a memorable one! It was the first time I did hardly anything in the kitchen though which is a little weird. Well I cut some veggies for a dish that we didn’t eat in the end, but that’s about it.

And now it is the end of our course again, such a shame really. There is still sooooo much more to learn, so I hope there will be another one after this.

Rob also gives summer courses in France where you spend a week cooking and/or doing other fun activities (painting, fishing etc.) as well. You go to the market in the morning and learn what to buy and then how to prepare all that in the afternoon. Sounds like a lot of fun and definitely something we will be doing next year. At the moment the farm where this will all be taking place is still under renovation to make it suitable to host guests but it should be finished beginning of spring next year. Courses start somewhere in june, but you can check the website for more details if you’re interested!

Pheasant with hare feet...

Cooking class lesson 4; sauce

Simone (junglefrog) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:17:40 +0000

Me trying to fillet a fish (sole)

I have been told many times that a good sauce is very very important in the kitchen. It brings the dish together and adds an extra dimension to it. So our lesson of yesterday was sauce…

The base of most good sauces is a good broth, which you – ofcourse – make yourself from whatever base you want, be it vegetable, meat or fish based. There are too many sauces to go into details plus I would probably tell you the wrong things.. So I’ll just stick to what we made yesterday. I have just gotten the recipe we used from downstairs but there is so much goo on the paper that it is hard to open!! Lol… sauce splashes all over the place!

Tom was gonna be late as he had a meeting at work that would last until about 7 pm (class starts at 6 pm) so I teamed up with Arjen to make a base demi-glace. We got the handout and went to read the instructions as to roughly how we should be making this sauce and then the first thing you read is ‘Mirepoix of carrot, sellery and onion”… Mire…what?? Never would have guessed that cooking would be good for your french as well.. (in case you want to know, mirepoix just means that you cut the veggies..)

We didn’t have to prepare our own broth (as that would have taken way too much time) so Rob had prepared various broths of which we use the beefbroth and we started by reducing that by aboout 50% on medium heat. In the meantime we cut the veggies and sauteed those in the butter. Tomato puree is then added and sauteed a little as well to make sure the sourness is gone. Add a little flour and color it brown (you’re making a brown sauce) Deglaze with white wine, add the reduced broth and reduce again with about 50%. Use your best judgment here as it is hard to give qty’s.

We were going to serve the sauce with lambracks, so to give the sauce a little bit of lamb taste as well I baked some pieces of lamb in a frying pan and browned them real nicely, added some red wine and the same base broth we used and added that to the broth as well to simmer along with the sauce to give of taste.

Simmering broth with lamb added already

While the broth was simmering we set out to fillet a fish (which I think was called a sole in english; tong in Dutch) Obvious we had a fish lesson before but that was months ago and while we did prepare a whole fish since then, it had been a while since I last did the filleting thing…. So… guess what… I kind of forgot what I needed to do.. oops… Luckily Rob helped us out as I would have mangled the fish completely. I have to keep practicing with things like that!

The tongue was made into little strips and rolled around a steamed asparagus and served with a very strong sauce based on lobster and fish broth. It was a bit on the strong side but still very tasty. In between making the sauce and preparing either the fish or the meat to go with the sauce we sat down to eat it all… To compare there was a sauce hollandaise and bernaise out of a package as well. Just so we could taste the difference between having a homemade variety versus what is sold in the stores…The packaged weren’t actually that bad, but very bland. I guess you could easily spice that up with additional things just to make it better if you are short on time.

We started with a piece beef of tenderloin with bearnaise sauce that was delicious! Then we had the fillet of sole with some sweatbread as well. (Can’t get used to sweetbread by the way… Not my thing!)

Then there was a recipe with the imaginative title of “Eel in green”. It’s not eel season, so instead it was made with turbot. The sauce was made with spinach which made the whole dish look like eh… well baby poo kind of.. in the green variant.. Unfortunately… the spinach was not washed and therefore a bit sandy… mmm, not so good gentleman!

We ended with the lamb with the sauce that we made and it was delicious! Not only because we made it ofcourse.. haha… but it was really really good.

From the base sauce you can make all sorts of other sauces as well, so I am sure we will be experimenting with that a lot.

To make a demi glace you need the following:

(all qty’s are not exact, so use your best judgment here!!)

mixed vegetables such as carrots, sellery and onion 100 gr

herbs such as bayleaf, thyme

tomato puree about 50 gr

white wine, about 0,25 ltr

brown broth, about two liter

maizena

flour

salt

Brown the cut vegetables in butter.
Add tomato puree and shortly bake to get rid of the sour
Add flour and color brown
deglaze with white wine
add the broth (simmered down to 50%) and leave to reduce to 50% again
Run the sauce through a sieve and add maizena if you need to
Remove fat and season to taste

Obviously this is the base so you can make all sorts of other sauce from this such as bordelaise (red wine, sjalot, bonemarrow), bigarade (reduced red port, orangejuice, zest, blue curacao), diana (cream, pepper, truffel), chasseur(sjalot, mushrooms, tarragon)etc… Sorry but I only have the french names!

Next week is already the last lesson… boohoo…

Junglefrog Cooking » kookstudio

Cooking class lesson 3 Fish

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