Goals

Hi All,

My goals for this blog are to teach you to cook. This means anything you want to learn. I am covering the basics then I am hoping you will tell me what you want to learn about.

Ever want to smoke fish on your bbq? or Flavour cream for really crazy creme brulees? Please let me know. There is nothing wrong with learning more than the basics as we go. The basics just make things easier and more efficient.

Please tell me what you want to know how to cook.

Dig in, chow down.

Chef P.

PS Sorry for the short post. I am editing the longer sauce posts so not to be novels. Will be up soon. Thank you for waiting.

Why learn this Sauce crap?

Hi All,

So I know a lot of you reading this are having the thought, “He keeps talking about how important learning this is, but is he really going to talk about all this sauce crap?’ To answer you, Yes I am. But I am going to mix it up along the way so it isn’t too boring.

It is true that you can buy most of these sauces in the store in some form, or similar if you add to some pre-made sauce. It is also true that most of these sauces you will never use for anything. I know I haven’t used most of them since the first time I made them in school. But I will ask you this, other than engineers or some other similar profession, when was the last time you used trigonometry?

I get it. It is boring to learn something that is not useful to your future or something that learning it to learn the basis of the paradigm is not useful. It is even worse when you can learn it from a newer book without learning all the steps between. But this book uses the same foundations as learning the steps.

One of the biggest things great cooking needs is patience. You can get all the certificates you want about cooking but you know what, you will never learn everything there is to know about cooking. So take your time and learn the basics right and then everything else will come together to make amazing meals. It’s ok if after you learn the basics you use short cuts because they are cheaper, more efficient, and more consistent. I believe this because if you know the basics you will find out that the short cuts only work in dire emergencies.

So please be patient while this builds and I will promise to make it a lot more exciting.

Dig in, chow down.

Chef P.

Tomateo vs Tomato

Hi All,

The easiest sauce to cover first is Tomato. This is because one its very versatile and two costs the least. So lets get cooking.

Basic Tomato Sauce, From the On Cooking book on my Bookshelf:

50g carrot small dice
50g celery small dice
50g onion small dice
500g tomato paste
2L white stock(usually chicken)
100ml oil
teabag filled with: 1/2 bay leaf, 1 fresh sage leaf, 1Thyme branch, 1 Rosemary branch, 8 Peppercorns.

Method:
1) In the oil sweat the mirepoix. Sweat means to cook over medium heat until soft but with no colouring. Stir this regularly.
2) Add the tomato paste and sweat some more
3) Add everything else and simmer for about an hour.
4) Adjust the seasoning to your liking and if you want smooth tomato sauce puree with your hand blender.

Now this is the mother sauce so to make fancy daughter sauces we just add some stuff.

Bolognese: Add 1lb of ground beef to your sweating veg and 1 clove of crushed garlic. Fresh chopped basil and oregano about 2 teaspoon each, more for your taste.  Follow the same recipe above and enjoy. Great with pasta or for lasagne.

Creole: To the tomato sauce above add 2 cloves crushed garlic while sweating. When simmered for 15min add 100g diced green pepper, 100g diced okra, and 100g sliced green olives. Add a dash of hot pepper sauce and simmer for 15min more. This is used a lot in Cajun cuisine and is great with Chicken, shrimp and anything blackened.

Spanish: Add 1 clove crushed garlic while sweating veg above. When sauce is ready add 100g sliced mushrooms and simmer for 10 more min. Add 100g diced seeded and skinned tomatoes. Season to your liking with chiles, salt and pepper. This is a nice change and I use it with rice to mix it up, also great with lamb and fish.

Provencale: Add 1 clove crushed garlic and 50g chopped shallots to your sweating veg above. Add 15g of fresh chopped fine herbs (parsley, tarragon, chervil, and chives) to the end of your sauce.  Great light flavour used a lot with fish, meats or veggies. Good summer sauce.

These are the traditional tomato sauce daughters and the mother. Try these. They are great and you can make your own. This is a taste of how you can make a big batch of your own “mother” sauce and then as you cook through the week add different things and have a ton of different meals. This is a great sauce to play with.

Dig in, chow down.

Chef P.

Back talking sauces.

Hi All,

So it is going to take me a couple of posts to cover sauces and I am not going to do it all at once. Your mind would explode, you would fall asleep, or you would eat your computer before I got through all the classical sauces. I will do it piece by piece and talk about different things as we work through them. I will also comment on some books and put them in the book shelf.

I want you to remember these are classical french sauces. If you want newer sauces, wait and I’ll get to those soon or pick up one of the books I will be mentioning. But like my last post on starting slow I really want to show how the french built the flavours of their cuisine  and did it cheap.

So Classical sauces!

There are five(5) mother sauces, each stemming from a “stock”. That is why they cover stocks first.

Bechamel – Milk
Espangnole – Beef
Veloute (Breaks into three with Veal, Cicken, Fish)
Tomato
Hollandaise -Eggs and Butter

So to make these other than Hollandaise you thicken that type of stock with a Roux, classical thickening agent of equal weights flour and butter). Much like building flavours of a dish with ingredients you can add flavour with how long you cook your Roux before you add it to the stock. Don’t worry I will cover roux coming up.

Each one of these mother sauces then have a magnatitude of ingredients added to make all of the different sauces in classical cooking.

For now the key is to see that if you start with a strong well made stock you get a strong well made mother sauce. If you stock is weak then your sauces will be weak. It takes patience and can be a very fun play time making sauces. I have been in kitchens where they have sauce competitions. It can get out of hand. With a good stock to start from there are endless possibilities.

Dig in, chow down.

Chef P.

 

Why the slow start?

Hi All,

First I am sorry. This was ready on Sunday and I hit save rather than publish. But on to it…

I am starting my lessons the classical way because it shows the depth that classical french cooking has. It starts with fresh leftovers and builds them up to make amazing grand meals.

The other reason is much like using quality cement in a foundation you want your cooking to start with the right building blocks. When you understand how it all comes together you can then abuse it to make the flavours you want. And if you get really fancy you can place flavours at different depths in your food. For example if you smoking the fish for a fish chowder verses adding smoked bacon at the end. If you build the chowder with smoke fish you will get smokeyness throughout the chowder where as if you just add the smoked bacon at the end you will get a hint of smoke. Cooking really isn’t that wide of a field. As we say in kung fu, the river is narrow but deep.

I also find if you know where the ideas that flashy chefs you seen come from, you will appreciate them more as they are rooted in things a lot deeper than just wowing you in a 1 hour cooking show.

Dig in, chow down.

Chef P.

Taking Stock

Hi All,

 

So to make a great sauce you need to start with the right base. For the best base you want to make your own stocks. Stock in the foundation to classical cooking. It is used in everything and is relatively cheap to make. Stock is all your mire poix trimmings and peelings and some extra mire poix roasted with the bones of which ever animal you want stock for. The best bones to use are joint bones, so knees and such. This is because you want both the marrow and the cartilage to give both flavour and body to the stock.

So here are the steps:

Roast bones (beef, chicken, veal, oxen) Fish bones you don’t roast!
Roast mirepoix trimmings a lot, and some fresh mirepoix
Cover both with tomato paste and roast some more (not needed for fish stock or chicken stock)
Put roasted bones and mirepoix into a pot and cover with cold water (cold water congeals the fat and brings it to the surface keeping your stock clear)
Add spices and herbs to your stock
Simmer until about 1/3 reduced.
Use where recipe says stock.

This is basically how you make stocks. You can make stocks by changing any variable here, so I urge you to experiment with what you like and don’t like. As I move forward to make sauces you will see why a good quality stock is important.

My side note: You can buy just as good quality stocks as you can make. Look for some in your local stores. The one thing good stocks take to make is time, and if you don’t have any, a little love can take bought stocks to a different level.

Now we are on to sauces!

Dig in, chow down

Chef P