Last night I started a 4 week, 4hr a night cooking class with my pal Jason. It’s being offered by the Continuing Education faculty of Conestoga College. The location is at the Waterloo Campus which is on University across from the Taco Bell / Pizza Hut Cardiology Centre. It’s in the building where the old school for questionable characters used to be.
The facility is excellent. There are 7 or 8 cooking stations: the stoves/ovens are gas powered industrial strength cas iron jobbies where you have to fire up the pilot light, etc. A pot of water will boil in less than a minute. The cutting utensils are super-sharp cut through intentional and unintentional bones, the cookware is immaculate stainless steel along with the countertops, fridges, etc. Basically, the facility is a restaurant class kitchen. In fact, it is used by the chefs-in-training for their classes and for preparing meals for functions that take place on site.
For Gourmet Cooking I, the curriculum is basic. Week 1: Soups. Week 2: Salads. Week 3: Entrees. Week 4: Dessert.
There are 14 people in the class and one instructor who is a certified chef type guy. There are 3 rows of stations so the class is split up into three groups, each responsible for one or two of the items on the menu for the evening. It’s a pretty interesting mix of students: young singles (early 20’s), young couples, middle agers (like myself), and old fogies (over 45). I was bunched in with Jason, a young quiet fellow and a middle age Mom looking to sharpen her culinary skills. Each week we are encouraged to mix up the groups. Whatever. As I’ve said a million times: I hate people. So it really doesn’t matter to me as long as they aren’t stabby with those sharp knives.
For the 1st hr, the chef gave us the low down on cutting techniques for vegetables and ‘protein’ items. The vegetable cutting techniques were broken down into the root/starchy types, the onion family and other (celery, tomatoes). Most of the stuff I had already learnt via trial and error over the years but I did pick up a couple of interesting things. One: Pare the 1st layer off of your celery stalks to get rid of the stringy chewy layer that never seems to go away even when cooked. Two: When dicing an onion, slice off just enough of the root so that you can use that end to keep segments attached while dicing.
The night’s agenda consisted of making 3 different types of stocks which would be further used in 3 different kinds of soup. Each group responsible for 1 stock/soup combo plus garnish and presentation. All within 2 hrs time to leave room for tasting and clean-up. Kind of felt like the Iron Chef. We needed to divide our group up so that we had a head chef a sous-chef and a couple of go-fers. The duties were rotated throughout the night. So the chef set out the plan for what to cook and when as well as for tasting decisions etc. The sous-chef did a lot of the chopping mixing stirring stuff while the go-fers went to the food stations and grabbed the best looking items for the recipe before anyone else could get them for the other groups.
We were responsible for the chicken stock and soup combo. Our soup to be made was Cream Chicken with Butternut Squash. We were given three ‘carcasses’ and a list of vegetables for the stock. That was the first time I dissected an entire (gutted) chicken. The chef showed me the proper way to sever the important pieces (drumsticks, wings, thighs, breasts) and store them aside leaving the undiserable items (spine, rib cage, etc. etc.) to be thrown into the stock. If one had the time, purchasing several whole chickens from the store would save one a considerable amount of money. E.g.: a whole chicken costs around $5. You can get 2 large whole breasts, drumsticks, thighs and wings with or without skin if desired, plus the remains for making about 1 – 2 litres of stock which can be subsequently frozen for future use. The 2 breasts alone would be about $5 from the store. This is how restaurants earn their keep by buying whole product and constantly preparing stock throughout the day with the discards from the ‘proteins’ and the vegetable cuttings.
The other stock/soup combos were: fish stock for a Talapia soup (including tomatoes, saffron, onions) and veal stock for 6, yes 6 onion soup (yellow, spanish, green, leek, shallot, red) with a baguette crouton topped with crumbled Stilton. MMMMmmmm MMMMMmmm!!
It took the two full hrs to prep and plate our soup. Some things I learnt: constantly taste your product. Think about how the finished product is going to taste. What are the flavour builders going to produce? What key flavour do you want to stand out? How do you want to balance the other flavours. Think in terms of salt, spice, etc. In our case we are having a chicken soup. How much of the chicken taste needs to be present? How much of the squash? Which soup is it to be? Chicken with Butternut or Butternut with Chicken? This though process was an enligtenment for me and I will now use this approach in all involved meals that I prepare at home. Always be thinking about what you want the meal to ‘say’ at the end.
A neat little trick which is so obvious in retrospect was to take bits and pieces of all the contents that are being cooked at any interval and mix them together in a little dish for tasting so that you can get an idea of where the dish is going. For example, we were cooking the squash in one pot with some nutmeg, cinnamon and ginger, the stock in another pot and still another pot with the thickening agent (flour, butter, cream). Each pot had its own flavour that were important to monitor individually. But neither one alone would give an indication of what the finished product would be which is really what ultimately matters. Without combining the contents into a bowl periodically there was no way to determine how each flavour would interact along with how the colour was going to turn out. The look of the soup is critical. If it looks like ‘pooh brown’ it’s likely not going to be desirable as opposed to a nice rich orange. Using this technique we were able to determine that there was not enough of the nutmeg/cinnamon to really bring out the squash flavour and not near enough salt….which in the end was still the case according to the chef. However, I would prefer the customer to add salt and to leave it the nice earthy flavour we ended up with.
During the night we were encouraged to walk around and taste the other groups stocks and concoctions. I tended to stay away from the fish group but I was lured in by the saffron they were using. I am intrigued by saffron and have never used it for it is quite expensive so I bypassed my dislike for fish and tasted their preparations anyway. I also enjoyed testing the veal and onion soup preparations. I did comment that they should skim a little bit of the excess fat out of the stock for it seemed a little too rich.
For our garnish and plating we decided to top each bowl of soup with a spiral of 32% cream and then take a knife and thread the cream outward so that it looks a little like a spiderweb. We added a sprig of parsley and sprinkled some chopped green onion on top. The look was appealing and everyone enjoyed the soup. I had never had butternut squash soup before so didn’t know what to expect. I found it very tasty and it gave me that autumn like feeling. But I wouldn’t want to have a lot of it for I found it to be too sweet to my liking.
The fish soup was way to fishy for me but I expected that to be the case and always found the concept of fish soup to be somewhat disgusting. The 6 onion soup was excellent albeit a little greasy. The white wine enhanced the onion flavour and the veal broth added a good saltiness to the flavour. The crouton crumbled with Stilton was a fantastic garnish to the soup.
I hope to make the onion soup at home some day soon. The question is: do I go through the time and effort to make the stock from scratch? It is quite time consuming for something that you could get from the store in a nice little cube. The advantages are obvious now that I know how creative and controlling I can be making my own stock. So it is tempting. What I do know is that there will be Stilton on my soup. But probably only on my soup and a milder user-friendly cheddar or parmesan I suspect for the other tasters.