Cooking 101: The Basics of Cooking

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Cooking is a fairly enriching experience with an endless combination of flavors, ingredients, and techniques. The class bails from the absolute basics, like knife skills, understanding ingredients, stocks, mastering techniques of cooking eggs and chicken. My name is Shubranshu. I'm a professionally trained Chef and baker trained from the prestigious [inaudible]. I had the opportunity to work under some amazing chefs in Australia, and I want to basically share all my knowledge with you in this class. We start this class by understanding about the different types of knives and their functions, to guide you to select the best ones by starting out on your cooking journey. Then we move on to learning different French cuts like batonnet, julienne, paysanne, brunoise, and many more on different vegetables. I will be teaching you the cuts exactly how I learned it in culinary school. We then learn how to make a delicious vegetable stock, backed with amazing flavor and umami. This is a great base for soups and sauces, and a great way to use leftover vegetables. After learning the stock, we move on to my favorite part of cooking, which is learning how to cook eggs. Now this will take your breakfast skills to another level. We'll be learning different techniques of cooking boiled eggs, fried eggs, and a soft and delicious mushroom and cheese omelet, and a classic French omelet. Then we move on to our final section of the class, learning how to de-bone a whole chicken, understanding the different parts of the chicken, and also the knife skills to cut one like a professional. We will then move on to learning how to make a chicken stock from scratch to prevent wastage of chicken bones. The final dish of this class is a rustic creamy mushroom and chickens too, called chicken fricassee. This recipe is a sure stopper and will impress your friends and family. We will be learning techniques like sorting, caramelizing, bracing, sharing, and many more. This class also comes with detailed recipe notes, so you can master the recipes easily at home. The goal of the class is not just to learn the recipes, but to actually build a strong foundation as a chef, so that you can take your cooking skills to the next level. [MUSIC]. 2. Class Project and Outline: Thank you for enrolling in this class. In this lesson, I basically want to go over the class outline for this class, as well as the class project and how you can download the class resources. The outline of the class is super easy. It's just divided into three sections. The first section, we go over knife skills, as well as how to make a vegetable stock. The second section, we learn how to cook eggs. Different types of eggs, like boiled eggs, omelets. The third section we go over how to debone a chicken, how to make a chicken stock, and how to make a chicken fricassee. We cover these three elements of cooking and basically cover different techniques, as well as different skills you can practice at home. Secondly, the class project is for you to share any one picture of any dish we make in the class so that I can help you out and I can critique it as well. The third one is our class resources. Let's have a look how you can download the class resources. Let's have a look how to download the resources. So the resources are in the fourth tab, which come under projects and resources. If you click the fourth tab and you click on the attachment file, the PDF file, and let it download. When you open it, you will see all the tips, the recipes, and all the information on the class which will really help you and guide you throughout the class. 3. Tools: Let's have a look at some of the tools which will be really useful in your cooking journey, as well as in the class when we make different dishes. So the first one and my favorite bile is a cast-iron pan and a non-stick pan. Now, if you have both of these, like you can make so many different things. And what I would advise is that when you get these bands, make sure to get the best quality product. Like the cast iron pan I have here is from Lodge. This is an American company and it's so amazing like I've had this for maybe five years now. And it looks like new legged works so well. You just have to take good care of disgust and bands. Make sure the oil lamp once in a while and don't keep water in them for very long time. Even non-stick bands as well like they're so useful, especially when you make eggs or any egg base dishes, even if you are stir-frying. These are really nice because you don't have to use a lot of oil in it and nothing sticks to it. So I really like using it if I'm making pancakes or crabs or any sort of different types of eggs. These two, I would say, are really essential for cocaine. That third one I really like using is a Dutch oven. Now, this is about a four liter Dutch oven. And I use this for almost everything. Like if I'm making a steel or if I'm blanching something, if I'm making poached eggs, if I'm even making bread, like I just use this Dutch oven. And this one as well just get a good quality Dutch oven. And this will last you a lifetime if you take care of it. These three, I would say like a censured. The fourth one, which I like using as well as a stainless steel pot. Now this is good if you just want to heat up and make, make any sources or just reduce like sauces as well. This is quite useful in that case. The last one I wanted to show you is a baking dish. Now baking dish is so if you want to just make any sort of bacon, had a lasagna or a tower, any sort of big product. Like, I really like using this one, this one, quite small and really convenient to use. It's just like voi in centimeters big. And I really like using this as far. So all these products like just get the best quality possible, is what I would advise, will be using almost all of them in our further lessons when we learn cooking, make sure to get the best quality products when you assemble these tools for your kitchen. Let's have a look at some other utensils and which you might also find useful in your cooking journey. So the first one, Let's start with a save. Now, I like to have to CVS. I is a big one, small one. So this is really nice if you're selling a stock, if you're blanching vegetables. And if you make a customer and if you just want to see if that even for like flower, if you're baking says so use for the smaller one is also really nice if you want to basically save anything out, or if you want to clean a stock as well. So both of them are super useful. The next one is a risk. Now risk is essential if we are basically emulsifying any fat into a liquid. If you're making rationale, if you're making a sauce, even if you are making a custard or any sort of moraine, this is really nice if you want to areas in case if you want to make an egg, this is so nice to use. In that case, the next one are dong. Dong are like an extension of your hand basically, especially when you are lifting hot objects from a grill or from a band. And he sort of meet, this is really nice to use. I also like using this fun blanching something. If I want to get something out of hot water, It's quite nice to use in that case as well. So Dong's are so essential and professional kitchens, we always have them whenever we're cooking. The next ones are spatulas. So I have two types of spatulas here. They're both made of silicon. I like using silicon because there's heat resistant and they do not get spoiled even at high heat. Spatulas are essential to use if you're mixing something. Also, if you are trying to get something out of a bowl, like a sauce or even mirroring or any other liquid element as well. You can actually scrub really nicely from a silicone spatula. And I like having both of these like it just helps if you have a smaller one as well. The next one is a wooden spoon. Now, wooden spoons are also really nice when you mix, when you make sauces as well as when you make breast chicken or any soups as well? I don't know. I really like using wooden spoon. I just feel like sometimes it gives a better flavor. The next one is a tweezer. Now, tweezers are like really specific. You don't necessarily need to have it in your toolkit, but really using it. Because if you want to play it a dish or you want to put like flower petals or any sort of really delicate element to ablate. These are quite nice even when you're cooking, like we use tweezers and kitchens. So this is optional, but if you want to get it, you can. It's great to use for. Finally, one is our stock metal spoon. And this is really nice if you're making a soup or a stock. Whenever I try to clarify a stock, I just use this. I really like using it. And also when you want to pour a stock as well. So it's really nice in that case. Now, let's move on to our mixing bowls. Mixing bowl is essential if you want to put dry ingredients in them. Also for storing any soups or sauces. You can just put it in as Cabela's and put it in your fridge. Also for like mixing any doors as well. Mixing goals are so useful in that case. So definitely get a few of these. It just helps you along in your cooking journey. So these are some other tools which we'll need in this class. Now there might be many more tools you might find on cooking. But these are like good enough for this class. If you have this, you should definitely be fine with all the recipes we cover. 4. Introduction to Chef's Knifes: In the first section of the class, you'll be learning about knife skills. Now as a chef, knife skills is one of the most fundamental topics to learn if you want to improve your cooking skill. What we'll do is we'll start off by understanding different types of knives and how they're made so that you can basically select the knife which is suitable to you. Then we'll learn different French cuts for vegetables. I'll teach you exactly how I learned in culinary school so you can basically master these techniques as well. Make sure that your knife is really sharp because if your knife is blunt, you won't get cuts which are precise. It will slow you down, and also it increases the chance of injuring yourself. Let's begin with the lesson. In this lesson, we'll try to understand the different types of knives which are available to us as chefs so you can basically decide which one is suitable for you when you start cooking. Basically, there are two types of knives based on the blade. The first one is a Japanese knife. Now, this blade is basically made with carbon steel and the second one is a Western-style. This one is a stainless steel blade. Most of the knives you will find will be basically made with these two different types of blades. The Japanese one is a carbon steel blade. With the carbon steel you have to basically maintain it really well, otherwise, it can get rusted because the carbon steel actually reacts with the environment. Also because of the material, it actually retains its edge. It retains the blade and the sharpness really well, so you don't have to sharpen it really often. But makes sure that it doesn't basically stay in contact with water very long because that will basically spoil the blade. It requires more maintenance, but I actually prefer to use Japanese blades because they are quite sharp. The second side of blade is our Western style. If you see this blade, it's more shinier. With this material, it actually doesn't require that much maintenance because it doesn't rust that easily. But at the same time, you'd have to sharpen the edge really often because it tends to blunt really easily. When you see the difference between both the knives. Now, this is a nine-inch blade and this is a seven-inch blade. Also with Western knives, you'll find this curve here, which you won't find in the Japanese knives because it's more flatter. When we actually cut, this is a more rocking motion. With the Japanese knives, it's a more flattened motion because of the blade structure. It's up to you which one you like. I tend to prefer the Japanese ones, but the Western ones are also really nice. There's another type of blade which I wanted to show you, which is a Santoku blade. Now, this is also a Japanese blade, so it is carbon steel as well. But this is really convenient for home use because it's smaller and also it's quite sharp and it's easy to cut things so it doesn't put basically weight on your wrist. If you have like say chopping vegetables or just like trimming meat, I really like using this knife as well. Totally up to you. You can get this one as well when you cook at home. The next one is a pairing knife. Now, a pairing knife is really useful if you're basically working with fruits or if you're working with pastry as well, if you want to cut strawberries or any different types of berries which requires a little bit more of being delicate with the knife. This one is really good in that sense. Now after these knives, I'll show you some of the other knives which I use, which I put in my kit. But for home use, even if you just have one chef knife and one pairing knife, that will be more than enough. But still, I'll just show you some other knives as well for more specific purposes. These are the second set of knives which are more specific to their functions. You'll find them in a chef's kit. It's not necessary to have them, but I'll just explain you just in case you want to purchase them. The first one is a fileting knife. Now, this one is really good to use with fish, if you're fileting a fish, if you are trimming the scales as well, it's really nice. The basic feature of this knife is that it can bend basically. Because when you filet the fish, you have to make sure that the knife bends with the fish so you can cut really cleanly. Also when you're scanning the fish as well, you have to drag the skin with it so you can just drag it like that. I really like using this. I mean, it's really easy to filet fish with this, but it's totally up to you if you want to purchase it. The second one is a boning knife. Now, with the boning knife, you'll see that it has a curve here. Now, this is basically just to get through the bones when you cut, when you trim lamb or chicken or any other meat. It just makes it really easy to sort through the motion when you're cutting through the bone. Also when you hold this, you'll feel like it has a slight edge here. It just makes it easy just to cut the meat and trim it. When you use this, you hold it like this and you just move it around in a curve motion. Just make sure to do that when you use this one. The third one is a bread knife. With bread knife, you'll see that it has a serrated edge here. With this knife, be really careful because it's really sharp and you don't want to injure your hand with it. When we use this knife, we basically saw it. We don't go straight in because we want the serrated edge to cut through the bread. When you use it, just do it like this through a bread. The next one is a cleaver. With a cleaver, you'll see that it has a really thick blade. That is for the purpose of cutting through bones when you're making stock. This one is super-helpful because if you use your chef's knife to cut through bones, it will dull the edge. Make sure to use a cleaver when you cut through bones and not your chef's knife. In professional kitchens, we use this quite often. The final one is not actually a blade, but I wanted to show you just in case you want to use it. It's a honing steel. What this does is that when you want to sharpen a knife just before we're going to use it, we just basically do the edge like this and we can just sharpen the blade of the knife. It's super useful just before if you're going to filet a fish or cut through some meat, just use this. It will just give an edge to the knife and it'll be easy to cut. I hope you could understand about the different types of knives we use as chefs. Whenever you choose a knife for yourself, make sure you feel really comfortable with it. Don't use a knife because some other chef is using it. Use it because it just suits you and your hand, as well as the blade should also suit you with the way you cut things. Make sure to take your time and choose a blade which suits your cooking. 5. Knife Skills: How to Hold a Knife: Before we learn how to actually cut the vegetables, let's learn how you can actually hold a knife. There are two ways to do this. The first one is you hold it like this, to something like a tennis racket. Then when you move it, you just move it in a locking motion like this. [NOISE] You get it? A grip like this and you move it like this. The second way to do this is you can put your finger ahead here and grip the knife from a half. But when you do this, make sure this doesn't go too deep, otherwise you'll hurt yourself. I like to use the first method because it gives me more control with a knife, but you can use either one. Now, when you're actually cutting something, we have to round our fingers like this and the thumb also goes inside. You just support the fingers, you support the knife with your knuckles, and then it just keeps going in in a locking motion like this. Make sure never to put your fingers like this when you are cutting something because you will definitely injure yourself. Always make sure to keep it rounded. It keeps your handle is safe. Perfect. Let's actually learn different types of French cuts. 6. Knife Skills: French Cuts for Carrots : In this lesson, I'm going to show you different types of knife cuts, and also show you how I set up the knife station, and how I do these cuts. So the first thing, what I'm going to do is show you the setup. So in this setup, what I like doing is keeping two bowls. The first bowl is any kitchen scrap we have, so I'll put this in the compost bin. The second one is for any vegetable scraps we have, which we can use. So you can use for stock or making juice or any soup as well. The next one is how we set up our chopping board. So when we place the chopping board, make sure to put either a mat under it, or you can even put a wet towel. Just spread out the wet towel so that the chopping board doesn't move. Because when we cut with a knife, because the knife is quite sharp, we don't want the board to move, otherwise you injure your hand. So make sure to do this. Secondly, I always make sure that I have all my equipment [inaudible] as well as two towels here. So the first towel is just to wipe the knife. The second one is to wipe a chopping board. You can also take another towel which you can put on your apron totally up to you. So the first vegetable we'll be cutting today is a carrot. Whenever we peel a carrot, makes sure to do it away from you, and not towards you. Just to prevent getting any cuts on your hand. [NOISE] Just take a peeler [NOISE] and away from you. Really easy. [NOISE] Perfect. So you want to make sure that everything is clean. [NOISE] Take all this crap, but it in a bowl [NOISE]. The first cut we'll do is called a batonet. Now this is a slightly longer stick. This is really nice if you want to steam it or use it in a dip, so you can eat it raw as well. So let's learn how to do it. So first thing you do is you've cut [NOISE] the top and the bottom. So whenever we cut anything, our knife, if it's sharp, the job will be really easy. But if it's blunt, it'll be really hard, so make sure knife is really sharp. Cut the carrot in two [NOISE] and what I'll do is, I'll just cut one edge [NOISE], so this becomes flat. Now, this really helps us cut any vegetable. So always make sure you cut one edge so it becomes flat, so it doesn't roll it on when we're cutting it. Make sure you cut the [NOISE] other edges as well [NOISE]. So we want to just cut it into a rectangle [NOISE], perfect. So you see how it's got this nice edges, that's perfect. So I'm going to cut above [NOISE] this thickness. So you see that thickness? That's really good for the batonet [NOISE]. Perfect [NOISE]. Just cut it into a half. This, you can either cut into threes or you can cut it into twos as well. I'll just cut into [NOISE] half as well. Cut this one into [NOISE] half, and this one as well [NOISE]. So if you want, you can actually stack them up and just cut it in one go. But initially I just liked doing it individually because I want you to get it right. So let's have a look at this size. You see that size? Squared nice. It's really good [NOISE]. Now you can eat this row with any dip. You can even steam it. You can even use it in salads if you want. But I actually like using this as a base to cut a medium dice. When you want to cut to a medium dice what you do [NOISE], just take like three of them and basically [NOISE] cut it like this [NOISE]. Perfect. So you see, that's a medium dice. So try to make sure that they're fairly equal in size, because that's really a good knife skills. These are really good if you want to use in soups, you want to stir-fry, just use it in any sauces as well. These are really nice. So set this aside. Now, we'll move on to a cut which is called paysanne. Now this is a really nice cut. It looks really beautiful. I actually quite like it. Now there are two ways to do this. Either you can just do it like this, [NOISE] like this shape, or you can even cut this into a half [NOISE] and then cut it like that [NOISE]. I actually quite like this. It looks so beautiful. This can be used for any soups, sauces as well. If you're making any stews as well, you can use this. Or you can even use this in a salad or in a garnish as well. This is done. Now let's move on to the next one. Set that aside. So now I've peel another carrot and I'll show you a julienne cut, which is a styling more advanced cut. [NOISE] So I'll just peel the carrot [NOISE]. When you do these cuts at home [NOISE] just make sure to do it as slowly as possible, because you want to get it really nice and exact. [NOISE] Don't try to speed the process. [NOISE] So cut the bottom and the top [NOISE]. Perfect. I'll cut this into half again [NOISE]. Now what I'm going to do is [NOISE] cut the edges like I did, put it flat on the surface [NOISE] and make it into a cube again. With julienne, it's basically a French cut, [NOISE] which is called a matchstick. When we cut a matchstick, you want to make sure that I cut it very thin when we cut through it. Let's have a look. You see that thickness [NOISE]. Perfect. Do it slowly initially [NOISE]. You want to get it fairly nice and thin. [NOISE] Let's have a look. You see that thickness, see how thin that is. Compare this to the batonet we had. This is quite thin. Now when you want to cut julienne, I would say when you start initially just take one and just go really slow with it [NOISE], try to get a nice and thin cut [NOISE], just like that. So you see how thin these are? You can even go thinner than this, but this is quite nice. So you can use this for [inaudible] rice, for just garnishing as well. Now, I'll show you even thinner. If I want to go even thinner than this, so I would go in even more [NOISE] finer. You see how that's even smaller than that [NOISE]. It's even thinner. Perfect. You can do either one, completely fine [NOISE]. If you want you can stack them up. If you want to do it faster [NOISE] just stack them up and [NOISE] you can even go faster than that. Perfect. So that's my julienne cut [NOISE]. So the next one is called brunoise. Brunoise is basically a fine dice. When [NOISE] you cut brunoise, first you need to go julienne and then cut a really fine dice with the julienne. I'll just take maybe four or five of these, and I'll show it to you how it's done. So just stack them up like that. Just go really slowly with it initially, and then you can go faster if you like. [NOISE] Perfect. Let's have a look at this. You see how fine that is? These are really good if you want to use for garnishing. In French cooking, we usually use them just at the end when we make a soup. We just put this garnish it at the end. Also, if you're making any meat filling say for example, in a dumpling or something, you can use this. It looks really nice and it actually shows the skill of the chef. After this, I'll show you a slightly more easier version of this dice. This is really small dice. I'll show you a slightly bigger dice than this. The next dice before I start, I just clean [NOISE] my chopping board a little bit. Perfect. Clean my knife as well. Then again, we do the same thing. You want to cut the edges off, such as you can put it and it's safer to cut. [NOISE] Perfect. Again, perfect. That's ready. Now when I cut the slice, I'll make sure that it's not too thin, but it's not too thick either. Somewhere in the middle of a batonnet and a julienne. Something like that. You see that thickness, something like that. Now when you practice, you'll be able to know and you'll be able to get more consistency with your thickness as well. But it just takes practice. Just do it slowly initially and then you can increase your speed later. Perfect. Now again, I'm going to cut the same motion as I got the julienne, but I'll make sure that I don't get it as thin. Just go slow and keep it consistent. Perfect. [NOISE] You see that? That's slightly bigger than our julienne. This is something you can approach as well if you're just starting off. This is also a really nice cut. Let's have a look at the difference as well. You see the julienne, you see the difference between both. You see the thickness. This is slightly bigger and this is thinner than that. Perfect. Now, let's cut a dice with this as well. The same method, we just stacked them together. We've got a slightly more bigger dice this time. [NOISE] Perfect. You see that? It's like old squares, and this is a slightly bigger dice. This is also really good for soups, if you're making a brunoise or if you're making any sauces. I really like cutting this dice. This is bigger than our previous ones, but smaller than our medium dice, which we got before. Perfect. Our next cut is called a rondelle. That basically just means a round. You just take a peeled carrot like that. This time you don't need to cut the sides. Because we actually want the circle and we cut it. Such as, be really gentle with the carrot because it's going to move, so make sure to grip it tightly and just cut these rounds. The thickness, you can keep it as thick as you want or as thin as you want, depending on how you want to use it. You see how nice that looks like if you want to use that in a salad, as a garnish as well, you can even put it in soups. I just really like the shape of this. Perfect. It's quite easy to cut it as well. The final one is called a mirepoix. Let's show that as well. I'm going to use another carrot. [NOISE] Perfect. Set this aside. [NOISE] The mirepoix is actually the easiest one because we just use them in stocks. This is called a rough cut. There's no definition of how big this should be. You can keep it as big as possible, but you don't want to keep it small because since you are cooking the stock for longer time, you want the cut to be quite big. I'm just going to cut this in half. Either you can just cut this in half as well or you can just keep it whole. It's totally up to you how you want to do this. You can cut this in half and just keep it like this [NOISE] to stocks of these big pieces, and you want to keep it big. This is a mirepoix. If you want, you can also cut it like this if you want. [NOISE] Something like this. You can even keep it this size. Completely depends on how long you're going to stock. If you're making a beef stock which you're going to cook for maybe eight hours, you can keep it this size, if you're making a chicken stock, you can keep it this size. It completely depends on how long you going to cook it. Perfect. That's all our cuts. Let's revise and let's have a look at it again. Let's revise all the cuts we learned today. The first one was a batonnet. This is a thicker cut. Really nice if you are a beginner just to start off using the knife, I would suggest that off with this one. The second one is a dice. This is a larger dice which we made from our batonnet. This is also really nice for soups, for sauces as well. The third one was biasel. This is a nice cut because it looks really beautiful. I really like using this in garnishes, in salads as well. You can also use this in soups. The fourth one was a julienne. Julienne is one of the most of trickiest cut to do. This really shows the skill of the chef. This is quite thin and it's like a matchstick. Try to practice this because this will really help you improve your knife skill. The fifth one was brunoise, which is a rarely fine dice, which we get from our julienne. The sixth one we did was a slightly bigger version of a julienne because this one is more approachable when you're starting off. From this we did our medium dice. This is as quite nice if you are using in making sauces as well as soups. The next one we did was a rondelle This is also a beautiful cut. You can use in salads, you can also use in soups and sauces. The last one we did is called a mirepoix. Mirepoix is one of the most easiest cuts because it's a rough cut and we use this and stocks. It's quite thick just like that. I hope you enjoyed this lesson and I hope you practice this at home as well. Make sure to keep it really slow initially, and then you can as you practice, increase your speed. Let's move on to the next one now where I'll show you how to cut eschalots and onions. 7. Knife Skills: French Cuts for Onion and Eschallots: The second vegetable will be learning is onion and shallots. Now, when you've got an onion or a shallot, you have to make sure that you keep the base. It keeps everything together and you just cut this side. You always keep this side of the onion. It just keeps everything together, and it's easy to cut. Perfect. Cut this in half and just remove the skin. You can do this by hand, or you can also use a paring knife to do this. I prefer to use a paring knife because that's a more professional way of doing it. Basically, you just grab the skin, and then you drag it. [NOISE] It should just come really easily to just come off. Hold it from the corner and drag it like that. Perfect. Put the skin in your scrap board. Similarly, the other one as far from the corner and just drag it like that. You can also do it by hand if you want. If you find that easier, there is nothing wrong to do it like this. If you don't feel comfortable with the knife, just do it like this. First cut we'll be learning is a really simple cut, is going to slice it really thinly. For that, what we'll do is we'll just take off the top of it because we don't actually want it to stay together in this case. We just want to get as thin as possible. [NOISE] You see how my motion is slightly different. I'm trying to drag it like that instead of going like this. Because I find that you get a more thinner cut when you do this. You see that. This is really nice for that stuff thing. I really like this for maybe if you want to make a sauce or something, if you want to saute onions, because these are quiet thin so they'll caramelize really easily. Just set this aside. The next one you can do is just a round. You just cut this into half and then you can just take it off like that. You get this flower shape. You can also use this in a stir-fry. It looks really nice. Let's take it off. So you see that, it's really easy cut to do. The third one we're going to do is a dice. Now for a dice, we want to keep the head on. We don't want to take it off because it holds it together. Now, this dice is not a very fine dice, I'm just going to do a medium dice. What you do is you just go through it and you drag it. It just goes through the onion. Just like that. You see, I'm not keeping it too thin. I've got it quite thick. Now what we do is we just keep it from the center. Just hold the top. Your hand shouldn't be here. Otherwise, you'd cut your hand. You don't want to injure your hand. Just hold from the top and just drag it below like that. You don't want to drag it all the way. You just want to go just till the end of it. Do it again from the top. Perfect. You see, you've got one cut like that and two cuts horizontally. Now to dice it, I'm just going to do it just check this. This is more of a medium dice. Very good if you're going to say, make a sauce, or if you're making a soup as well, this is really nice to use in that case. Now the next one we're going to do is a brunoise, which is a more finer dice, which be used in soups as well so just set this aside. For a brunoise we're going to cut it more thinner than we did for the medium dice. The spaces between the cuts will be lesser because we want the thickness, and the size to be quite small. You see I'm still dragging it, but at a slightly lesser distance. Do it slowly initially, you don't need to do it very fast. After you've got this, I'm going to go again horizontally and this time I'm going to do it thrice instead of two times, so two and another one. Don't worry, if some amount of onion comes out. Don't worry about it. Just keep it aside. Now to cut it. Go through already thinly less spaces again, because we want the dice to be quite small. Perfect. The ends, you can take it off. You see the dice. That looks so beautiful. You see how small that is? Whenever we cut through onions, we never cut through them again because that just takes out all the juices and water out of it. Make sure to try to do it in one go. But if you want to do it again, what you do is you just rock it around it in this motion. Just like that. But I wouldn't advise it because the onions lose a lot of water and you don't want to lose that. You want to keep that inside. Perfect. Just set this aside. Now, next, I'll show you how to cut the shallot. Before we cut the shallot, I want to make sure that I clean my workspace so that I can work purely neatly. Take all your onion off cuts and always make a habit of clean as you go so your workstation remains really nice and tidy. With the shallot as well, we follow the same principles. We keep the head because that holds it together. We cut off the tail. We cut it in half and then we use the paring knife to take the skin away. This should come off more easily because it's smaller. Perfect. You can also do it with hand if you like. Just use your nail and you can take it off like that. Perfect. With the shallot, if you want to cut rings, what you do is you start from here. You've got small rings like that. Keep it as thin as possible. This is really nice if you want to fry them. In Asian cooking, we use these rings to fry them. Also if you want to saute them because they are already thin, so caramelize really nicely, just like the onions. Perfect. This aside. The next one, again, is our petals. Similar to the onions we did, you can just take out the petals like that. Really good for sauteing as well. Keep this aside. Then I'm going to show you the next cut, which is basically a frying brunoise. What we do is we just take out the petals from the shallot. Individually, you take out all the petals and then you got Julienne with this. What you do is you start flattening this out like that, you can even cut it in half if you like, and try to cut it as thin as possible in a line like that. [NOISE] You see how thin that is, something like that. Get it aside and I'll do the same for the rest as well. This one is really good for like salad dressings and stuff when you've got the brunoise of this. Such a stack them together. You don't have to be exactly precise, but just try to make it as stacked together as possible. Then similar to the other one we did for carrots. [NOISE] Perfect. You see that? That's a clearly fine dice of shallots. This is what we do in fine dining restaurants. Even in Michelin star restaurant, this is the cut we use for our salad dressings and this is fine tuners. You see that? How fine that is. It's beautiful. You've got a Julienne and you've got a brunoise. The final one we're going to learn is a slightly bigger dice. Similar to the onion, just do it like that. [NOISE] Just slice it once and keep it slightly bigger. Just like that. That's a big dice. This is really nice if you want to stir fry it. This is quite nice in that. Let's go over all the cuts we discuss in this lesson. The first one was slice. This is fairly good for sauteing, really good for caramelized onion as well. The next one is petals. This is really nice. If you want to make a skewer, even in salads, you can saute this as well. I really like this cut. The next one is our medium dice. This is really good if you want to use in sauces, if you just want to reduce it down to sauteed and make sauces with it. The next one we go with the fine dice. Fine dice is also really nice, if you want to make a risotto or you can just saute this with risotto. We can also use this in soups as well. These are cuts for our onion and for our shallot, we have the slice cut which you can fry as well. The next one was our petals, which was similar to the onion petals. These are also really nice for making a vegetable salad. You can sort this as well. After that we learned how to make Julienne of shallots and also preneurs of eschalots. These are slightly more advanced cuts which you can practice and improve your knife skill. The final one we learned was medium dice. This is also really nice if you want to just reduce down and sauces as well as soups. These are our cuts for onion and shallot. Practicing this is like a base in any kitchen when you work as a chef, because onion is actually one of those ingredients which is used in almost all recipes. I hope you could learn a lot from this lesson and I'm sure you practice practice this and learn these cuts as well. After this, we're going to move on to our next vegetable, which is a potato. 8. Knife Skills: French Cuts for Potato, Leeks and Garlic: In this lesson, I'll show you how to cut potatoes, mince garlic, and also cut leeks. Let's start with the potatoes first. I'm just going to peel it. With potatoes, you can do a lot of different cuts. I'll just show you the most common ones. So after you've peeled it, you just get rid of all the scraps. The first cut we'll do is super easy. If I'm going to make roast potatoes, we'll be using this cut. What we do is we just basically cut it in half. Now you can cut it in half or you can cut it in four pieces as well. Always the flat side goes on the base, so it doesn't move, like this. So this is really good for roast potatoes, this cut. Next one is wedges. Wedges you can just cut it like this and then you can also just cut it into half like that. This one is wedges. If you want to just fry it or even roast it, this is also quite good. Perfect. Next one, we'll learn how to do a batonnet, which is a slightly more advanced cut. For our batonnet, just peel the potato. Cut the edge. You want to make this into a rectangle shape just like we did with our carrots, and potatoes are quite easy to cut because they have no resistance as such. Just goes really smoothly. Perfect. Just level the surface. You get this cube shape like that. Perfect. Now, I'll just cut it like that. Something like that thickness is good. If you have bigger potatoes, it's even better, the potato I was using wasn't that big in size and just cut it like this. You get this batonnet size, that thickness. Perfect. Now I cut these as well. You can even go thinner if you want. If you want to do it like a julienne, what I would do is I would just cut this thinner something like that. You see that thickness? That's really good for julienne. To cut the julienne, same thing we did with the carrots. Perfect, and just keep it thin and that's a julienne. These are also really good for like frying or if you want to use them in salads as well. Keep this aside and then I'll show you how to cut a brunoise as well. This is just to practice your knife skills. You probably won't be using these cuts that much with potatoes. But just to practice it. Perfect. After cutting julienne, just keep it small size. You see that dice, let me show you again. See how they're like equal-size cubes. They are really nice. You see them? That's all equal and really small. This is just to practice your skill. Honestly I don't think you really use these cuts that much with potato. But compared to carrots, cutting a potato is easier. I would recommend just start with a potato. Set this aside. I'm going to show you how to cut a medium dice with the batonnet we got. Just take maybe four of them and just keep it slightly larger in size. Perfect. That is our medium dice. You see how they're accurately equal in shape and they're these small cubes, that is what you want. Now these are really good if you wanted to roast them or even fry them. They look really cool and in a plated dish. Perfect. Now let's move on to learn how to cut our garlic and leeks. To cut our leeks, we just get rid of the top and the bottom part of it and just cut this in half. And what I want to do is cut this in half as well. Because I want to get rid of the outer skin. Maybe two of the outer skin. Perfect. And here as well. Leek are actually really easy to cut if you want to practice like julienne and on leeks. It's one of the most nicest one to practice julienne. The first cut will do is for our mirepoix, which be used in stock. Most easiest one. It's just a rough cut. You want to keep it around that size. If you want to use it in a stock. Perfect. Just set this aside. Next one we'll do is a medium dice. To do a medium dice, what you can do is you can actually find out these leaves so they become really easy to cut. Maybe just take about 5-6 of them at one time and just put it flat on the surface and all you need to do is go like that. Just like that. Turn it around and you want to keep it slightly bigger. So that is our median dice. Super easy to cut. Make sure that you're not forgetting as well. Perfect. You see that. It's really good if you want to saute them and just reducing caramelized them as well. So set this aside. Now, we learn how to cut our julienne. To cut julienne just take maybe 3-4 leaves and just spread them out flat like that. This gets quite easy. Now if you want, you can cut them a little bit more smaller as well. Just get rid of that. That fix it easier to cut. Now to practice you want to keep it as thin as possible. See how easy that is to cut. Yet these nice julienne cut like that, just like a matchstick. I find that leeks are the most easiest to cut when you want a julienne. You can practice this as well. Now after you've cut the julienne, I'm going to set them aside and the rest I'll just cut into a brunoise. Same motion again. Perfect. You see, that's really small dice. Really good for our soups. As far as any fillings you make, it's really nice to just fold them in. It looks really delicate, so it cooks really fast. The next cut we learn is a more triangle cut. This is just for decoration. If you want to do it, just cut this in half and what you do is you just cut it just like that so into a side of a triangle shape. It looks quite nice. If you want to sort it, it just looks quite beautiful in a dish. Set this aside as well and after this, we're going to learn how to mince our garlic. I've just got about three bulbs of garlic here, just separate them. Then you want to take garlic out of the skin. What I like doing is cutting the head, and what you do is you just press it. Lightly bash it, so the skin should just separate on its own, and it should come off really easily without actually destroying the garlic. That looks good. Now, with garlic, there are a lot of ways you can cut it. It depends on what you're using it for. The first one, I'll just show you, is you just slice it really thinly just like that. This is good if you want to maybe make up oil infusion. If you're using in pasta sauces or something like that, you can just use it. Perfect. Set this aside. The next one we can do is similar to this, but we'd actually be fine chopping it a little bit. Just cut it again similarly. Perfect. Once you get these ones, what you do is you just cut it thinly, just like a julienne. Just like that. Set this aside as well and cut this as well. Now, you can just stack them together and fine dice it in a way. [NOISE] Perfect. You see, that is like a brunoise dice. Set this aside as well. The next one we will do is called mincing garlic. I'll show you how to do that. When we mince the garlic, you want to make sure that you fine chop the garlic a little bit. [NOISE] Same for that one as well. Perfect. Now, what you do is, you go in a rocking motion when you do this, so something like this. [NOISE] You see how my hand is moving. I have a little bit of pressure here, but this part of the hand is really loose. You just basically rocking it like that. [NOISE] This is a way to fine dicer. After you've done that, what we do is [NOISE] we just take our knife, take the heel of the knife and press it down. Squeeze it slightly, just like that. That is mincing it. [NOISE] Just keep that motion. You can already see that the garlic is started to release its juices. [NOISE] Again, the rocking motion again, [NOISE] and then pressing motion like that. Press the heel of the knife [NOISE] just like that. [NOISE] That is going to mince the garlic. [NOISE] This is just for practice. It's not like you can use a garlic mincer, so you don't really need to mince it like this, but it's just to practice your knife skills. [NOISE] I know some people even put some salt in it when they're mincing it. It just makes it easier, so just like that [NOISE] You can see all the juices of the garlic coming on, and you get these mince. Let's go through all the cuts we did with the potato leeks and garlic. The first cut we did was our roast potato cut, which basically cut it in one-half, and then we cut it into quarters. The second one was our wedges. This is basically to fry or to roast as well. The third one we did was a batonnet. These are quite like some big pieces, big cuts. If you do a bigger potato, you can use the same shape to do French fries as well. Because my potato was a little bit smaller, so these are small. But if you use a bigger one, just the same cut for French fries. The next one we did was medium dice. It's just your batonnet, which you've cut into squares. After that, we learned how to do a julienne. Basically, we cut the potato quite thin and then just cut it really tenderly into these matte sticks. After that, we cut this into a brunoise. This also quite a beautiful cut, looks really nice equal squares. After that, we moved onto leeks. This was our mirepoix, which goes in stock or sauces or soups. After that, we learn how to cut these oblique cuts, which also look quite nice for sorting. Then we learn how to do a medium dice. This one as well you can use for sorting, or in eggs or fried rice. After that, we learn how to do a julienne or flakes. It's really beautiful, these matte sticks. Then you got a brunoise. Just to check your skill, just to improve your knife skills as well. After that, we moved onto garlic, and we cut these rings. It's really thin, really good if you want to make an oil infusion. After that, we cut this into small pieces and then chopped it finally into a brunoise. Then we cut the brunoise. We basically minced it into a garlic paste. This lesson basically covers how you can improve your knife skills by practicing these different cuts. Now you might not use these cuts in your dishes, but I would recommend just to practice it, so you get more control over your knife. This ends our knife skills lesson. I'm pretty sure you would have learned a lot of different concepts. This will help you improve your knife skills because that is the basis of becoming a good chef. 9. Vegetable Stock: Preparing The Ingredients: [NOISE] In this lesson, we will learn how to make a vegetable stock. What is a vegetable stock exactly? It is basically reduction of vegetable scraps, herbs, and ******. We basically keep cooking this in water and extract all the flavor and nutrition from them. It's a great way to use vegetable scraps or any oil vegetables you can't eat row. You just basically peel them, or just cut them and you reduce it down in water. In fine dining restaurants, we always use stocks for cooking stew soups or sauces even for cooking rice, because it adds this complex flavor and makes the dishes taste really nice. Also, it has a lot of flavor, nutrition, and it's a really great substitute for chicken stock. Some tips when you make the stock is never to boil the stock vigorously because if we boil the stock, sometimes you get really off-flavors and it also makes it really cloudy. Make sure it's a rolling boil and not a vigorous boil. The second tip I can give you is to always season the stock at the end, because if you season it at the beginning and we're reducing the liquid, sometimes the liquid gets too salty and then we actually cannot reduce the salt, so always season at the end. The third one is to always skim the stock, especially at the beginning when you're making the stock to remove all the impurities from the top. Because sometimes if you don't do it, the stock doesn't taste that clean. We want to make a really clean stock, so keep skimming it. Let's begin by learning how to make this beautiful stock. Vegetarian stock is really nice to learn because if you are vegan or if you're vegetarian, you can't actually use any meat when you make stock. This is a really good base to make just for flavor and also to use in different soups, as well as if you're making risottos or any sauces you're making. It's really nice to know how to make this. I'm going to be making a more Western-style stock today, but you can also adapt it based on any sort soups you're making. You can add lemongrass or coriander seeds. It's totally up to you how you want to adapt the recipe. Before we start making the stock, let's have a look at the ingredients. I'm going to be using carrots for the sweetness, onions for the flavor, as well as a little bit of leeks, celery, and mushrooms for the umami flavor. For the aromatics today, we have some parsley stems, thyme, peppercorn, garlic, and bay leaf; just a couple of bay leaves. With aromatics, you can experiment a lot. You can add different coriander seeds, you can even add coffee lime leaves. It's totally up to you what you want to adapt the stock towards. Now, when we make vegetarian stock, there are basically two methods to make it. The first method is that we cut the vegetables and we sort it with oil, and then we add the water. Now, you can make it like that as well. But I don't like making it like that because sometimes the oil makes the stock really cloudy. What we're going to do is we're going to prepare the vegetables, cut the vegetables and just put it in cold water and start cooking that. Let's begin by preparing our vegetables. The first one, let's prepare the onion. What I like doing is just removing the tail [NOISE] and the head as well [NOISE] and just cutting it in half. Now, if you want, you can keep the skin on. That's completely fine. Just give some more darker color to the stock, so I'm just going to leave it on. Just set this aside. These carrots are a little bit old, that's why I'm peeling them. But if your carrots are really fresh, you don't even need to peel them when you make the stock. [NOISE] I know some people who even use the peels in their stock. That's completely fine as well. This is a good excuse to use any old vegetables you have, which are edible, but you can't actually cook them. It's really nice, very used them as well. [NOISE] Perfect. Set this aside. Now, we're going to cut the carrots in a miracle that's basically just these big cuts. [NOISE] Perfect. You want them to be about this size because they are going to be cooking for like 1, 2 hours, so you want to keep it bigger in size. Perfect. With the mushrooms, we'd just be keeping it whole and not removing the stems because the stems also have a lot of flavor. Perfect. The next one is celery. Whenever we use celery, make sure to wash it nicely from here, because there is sometimes a little mad here. Perfect. I've already washed this. Now, this one as well, we just cut it similar size to our carrots, which is this size. This big. [NOISE] Perfect. That's great. Now all our veggies are ready. As you've seen, I've just rough cut the vegetables because I'm making a stock. That is why you want to keep your vegetables a little bit bigger because they are going to be cooking longer. Perfect. I'm just going to put this in the pot and I'm going to put the aromatics as well and cover it with cold water. 10. Vegetable Stock- Cooking The Stock: To make this stock I'm going to be using a 3.5 liter Dutch oven, so this is quite dark and quite big as well. If you're using a stock pot, make sure that it's big in size and that you can at least put about 2-2.5 liters of water. Perfect. Just put all the veggies in. [NOISE] Put the aromatics in as well. [NOISE] I'm just going to cover this with cold water. [NOISE] Perfect. Let's put this on heat and start cooking it. I'm going to put the gas on the highest heat possible because I want this to come up to a boil. [NOISE] Also when I make the stock I always make sure that I have a needle and a bowl so that if there's any impurities coming on the top, I can skim it off. Now what I'm going to do is just press all the mushrooms down a little bit. Press the aromatics down as well so that they completely submerge. Once the stock comes up to a boil, you will start seeing some amount of impurities on the top. That's really nice and we start skimming that just to make a peanut stock. The first step is to get this stock to a boil, and then we'll reduce the heat slightly, and then we want a rolling boil, not a really vigorous boil. I'll show you when this comes to that stage, should take anywhere between 10 or 15 minutes. When it comes to a boil I'll show you how it looks like. [NOISE] It's been about 15 minutes and now you can see that it started to boil really vigorously. What we'll do is we'll lower the heat to a medium-low, and we just want a rolling boil. We don't want such an aggressive boil. Next, we want to extract the suite of flavors in our vegetables. If we do the early aggressive boil, sometimes it can get a little bit bitter. That is why we want a slight more gentle boil. Just lower it to medium-low. [NOISE] You see how that's boiling, that is perfect. It's not vigorous, but it's still like a rolling boil. That is surely good to extract good flavors out of the vegetables. Now what I'll do is I'll set a timer for 30 minutes and then I'll have a look and I'll skim the top as well and I'll show you how this looks like as far. Let's have a look at this after 30 minutes. Our stock has been cooking for about 30 minutes now. It looks really nice and it smells really nice as well. Let's skim this stock on the top. If you see any sort, just want to get rid of that just to make it cleaner. I don't see a lot in this compared to if I make a chicken stock. But there is still little bit, if you see, just get rid of that. Usually just around the corners is where all the dirt is. I just want to press it really gently. Just get as much as I can. Perfect. That looks good. This stock is really clean. It looks very nice. If you see the color of the stock, it's getting this really nice golden brown color. It looks really beautiful, that's because of the onion skins as well as the mushrooms. I'm going to cook this for maybe another one hour, so total of 1.5 hours. I'll show you how it looks like after one hour now. Keep it at a rolling boil like this, nothing more than that. Our stock has been cooking for one one now, so a total of one hour 30 minutes. You can see it's reduced a little bit less than half. That's perfect. I actually want to get about one liter from this batch. I think that looks really good. Also, I want to check the color and I want to show it to you. You see that color? That is a beautiful dark golden color. That is exactly what I'm looking for. That has a lot of umami, it's because of the mushrooms and all the vegetables we put. Now what I'm going to do is, [NOISE] I've just got a strainer and a bowl. I'm going to strain liquid in the bowl. Switch off the gas [NOISE] and get a [inaudible] because the handles are quite hot. Let's strain the stock. [NOISE] Just get as much as you can. [NOISE] That's nice, so delicious. Let's have a look at the color of that stock. [NOISE] That looks really beautiful. [NOISE] That is a really beautiful stock. You notice we haven't seasoned the stock yet and that is because what happens is that if we season the stock before, it tends to get really salty when you're reducing it. As a rule, I always season the stock right at the end so that I can actually know how much salt I'm putting and it doesn't get too salty. Let's season the stock with a little bit of salt, and you can also add a little bit of black pepper or white pepper, anything you like. Just put a pinch of salt in it and then let's paste the stock. [NOISE] Mix it together. Let's finally taste the stock [NOISE]. That needs just a little bit more salt. Mix it together. [NOISE] Perfect. Going to taste it again. That taste soo delicious. I can actually taste so much umami from the mushrooms as well as from the vegetables we used. When it comes to storing the stock, what you can do is you can put it in the fridge for up to 3-4 days, or you can actually even freeze it for like three months. So whenever you want to use it, you just put it on a pot from the frozen one and you can just defrost it like that. Totally up to you how you want to consume it. I hope you like this lesson and never throw away vegetables that are getting spoiled, you can always use them to make stock like this. 11. Fried Egg: French Style Fried Egg: In this section of the class, we'll be learning how to cook eggs. Now, eggs are one of my favorite things to make at home, even in the restaurant as well. They're really easy to cook, but they're usually hard to cook really well, because they're so simple, you know, if they're undercooked or overcooked. We'll be learning different techniques of cooking boiled eggs, fried eggs, as well as two different types of omelets as well. You'll be learning a lot of different techniques in this lesson and I'm really excited to begin. In this lesson, we'll be learning how to make fried eggs. I'll be showing you two ways to make it. The first one is a French technique, which we usually make in fine dining restaurants, and the second one is a more of an Asian technique of doing it. Making a fried egg might seem easy, but it's tricky to get a nice fried egg. I'll show you the tools you'll need. Get a good non-stick pan, because it doesn't stick to it and it cooks evenly. You can also use a galvanized steel if you want, but I prefer using a non-stick. Secondly, I've got butter and I've got some vegetable oil. The oil I'm going to be using in the Asian style egg, and butter is in the French style eggs. [NOISE] Also, these are free range eggs, so make sure that you use good quality eggs which are fresh because they'll taste better and they'll be more softer as well. Also get like these two plates, to put the egg in after it's cooked. Let's begin cooking the egg, so I can show you the technique. To cook a French-style egg, I'm going to put the gas on really low flame. [NOISE] I'm going to put some butter on it just let it melt. [NOISE] Just about that much. It's about one teaspoon. You can also put less if you want, but usually, in French cooking, we tend to use a lot of butter. Let it melt gently so that it coats the pan and gives a nice texture to the egg. [NOISE] Once it starts to coat the pan, you'll see the butter will slightly start to sizzle. That's when we put the egg and we lower the heat. I can see that the butter has started to sizzle slightly. Now what I'll do is I'll lower the heat, to like really low. Because you want to cook it reality gently. You don't want any color on the egg and crack the egg in the butter. Perfect. After you crack the egg and the butter is still slightly sizzling. And you'll see the sides of the white getting set. You'll just cover it with a lid. You want to basically cook it with the steam of the lid so that the white sets really gently and the egg yolk still remains really nice. This can take anywhere between 20-30 seconds. Let's have a look at this after maybe 10 -15 seconds to check how it looks like and make sure the heat is really low. It's been about 15 seconds. Let's have a look at the egg. You see how nicely it's set? Surely right, very beautiful. I can see that this needs to set just a little bit more to the right. I'll give it about 10 seconds more and then we'll take it off the heat. It's been about 10 seconds and that's perfect. If you see, you can touch the white and it should be nicely set and really delicate and the yolk as well, shouldn't be cooked at all. This is ready to put on a plate. Now if you want, you can season it on the pan or you can season it on the plate. Let's take it off the gas. Gently, slide it on your plate. I'm going to season this with a little bit of salt and a little bit of pepper. Season it with a little bit of sea salt on top, just gentle a bit, not too much. If you want, you can use white pepper, you can also use black pepper. [NOISE] Put a tiny bit of black pepper on it. Not too much, just a little bit. Perfect. [NOISE] When you look at the egg, you can see that the white is really delicate, really soft and there isn't any color at the bottom of the egg. It's still really gentle. You see how that's still white. So that's a typical French egg. The yolk, let's cut through it. You see how the eggs that is still really delicate. This is perfect French egg. I actually like eating this. So if you cook a fried egg without covering the egg, what happens is sometimes the sides overcook. They become really crispy and if you'd like that, that's good. But this method of cooking the egg is also really nice. I'm going to taste this and see how it tastes like. That is so delicious. I really like cooking the egg like this. It just gives it such a nice flavor of the butter and retains the texture of the egg so well. Let's learn the second style of the egg, which is a more Asian style of fried egg. 12. Fried Egg: Asian Style Fried Egg: To make our second fried egg, which is basically an Asian style fried egg, we'll be using the exact opposite method of the French style. We'll be cooking at a really high heat and actually a lot of oil. Let's put [NOISE] the heat at the highest possible. What I'm going to do is put about two tablespoons of oil. Just about that much. I know this looks like a lot of oil, but if you put less oil, the egg actually absorbs more, so it's better to put more oil. We're also going to base the egg with the spoon, so it's always good to have more. Traditionally, this is actually made on a wok, but we just got to make it in a non-stick pan. While the oil is heating, I'm just going to crack the egg in a bowl so that it'll be easier to pour it and basically it won't splash on you. [NOISE] Set the egg aside. Let's see. The oil needs to be just a little bit more hot. But the oil shouldn't smoke, so don't make it too hot as well. Once this feels a little bit high, it's quite hot now. What I'm going to do is just going to hold the pan with my right hand, pour the egg just in the center [NOISE] just like that. You see, you want it to bubble like that. What you do is you just get a spoon and you pour it over the egg to get these bubbles on the side. The cooking time for this egg shouldn't be more than 30 seconds. You don't want to cook too much because you don't want to sever the yolk. You see how that's filling these bubbles at the top? Beautiful. Just keep basting it until it get like this. Crisper is more like that. Perfect. The egg is ready. I'm just going to put it on a plate and just switch off the gas. You're already [inaudible]. Just take the egg with a spatula. Just a pour the rest of the oil, so the oil stays behind and you don't have a lot of oil on the egg. Make sure you pour it out and you put the egg on the plate. See how this has got this nice sort of blisters and it's got a really nice color on the bottom. Nice caramelization. I'm just going to season it a little bit of salt. Just a pinch of salt. You can also put pepper if you want. I'm just going to check. I'm just going to show you the texture of the yolk. That is so jammy, that's beautiful and the skin of the egg, the whites, should be super crispy. Can you hear that crispiness? Hello, beautiful. This goes really good if you're making fried rice or if you're making any Asian dishes, you can put that on top and it gives a really nice crispy texture. Let's taste this. That is really nice. It's got a really nice crispiness to it and compliments any Asian dish you make really well. This is our second method of making fried egg. You can make anything you like. Personally, if I'm making Western dishes, I tend to make the first one, but if I want to make a fried rice or any other Asian dishes, I make the second one. 13. Boiled Egg: Preparing and Boiling the Egg: Let's learn how to make boiled eggs. There are a few techniques to make boiled eggs. The first one is that you take cold water in a pot and then basically put the eggs and get them to temperature. Now I actually don't like doing that because the eggs don't cook evenly. I like starting from hot water, putting the eggs in and actually putting a lid on so that it cooks more evenly. When we cook the eggs today, we're going to make sure that we have a bowl of cold water with ice so that we can directly take it from the water and put it in ice so it stops cooking, also it makes it easier to peel. Make sure you do this. Also, I'm going to be cooking five eggs today. I'll be cooking it for different duration. The first one would be five minutes, the second one would be six minutes, then it'd be eight, 10, and 12. We will see the different textures of the egg and we'll understand. Whichever you like, you can select that one. Let's begin by cooking the eggs. Put the pot on the gas and I'm just going to switch it on medium flame. Also, I have a kettle with hot water. I just pour the hot water. Just cover it up. Perfect. We don't want the water to boil exactly, but it should just be simmering when we put the eggs. Because if you boil the water it doesn't cook nicely, like the white set really fast, so you want to just simmer it slowly. I just want to get this to a boil then I lower the heat even more and I'll put the eggs in. When you see these tiny bubbles coming here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to lower the heat too low because I want the eggs to cook very gently. One-by-one, I'm just going to put the egg inside very gently so it doesn't break, bend a sieve. You can also use your hands to do this, but I prefer using the sieve because it doesn't crack and it just stays nice. Perfect, just picked one more and just add the one. When I put them I'm just going to cover them with a lid and also set my timer. Perfect. You see these bubbles coming up. It's not boiling vigorously, but it's just cooking really evenly, and my heat is at the lowest flame possible. After five minutes, I'm going to take one egg out and put it in the ice bag, that'll be a really soft boiled egg. Just get the led out and take the egg very gently and put it in ice water. [NOISE] Once the egg gets slightly cool, what I'll do is I'll slightly crack it, stir the water seeps in and it gets easier to sort the egg. Our egg has been cooling under 30 seconds now. Before I put the other egg I'll just show you how to do this. [NOISE] Just crack it slightly. You get the set of cracks and the water can go inside it and it gets really easy to peel. Just set this aside and you get the other egg now. After six minutes, let's get our second egg and put it in water. Perfect. Set the lead again. Just put the second egg in the ice water. This one, again, we're going to do the same thing. We set this for 30 seconds and then we'll crack it so that it's easier to peel. It's been eight minutes and let's get the third egg. [NOISE] Now we have two eggs left. The one I'll take out after two minutes, and the other one after four minutes. That's our 10-minute egg and our 12-minute egg. Set this aside. It's been a total of 12 minutes, and let's take out, I'll find the egg. Perfect. Set this aside in the cold water. Perfect. Just crack it. [NOISE] Perfect. All our eggs are done now. I'm just going to let them set for 5, 10 minutes and then I'll start peeling them, and then I'll show you the texture of the egg. Our eggs have been cooling for about 10 minutes now, I'm going to start peeling the eggs. When you peel the eggs make sure to keep using this water, so that the shell comes out really nicely. The softer boiled egg, the harder it will be to deshell it. Just be super gentle with it and then you'll find this skin here. Can you see that skin? Once you see that skin, you can easily take the shell out like that. Just make sure not to disturb the white too much, especially when it comes to the soft boiled egg. Perfect. Once you get the skin it should just come out really easily. Sometimes it's easier to do it, sometimes it comes out in one go, sometimes it's a little bit more trickier to do it. This is a soft one, I can feel it. Perfect. Now what I'll do is before I put it on the plate, I just give it another rinse. If there's any shell which comes out, we don't want any shell and we solve it. Perfect, I set this aside. Repeat the same thing again. [NOISE] I just try to get the skin off, it will just come off really easily. See how easily that is just coming off. The ones which are boiled longer, they are easier to feel. Let's keep going sideways and see how that falls off. Wash it again nicely, so all the shells go away. Perfect, I set this is right. Perfect. That's our final egg. Just wash it. Perfect. Now let's cut this and see how it looks like from the inside. 14. Boiled Egg: Cutting the Egg and Textures: I'm going to cut the eggs and show you the different consistencies of cooking. Let's have a look. Just go in one go, and cut it. This one is a hard-boiled one. Make sure you clean your knife and you've got a hard-boiled, a semi-hard-boiled. Let's cut the next one. That looks so good, that is beautiful. That's actually one of my favorite ones. That's a soft-boiled one. You've got this jammy egg yolk and really soft whites. Just set this aside here. Be super careful with this because it's just going to fall if you're not careful. [NOISE] Clean the board. Let's try to cut this one as well. Very gently, I can see it's very soft. That must be the five-minute one. That's five and then that's six minutes. Because this I can see is even more delicate than that one. Let's cut the last one, perfect. That's unjammy egg. That's the eight-minute one. You've got all the eggs now. I'm just going to arrange it and then explain it to you really nicely. These are our final boiled eggs, and I'm super happy with how they look. Let's go through it over again, so I can revise with you how they look like. This one is our first one. This was about five minutes. What am I looking at here? If I lift it, firstly, it's super delicate. This one is also quite hard to peel as well because it's so delicate. The yolk is completely jammy. This is super nice if you want to use in salads, even if you want to put on top of [inaudible]. I really like using this one. It's really delicate and that's usually tasty as well because I prefer this texture. This one was five minutes. The second one was six minutes. Now, this one is a little bit more stable. The yolk is just about slightly set, but this is still quite runny. If you prefer this one, this one is about six minutes. The next one was eight minutes. Now, the eight-minute egg is quite jammy. If you see the center, the yolk is cooked and at the same time it's really jammy. If you want to make it in sandwiches, you can use this one. The next one is our 10-minute egg. Now, this is completely cooked. Your yolk is completely cooked. The white as well is quite sturdy. This one as well, is quite nice if you want to make sandwiches and if you'd like the completely cooked texture. The final one was a 12-minute egg. Now, I wanted to cook it for 12 minutes because I wanted to show you what a slightly overcooked egg looks like. Because I generally don't like cooking it like this. Anything above 10 minutes, for me it's too overcooked. Because the texture isn't that nice and it just feels a little bit hard. If you can see the yolk is really hard. Also sometimes you can see on the back here, a little bit of grayish color. It's not there in our egg, but you might see that if you overcook the egg. I generally don't prefer cooking it for more than 10 minutes since this is a 12-minute egg. I would advise not to make it for this one. If you want a fully cooked one, make it for about 10 minutes, perfect. Those are our final eggs. I hope you could learn a lot from this. When you make this at home, just experiment with different timings and also with different textures of these eggs. 15. Mushroom Omelette: Preparing the Filling: In this lesson, we'll be learning how to make omelete. Now omelete are actually one of my favorite things to make and eat as well, because they're so delicious. We'll be covering two techniques of making omelete. One is the country style omelete, which is fully cooked. You have this nice brown color on the outside. The second one is a classic French omelet, which has to have a rarely pale and rarely creamy inside. Let's begin. The first one I'll show you will be a mushroom country style omelete. We'll be just cleaning the mushroom, cutting this into small pieces, sorting the mushrooms, setting that aside and cooking the egg. Putting the mushroom in, putting some parsley and just folding it. You can also add a little bit of cheese as well, so we'll also add a little bit of mozzarella in the egg. So let's begin by preparing the mushroom, as well as whisking the eggs. To prepare the mushroom, we'll be using a wet towel to clean the outside of the mushroom. You can also wash it, like I've seen some people do that as well. But I prefer to do it this way because it maintains the flavor of the mushroom. [NOISE] I'm using a Portobello mushroom, you can also use any swiss brown or any regular mushrooms as well. Perfect. That looks clean. Now you can cut this any way you like. What I'll do is, I'll just get rid of the top, just like that, just to get a flat edge [NOISE] and then another way like that. [NOISE] I want to get a medium dice. Set this aside as well, perfect. Now we have a flat surface, [NOISE] go straight in like that. [NOISE] Perfect [NOISE] Set those aside as well. I'm just going to stack them together, and get a rough medium dice with this. Doesn't have to be exact because we are going to be cooking it and it's going to be inside the egg. [NOISE] Perfect. That looks good. [NOISE] Something like that size. That looks [inaudible]. Let's set this aside in a bowl [NOISE] Just because I'm using a Portobello, that's why I cut it into three parts. If you're using a regular mushroom, you might not need to do that. Because with Portobello mushroom, if I just cut it into small pieces, it would still be quite big. I can just cut it into, [NOISE] [inaudible], and just line them up. [NOISE] into a medium dice. [NOISE] Perfect. Something like that. The [inaudible] as well. [NOISE] Perfect. [NOISE] Our mushroom is ready and I'll just show you this size again. This size should be good, because once you cook them, they will reduce in size. Just set this aside and let's start cooking them. Let's cook the mushrooms now. I've got a non-stick pan, and I'm just going to put this on medium heat. [NOISE] That's perfect. Just heat the pan slightly and then we'll put the mushrooms initially without the oil. This is a technique which I learned when I was working in a fine dining restaurant. I actually used to just cook it with butter, but cooking it with this method, what it does is it draws out the moisture in the mushroom, and once we cook it only 15-20 seconds, then we'll add the butter in. The mushrooms get better caramelization on them when you cook it like this. Just get it a little bit more hotter. The pan feels hot now, so I'm just going to go in with the mushrooms and you'll hear this, like scissor, because the water has started to evaporate from the mushrooms. [inaudible] for like 10-15 seconds. [NOISE] After they've been cooking for about 10-15 seconds, I just go in with the butter. [NOISE] Just add about half a teaspoon of butter, [NOISE] and then just take a spatula and just spread the butter around. This cooks the mushrooms nicely. [NOISE] In this [inaudible] [NOISE]. Then all the mushrooms will get nicely coated. [NOISE] Perfect. At this point I'm going to just season them a little bit of salt, [NOISE] and a little bit of black pepper as well. [NOISE] Now I'm going to switch off the heat because they're nicely cooked. [NOISE] I'm going to finish them with a little bit of parsley. Put your parsley here. Parsley and mushrooms goes so well together. [NOISE] They look beautiful. Our mushrooms are ready. Let's have a look at them. They are beautifully caramelized and they look quite even and nice. Perfect. Just set this aside, and then you just crack the eggs and start cooking the eggs this far. The reason why I like cooking this before so that I have everything in place when I'm actually assembling the egg. Just spread the mushrooms in the bowl. Beautiful. Let's set this aside and let's [inaudible] our eggs together. 16. Mushroom Omelette: Cooking the Omelette: For this recipe, I'm going to be using two eggs. You can also use three eggs as well, completely up to you. [NOISE] Let's crack the eggs. I'm going to add a little bit of cream, roughly about one tablespoon. This gives a nice richness. I'll actually add another tablespoon just to make it more tastier. Season it with a pinch of salt and black pepper. [NOISE]. Just whisk it together really well. [NOISE] When you see there's no strands of any whites, and it's nicely combined, let's start cooking the egg. To cook the eggs, I'm just going to put the pan on set of medium-low heat. [NOISE] Just put a knob of butter up here by half a tablespoon. Just let it melt and once it starts sizzling, we'll put in the eggs. Just move the pan around and go to the sides as well so it doesn't stick. You see it started to sizzle now, so I'll go in with the eggs. Beautiful. [NOISE] Now what I'll do is I'll take my spatula and I'll just keep moving the egg around so we get smaller curds. You don't need to move it too vigorously as well, but just a little bit. Because you want the curd to be really nice and to taste really good as well. Similar to how we made scrambled eggs, similarly like that. But once you see the curds start to set, we'll stop. Just a little bit more. I can see that the curds have started to set now. Perfect. At this point, I'll just stop. What I'll do is that, whereas you can see there are some raw egg here, because I've cooked here. I'll just take all the raw egg to one side. I'll just hold the egg like this and take it to one side and put it towards the heat so this part cooks more than this one. When I put my mushrooms, I'll be putting it around here because I want this part to cook because I can see that it's not cooked that much. Just let it set for about 15-20 seconds, because you want the bottom also to get nice color. You want the bottom to be nice and brown. I can see it's still quite light. I just want it to get more color, so just let it sit there that side towards the heat. You'll see slowly this will start to cook more. Let's see the color. I can see some amount of browning happening there, so I like that. Now I'm going to add mushrooms as well as our cheese. [NOISE] Perfect, to set this. I'll go in with the mozzarella cheese as well. It started to melt nicely and I'll just scrape this side to see it's coming off the side really well. I just want to check if it's brown enough. I think it can be a little bit more brown, it's just slightly more light now. Just set this aside for about 10-15 seconds. To just give it a little bit more browning, I'll just put some butter on this side. Just put the butter and let it go on the bottom here so it just comes off easily and it also gives really good flavor and a nice shine today. Beautiful. At this point, what I'll do is I'll just take one corner really gently and just flip it and seal the egg. Just take it from the bottom, and just like that. Beautiful. It's got a beautiful golden color on the top here. I'm just going to cook it at slightly low to medium heat so that the cheese and the mushroom just seal themselves in the egg. [NOISE] Let's see the color in the bottom. That looks beautiful. The cheese is nicely melted as well. Now let's transfer this to a plate and see the texture of the egg from the inside. To transfer the egg, you just hold the pan like this, then you take it to one corner, put your plate like this, and just flip it nicely. You see it's got a beautiful golden brown color on the top. That's exactly what you're looking for when you're making our country egg. It should be fully cooked on the top and slightly custody from the bottom. Just finish it with a little bit of parsley, it gives a really nice color to the egg. You can also put some Parmesan cheese on top if you like or any other cheese will do. Perfect. Let's cut through the egg and see. That feels so nice and soft, and the cheese is also so nicely melted, so stretchy. It looks really nice and beautiful. Let's see the inside. You see that really nice layer of cheese and mushroom there and so delicate and soft, it's not overcooked at all. Let's cut the inside and see. Wow, looks so beautiful, super delicate from the inside. Let's taste it. That is so delicious. This egg is actually also quite easy to make. Just make sure that don't overcook the custards and keep stirring it when you're making it. If you'd like, you can put other filings as well. You can put spinach inside this. You can put tomatoes as well. You can experiment with different cheeses as well to this egg. The technique is just a template for you to experiment the different fillings. After this, we're going to move on to the next one, which is a slightly more challenging one, which is a classic French omelet. 17. Classic Herb French Omelette: Let's learn how to make half French omelets. Just take two eggs. [NOISE] Perfect. I'm going to add about two tablespoons of cream. I just like adding one for each egg, and season it with salt and pepper [NOISE]. In this recipe, I'm just going to add the parsley straightaway in the egg because it gives really nice flavor. You can also add chides if you like. You can add other herbs as like tarragon, even basil if you like. It's totally up to you, which herbs you like. I like using parsley a lot, so I'm going to use that, and this gives a really nice and add the flavor to the egg. Just whisk it get together [NOISE]. Perfect, and it's nicely combined. Let's start cooking the egg. To cook the egg, I'm just going to put the gas at medium-low heat, [NOISE] and add about one teaspoon of butter [NOISE]. Just about that much. Just let it lead, and let it sizzle slightly then we add the egg. As you can see the butter is nicely melted, and the butter is starting to sizzle as well. So at this point, I'll just lower the heat slightly, and put in my eggs. With these eggs, you have to store them lowly bald because you don't want any color on the outside [NOISE]. This goes in, and use your spatula and keep stirring it. I also sometimes take it away from the heat. Just like making a really creamy scrambled eggs that I just thought once it starts to set. So you want the cords to be really small in the egg, and also no color on the outside [NOISE] See how vigorously I'm staring that. That's what's going to give you a really nice codes. I can see that the code has just started to set just about. What I'll do is I just take it to one corner [NOISE]. Just this corner and this corner, I'll just leave it as thin as possible. Once it sets, I'll start rolling from this corner. Just set it for maybe 10 seconds, and once you put just a tiny bit of butter on this side here, it comes off easily [NOISE] Perfect. Just see if it's coming off, beautiful [NOISE]. You see the codes. Super delicate. You start folding from here, make sure it comes off from the sides really well as well. Beautiful. Just run it down the side and fold it again. See that's completely white. That's what you want when you're making a French style omelets let. You just give folding it. When you reach the end, what you do is you take it to one corner, then you just for this here, and seal the egg, just like that. [NOISE] Perfect. The egg is nicely sealed, and I'm just going to quickly put it on a plate now. To put it on a plate, what you do is you just hold it like this, and gently just flip it over that. Perfect. You see this is completely right, there should be no color on the egg, and if you want to give it a more cylindrical shape, you can just tighten it slightly. Perfect. You can also brush a little bit of butter on top just to give it a nice shine. Just take your spatula and the butter should just melt because of the heat of the egg, and gives a really nice shine on top of the egg. This is an optional step, totally up to you if you want to do it, and finish it just a little bit more parsley. Just a tiny bit. Just gives it a really nice shine. That is a half fine French egg. This is a classic French omelet. Very delicate codes inside and no color on the top. Let's get into the egg, and I want to show you the codes inside [NOISE]. Beautiful. You see the codes inside the egg, it's just oozing out like yeah. Wow, that's pretty nice. Lets cut another slice then I'll show you. Let's see, from the center, you have these really beautiful codes, just oozing out from here, and so delicate and nice. Lets taste [NOISE], it should be really soft. It has such an amazing taste [NOISE]. That is so delicious. It just this tastes so nice. It's little bit tricky to make. I'm glad it's so delicious. When you join a professional kitchen, your chef will actually ask you to make an omelets to test your skill as a true chef. So if you can make this, you'll pass and you get the job, and if you can't make it, you won't get the job. It's funny, but it just looks easy. But it's actually not that easy to make a nice omelet. I hope you like this lesson and send me pictures of your omelets and tell me if you like it. 18. Knife Skills: Cutting a Whole Chicken: In this lesson, we're going to be learning how to debone a chicken. The first thing I'm going to do is show you the setup to do this. Make sure that your chopping board is stable, either with a mat or with a wet towel because you don't want the board to move when you're cutting the chicken, otherwise you will cut your hand. So you want to be safe. When we debone the chicken, make sure to be as hygienic as possible. We will be using two towels in that case. The first towel will be just for my hands, then I wash it, I just clean my hands with it. The second towel will be in contact with the chicken, so we'll keep this separately. Let's have a look at the equipment we'll need to cut the chicken. I'm going to be basically using these four knives. [NOISE] You can just use a chef's knife. You don't need this. But I'll just show you the ways you can do it with the boning knife as well. Also make sure to have these pair of scissors because they are really useful just to cut through the bone. I also have a small knife here just in case you're using that. You can use either of these knives. There isn't like you need a specific knife for this. But in professional kitchens, we usually use the boning knife to do this. Perfect. Set this aside. Let's get the chicken on the board. First thing I'll do is I'll just dry it so that it doesn't slip on the board. Because if it's wet, it just moves too much and you don't want to injure your hand. Just dry it on the back as well. I just washed the chicken when I took it out of the bucket just to get rid of all the impurities, as well as if there's any blood as well. Perfect. Also, I have two bowls here. This is for the bones and this is for the final pieces of the chicken. I'm going to take my chef's knife first. [NOISE] Before I do that, I'll just explain to you the parts of the chicken. If you look at the chicken, it's basically attached through a wishbone here, which holds together the chicken breast. If you look at the back, you have this backbone here and where the wings are attached basically. As well, as you can see, the oyster, the thigh, and the leg. We'll be cutting through here to get the oyster as well. There are a lot of ways to debone a chicken. I'll just show you the way I like doing it. First, what I like doing is go through the incision here, then I cut the tie. You see this incision here, you just basically cut it like that. [NOISE] Then you just turn the chicken around. We want to go through this line and get the oyster. I'm just following the line, the fat line. Now, what you can do is you can just flip it, and just do it like that. Just have gently guided through the back. See how I'm moving my knife. I'm not going all the way through, I'm just doing like this. I'm just going through the bone and just guiding through the fat line, and get the oyster out of here. Perfect. You see this bone here, you just go through it, and you get your thigh. Similarly, for the next one as well. You just go through this line here at the back, and you go through the oyster, [NOISE] this line. Then what you do is you just take the bone out like that, and just follow the bone and gently just cut it like that. You have the oyster here. This is your oyster, and that's your thigh, and that's your leg. I'm just going to set this aside. Next, what I'll do is I'll just clean my knife a little bit. To take out the wings, what we do is we just hold this cartilage here, so there is basically a gap. If you move the wing, it moves like this. Just below the cartilage, just take your knife like that, then you break it slightly. Then once it breaks, you just follow the cartilage, and then it will just come out clearly easily. Similar to this as well, you just go below the cartilage and just take it off like that. That's your wings and your legs. Now, for the breast, [NOISE] just make sure that the skin just stays intact and nice. Now there are two ways to do this. First is to just cut through the backbone through scissor, or you can just gently guide it with a knife as well. [NOISE] I'm just going to cut it through a scissor. It's this quite easier. You see this fat line here, you just want to go along that. [NOISE] That is a line which will offer you the least resistance. See how easily I could cut through it. Similarly, you'll see this fat line here, just go along the fat line and [NOISE] it should come off quite easily. Perfect. I'm just going to set this backbone aside, I'll clean it later, and we'll use it for stock. I don't want to look at that now. What I want you to look at is the breast. Just clean this as well. Now, some people, what they do is they keep the bone in, like this bone which we have here, they keep it in. But I'll just debone it completely. You have this line along here, so just follow that and make an incision like that. You see this line separating the chicken breast. Now what I want you to do is just follow through that line and just guide your knife through. [NOISE] Just guide your knife through inside. The meat should just fall off. Don't worry if there is some meat left there, that's completely fine. Perfect. That's our chicken breast. Then you'll have this tenderloin as well, which will be attached to that. Basically you can take it out. That's your tenderloin, that's your chicken breast. Just make sure to keep the skin really nice and intact. Keep this aside. Now we'll do the similar thing here. It's almost like when you fillet a fish, you just go through the bone. You just let it guide and see how my knife is going. I'm just being guided. [NOISE] Perfect. That's your back. Set this aside. Now you just want to take the tenderloin out. Perfect. You might have some bone here from the wishbone, so make sure to take that out as well just so that it doesn't come out. That's the wishbone, set this aside as well. [NOISE] That's your chicken breast. You've got one breast here. That's your two tenderloins. That's the other chicken breast as well. Make sure the skin is on nicely. Those are your wings, and those are your legs. Now re-cut the legs. What we'll do is we just go along the flat line, and the joint. You this line here, super easy if you do it correctly. If you just take out the skin, you'll see this line of fat here. You just want to go along it. Just in one go, it shouldn't offer any resistance. It should come out, and this should be white and this should be red when you cut it. Just set this aside. That's your leg, that's your thigh. That's our final chicken. See how many pieces we could get from one chicken. It's so economical as well. Because when you get a full chicken, it's much cheaper than getting these individual pieces. Once you practice it, it shouldn't take you more than five-minutes to debone a whole chicken. Let's go through again what we did. First, what we did was we deboned the thigh and the leg, and we set that aside. Then we got the wings by taking the cartilage and just going through the bone, and we separated the wings. Then we took out the back with the scissor and we set that aside. Then we debone the chicken breast by going through the center and just going through the bone and just guided a knife throughout, so it comes out. Then we took out tenderloin from it and we kept the chicken breast intact. This is our full chicken which is deboned. Now, I'll be showing you recipes of how to use these different parts in different preparations. You know you have to cook them differently because the chicken breasts cooks faster. These parts take more time. Tenderloin is the fastest one to cook. This is for stir fries, this one you can use for roasting, as well braising. These ones are slow cook like for soups, for braising as well. This one I usually tend to use in stocks. Or you can even make like chicken wings, but you can try it as well. There are so many uses of different parts of chicken. I hope you could learn different techniques of how to debone a chicken and I can't wait for you to try and apply these techniques when you get a chicken to cook next time. 19. Chicken Stock: Preparing the Ingredients: In this lesson we'll be learning how to make a chicken stock. After we learn how to debone a chicken we are left with the chicken carcass which we need to use, so chicken stock is an amazing way to use that. Why do we make a chicken stock at home? Chicken stock at home has a better mouthfeel, it's more tastier, it has more nutrition, and it has a lot of collagen as well which thickens the sauces we make. Compared to stock cubes we get, they don't actually take in that much because they don't have collagen naturally in them but when we reduce bones at home, it has got that thickness in it and it got a better mouthfeel as well. In fine dining restaurants we always make chicken stock from scratch, so whoever comes earliest in the morning to the kitchen has to put a pot on the gas and reduce the chicken stock. We use chicken stock in almost everything: in soups, sauces, stews, pasta as well. There are basically two kinds of stock, the first one is the brown stock and the second one is a white stock. In a brown stock, we basically brown the bones and the vegetables. We deglaze the pan and then we reduce the stock, so it gives a more deeper flavor and a deeper color as well. The white stock which will be learning in the lesson. We don't actually brown the bones or the vegetables, we just basically reduce them so it has a more cleaner flavor as well as color. Some tips when you make the stock is to always blanch the bones when you make it. Blanching basically removes all the impurities in the bones and it makes it cleaner stock. The second one is to use aromatics when you reduce the stock, so use bailey, peppercorns, thyme, whichever you'd like because it just gives more flavor to the stock. The third one is to keep skimming the stock occasionally, maybe after every 15-20 minutes just to skim off all the impurities which come at the top. The fourth one is to never boil the stock vigorously because that can make it cloudy, always keep it at a rolling boil. These are some of the tips you should follow when you make the stock. Let's begin and learn how to make the stock. After deboning chicken, we'll be learning how to make a chicken stock. I've got the back and I've also got the carcass after removing the chicken breast, and I've got both of the wings. If you want to make a stronger chicken broth, you can also use the thigh and the leg as well. Before I start preparing the stock, what I'll do is I'll just remove some of the fat from the back portion. You see all this fat here, you don't want that in your chicken stock so just get rid of it because it would make the stock really cloudy. All the white bits are just filling here, I'll just get rid of it, and also you see here this part of the back you get rid of that as well which is the tail part of it because it's just not really good, it just makes it too fatty. Perfect. Now this is nicely trimmed. What I'll do is I'll blanch the bones. What blanching does is it removes all the impurities in the chicken stock, so it really simple. What we do is we start with cold water, but just the bones. We get it to a boil, boil it for maybe five minutes and then we strain the water, we wash all the bones, we clean it, we scrub it nicely then we start again with our aromatics and our vegetables when we make the stock. Let's begin with the blanching stage of our chicken stock. To blanch the bones I'm going to take a four liter pot, so this is just a Dutch oven. Now you can use any part you want, you can even use stainless steel parts. Just add all your bones in it, [NOISE] the wings as well, and I'm just going to cover this with cold water, make sure the water is cold and not hot. [NOISE] Perfect. That's roughly about three liters of water, and I just want all the bones to submerge really nicely. Now what we'll do is we'll get this to a boil and then we'll strain it. We're going to put the gas at really high heat because we want to get the water to a boil and just put your pot with the bones and the cold water. No aromatics at this stage, just cold water. Let this come up to a boil, it might take like 5-10 minutes, and once it comes up to a boil I'll just show you how it looks like. While the chicken bones are coming to have boil, I'll just show you the aromatics as well as the vegetables I like to put in the stock. For the aromatics, I'm going to use some peppercorns, the leaf, parsley stems, and thyme. If you combine this together and put it in a muslin cloth or a tea bag; it's in French, it's called a bouquet garni. Bouquet garni basically means it's just like a bouquet of herbs and ****** just to flavor this stock. The next element to flavor it is garlic, and garlic gives really nice and already to the stock, so I really like putting it. The vegetables we'll be using are carrots, celery, leeks, and onions. Now these are really classic for a friend's style stock, but if you're making a far or you're making any Asian style stock you can also use lemongrass, you can also use mushrooms so it's totally depends on what you want to use the stock for. But this is a really nice base recipe which you can use for a lot of different dishes like risotto is for soups, so this is really amazing if you can master this. Also we're using bones which otherwise you will have just thrown in the bin, so it's just such a nice way to use the whole part of chicken. We're not wasting anything, that is why I really like making the stock. You can also make this stock in advance, and just freeze it, and just use whenever you like, so it's super convenient. After understanding the ingredients, let's start preparing our vegetables and do a [[FOREIGN] which is a rough cut which is used for stocks. The first one is leeks so just cut the bottom, [NOISE] and now you can do it many ways. I'll just do that really like this, [NOISE] chunks of leaf, and just cut it in half like that. Perfect. Set this aside, then let's do onion. Now with onions there are two options, either you can peel it or you can just let the peel on. If you let the peel on you'll have a slightly more browner colored stock with a more deeper flavor, totally up to you. [NOISE] In my case what I'm going to do is I'll just cut it into half and I'll keep the peel on because I like doing it that way, but if you want you can remove the first peel just like that. If there's any dust or something in it, it just comes off, and then you can keep the peel which is inside. You can keep that peel on because that's more cleaner. Perfect. For the friend's style stock we generally use white onions, we don't tend to use red onions for this one. For the celery, super easy. Just cut it into big pieces like that because we're going to be cooking for quite a bit. With garlic as well I know some people who just leave it whole, what I like doing is just cutting the top off, and just to release the flavors of the garlic we just give it up. Just let go. [NOISE] Bang it like that, so all the flavor has just released. If you want you can also just quickly take the cover off, it's totally up to you. I know some people who leave it on as well, so just up to you how you want to do it. [NOISE] The next one we're going to use is carrots. Now, carrots, you can use old carrots as well in the stock, it doesn't have to be completely fresh as long as they're still quite form. This one is a slightly older carrot which was lying in my fridge, so what I'm going to do is peel it off. [NOISE] Peeling is optional. I know some people who don't peel it, but I just tend to pill it. I prefer peeling it because sometimes there can be a lot of impurities on the skin outside, so it's totally up to you. I'll set this aside. [NOISE] Carrots give so much sweetness to the stock so it's such an amazing ingredient to put, and definitely it's essential to put carrot in the stock. Again, we're going to do a final part, so just keep cutting like this, big chunks like that, and this one as well. [NOISE] Preferably about one inch cubes like that. Perfect. All our ingredients are now ready to put in the stock, so these are all our vegetables. This will give amazing flavor and amazing nutrition as well to the stock. Let's check our bones now and see if they've come to have boil. 20. Chicken Stock: Cooking the Stock: Our stock just came up to a boil and I can see lot of impurities on the top. That is quite nice because you want all the impurities to come out so you get a much cleaner stock. I'll just let this cook for another two minutes and then we'll take it off the gas and wash the bones off and then refill the pot with fresh water. After three minutes of boiling, I'm just going to take it off the gas now. I just wanted to show you before I take it off. You see all the fat has come on the top and all the impurities have come on the top as well. Make sure you get to this stage before you start cooking it. Perfect. Then switch off the gas, and let's wash this. After washing the chicken really nicely, I fill it with water, it's about three liters of water, and make sure it comes to the top. Go in with your aromatics, just put all of them straight in. Go in with all your vegetables and [inaudible]. Put your onions and put your leeks as well, and the rest of the carrots, and celery, and garlic. This looks really good. You want it to come till here, just about here. You don't want it to overflow as well. Now I'm going to put this at really high heat. I want this to come up to a boil. Then I'll reduce the heat slightly, so that it's not boiling too aggressively. But at the same time you have this rolling boil happening. Put this on high heat. [NOISE], and let's get this up to a boil. After about 10 minutes of cooking, our stock is finally come up to a boil. You can see it looks really nice. What I'll do is, I'll just reduce the heat slightly so it doesn't boil really vigorously. Also, what I have here is just to boil with a ladle, so whatever impurities which come on top or any fat which comes, I just want to get that basically out of the stock, so our stock is really clean and tastes really light as well. You see how I'm just trying to get just on the top. I'm not going really deep. I'm just going on the top and getting all the impurities and oily fats as well. Keep skimming this throughout when you make the stock so you get a really nice and flavorful stock. [NOISE] For me, this level of boiling is good. You can see it's rolling boiled. It's not super hard boiled, but it's just a rolling boil on this. When the stock comes to a rolling boil, what I like doing is putting a timer for two hours because usually I've seen the stock takes anywhere between 2-3 hours to be ready. We'll have a look at two hours as well just to check if the taste is good and if it's lexer of nice texture as well. Every 15-20 minutes, I'll just come and just give a quick skim through it on the top with my ladle, just so that it's really clean and it's not really oily as well. I just set this aside and we'll have a look after maybe 30 minutes, and I'll show you how the stock looks like. After 30 minutes of cooking, you can see that the stock is reduced slightly, now it'll become a little bit more thicker. Also you can see the rolling boil here, you don't want any higher than that. What I'm going to do is just take my ladle, and just from the top, skim off all the fat I can get. Just press it and it should come off on the ladle. [NOISE] You see that fat floating there? Just get rid of that. Just search on the sides as well. I just press it slightly on the side and it should just come on your ladle. So perfect. Just feel it looks pretty good. I'll just let this go for another 30 minutes and then I'll show you how it looks like. After 30 more minutes, so now we've been cooking the stock for one hour. You can see that it's almost reduced by 1/4. What I'll do is again, I'll just skim off the fat. Just take your ladle and just get the fat from the corners so that the stock becomes lighter. I'm just gently pressing them. Perfect. I'm going to set this aside for one more hour, and then we'll have a look at the stock and check if the flavor has infused properly, and then we'll season the stock as well. After two hours of cooking the stock, the stock it is finally ready. It's reduced by a little bit more than a 1/2. You want to basically obtain roughly about 1-1.5 liters out of the stock. Now, if you want basically to convert this stock into a broth, you can also add a stock cube that will also give a really nice flavor. Sometimes at home I actually add a little bit of stock cube if I'm making a chicken soup. Now this is really good to use for risottos. Even as a base for any soup, it's really nice to use this. I'm going to just switch off the gas now, and I'll just get my strainer ready, and strain the stock. Just take your Dutch oven and just pour it really gently so everything just falls down nicely [NOISE] Just strain it nicely, and that's our final stock. Just strain this stock nicely. Let's assess how the stock is. You can see really nice color on the stock. It's slightly golden because we left the peels on the onion on, and we've got some nice color from that. If you see the stock is really clean, it's got barely any fat was built on top of it because we actually blanched the bones before we made it. That is why it's really nice and light when you eat it. Also, I can see some amount of collagen floating on the water, which basically comes when you reduce the bones, and we cook them really nicely, you get this thickening on the stock, which is really good sign that the stock was nicely made. Now at this point what you can do is, either you can put a stock cube in it, if you want to make a soup. You can also season it right now, which is what I'm going to do. I'm just going to put a little bit of salt. I like to do this right at the end and not at the beginning because sometimes what happens is that if you reduce this stock too much, it becomes too salty. It's always good to add salt at the end. I'll just mix it together nicely [NOISE], and see how good that stock looks. Super clean. Amazing. When you want to store this stock, you have to cool it down at room temperature for about 1-2 hours, then you can just cover it and put it in the fridge. You can also put it in the freezer if you like, and just use it whenever you want. I hope you make this at home and never throw away chicken bones in the bin again. Always use them because you want to use all parts of the chicken when you're cooking. 21. Chicken Fricasse: Preparing the Ingredients: In this lesson, we'll be learning how to make chicken fricassee. Chicken fricassee is a really classic French stew which is made by braising chicken pieces in a creamy mushroom sauce and also with half aromatics and herbs as well. This is a really good dish to learn because we cover different techniques such as searing the chicken, also braising the chicken. We combine what we learned before by using chicken stock, and also reducing down onions and mushrooms. It's a really good base to learn a lot of techniques and also it's a really delicious dish. Before we begin with this lesson, I wanted to share with you some tips to make this dish really nice. The first one is to caramelize the onions really well. Now you want to do this really slow and you want to do this really nicely because the onions will give a lot of sweetness to the stew, and it just blends down in the sauce as it reduces. Make sure to do this really well. The second one is to use good-quality chicken, preferably free-range chicken because that will give the most flavor to the dish. Third one is to use a good chicken stock when you braise the chicken. The chicken stock will give a lot of flavor as far as mouthfeel to the dish. Preferably use homemade one, but you can also use stock cubes if you like. The fourth one is to use aromatics when you reduce the sauce. Aromatics like thyme or bay leaf, they give such amazing flavor to the dish. So definitely use that when you make the dish. The last one is that when you use wine to deglaze the pot, make sure to use a neutral flavored wine like Chardonnay, but don't use a sweet wine like Riesling wine because that will literally ruin the dish. Make sure to use proper wine. You don't need to use age wine at all. Any low priced wine would work really well with the dish. Let's begin by learning how to make this amazing dish. Before we start the recipe, let's have a look at the ingredients, and I'll also briefly explain you the process of making this dish. I'm going to be using a whole chicken in this recipe. I'm also going to be using chicken breast. Now in some traditional French recipes we only use the chicken thigh and the chicken leg, but I'm just going to use a chicken breast as well because I wanted to use the whole chicken. For the vegetables, we're going to be using onions and mushrooms. Now both of them give really nice flavor. Onion is for the sweetness, and mushrooms also give a lot of umami flavor, so they taste delicious. When we cook onions today, we'll caramelize them really well because that actually gives a lot of flavor to the dish. Now for our aromatics, we are going to be using thyme and garlic. I'm going to be chopping this garlic finely, and I'm also going to be using thyme because its just when the dish braises the thyme gives really good flavor. You can also add bay leaf if you like, that also works really well. For the fats, we're going to be using butter as well as oil. I like using a combination of these because otherwise the butter just tends to burn. But if you add a little bit of oil, it doesn't tend to burn that fast, and it stays quiet nice. I'm also going to be using some cream and chicken stock. The chicken stock I'll be adding when I'm cooking the braise, and the cream I'll be adding right at the end just to reduce it down a little bit. I'm also going to be using some white wine in this recipe. Now white wine gives really nice flavor, especially when we want to deglaze the pot after cooking the chicken, and I really like using it. But if you want you can skip it. To thicken the sauce, I'm also going to be adding a little bit of flour in the recipe. Flour is also optional. If you want to use it, you can, but you can make it without it as well. But I want to just show you the traditional French way of making it. That is why I'm using white wine as well as flour. The first step, what we'll do is, we'll just prep our vegetables. I'll show you how to prep the mushrooms, onion, and garlic. After that, we'll start prepping the chicken. Let's begin with the recipe. We prepare the mushrooms. We just cut them in quarters. [NOISE] We want to keep them just about this size because they're going to be cooking for quite long, so we don't want to cut them too small as well. [NOISE] Just cut all of them. I've also cleaned them before I'm cutting them and remove the bottom as well. [NOISE] Perfect. Let's set this aside, and let's move on to the onions. [NOISE] Just clean your chopping board nicely. For the onions, we'll keep it quite simple. We just cut the top and the bottom, then we cut it in half. Just remove the skin. [NOISE] Cut the other one as well. After removing the skin, I'm just going to cut into fine slices. [NOISE] Something like that. Just keep it finer because we want to get caramelize the onion and the finer they are, the more quickly they caramelize. But if you keep it a little bit thicker, there's no problem. [NOISE] Perfect. I've cut all the onion into thin slices. Just put it in a container and set it aside. [NOISE] Just clean your workbench again, just clean your chopping board. Next, we'll prepare our garlic. We're going to fine chop the garlic because we want to release its flavors and cook really nicely as well. Just take about four cloves of garlic. I'll just cut the head [NOISE] and just give it a little bit of a smash. The skin should just come off really easily. [NOISE] Perfect. Just remove the skin. Now to fine chop the garlic, what I'll do, I'll just cut it into really thin pieces. [NOISE] Now what I'm going to do is use a rocking motion, just go over it like that. [NOISE] Perfect. That should be good. Don't worry if it's slightly bigger as well because it's going to be cooked down and it's going to just reduce, don't worry about it. I'm just going to set this aside. All our veg are prepared now, and now I'm going to start preparing my chicken. Just put this. Perfect. [NOISE] Clean the chopping board again. Let's prepare the chicken. To prepare the chicken, I'm just going to lay it down on the chopping board. Basically what we want to do is we just want to dry out all the juices in the chicken because if there are too many juices it just releases a lot of water and it doesn't taste nice, and it just doesn't caramelize too fast as well. [NOISE] Let's just dry it so the skin gets nicely caramelized and we cook it. The other side as well. If you don't like the skin, you can remove the skin as well. That's also completely fine. [NOISE] Perfect. I'm going to set this towel aside now and I'm not going to use it because it's contaminated with the chicken. Don't use this again. Now what I'll do is I'll season the chicken with salt and pepper. Just season it generously because you want the salt to be absorbed by the chicken. Put some pepper on it as well. [NOISE] Just turn the chicken and we'll season the other side as well. [NOISE] After you've season the chicken, what I'll do is I'll just set this aside because all our ingredients are now ready. I'll put a Dutch oven on the heat, and I'll start melting the butter and the oil to sear the chicken. 22. Chicken Fricasse: Cooking and Braising the Chicken: We've already started cooking the chicken. I just wanted to show you, I'm going to use a Dutch oven to make this dish. Super delicious when you make it in this. You can also make it in any other source pot as well. But make sure that it's quite deep when you use it. Put the flame on medium-high [NOISE]. You want it to get a little bit hotter when we add oil as well as butter. Butter has been heating for about 30 seconds now. It feels quite hot. I'll go in with the oil and the butter as well. I'm adding quite a lot of butter at this stage because I'm going to be using this fat for everything. I'm not going to be adding additional fat to this. I know it seems a lot and you can reduce it if you like. But this is French cooking and in French cooking we tend to use a lot of butter. It's totally up to you. If you want to use it you can make sure that it's spread around [NOISE]. At this point, I'm going to go in with the chicken [NOISE]. Add chicken legs and the thighs. After we have seared the red meat, which is your leg and the thigh, you're going to go in with a chicken breast and sear that as well. This one, I sear three minutes on each side. We just want it to have a nice caramelizing on the top so it just seares the juices inside the chicken. Let's go in with the chicken breast as well. We're just going to skin side down. Perfect. You want a gentle scissor , not really aggressive. This is perfect [NOISE]. We'll be cooking this as well for about two, three minutes on each side. You just want to get a nice caramelization. After cooking the chicken breast for about two, three minutes on each side, you should be able to get a really nice light brown color like that. It looks really beautiful. I'm just going to set this aside as well. These are beautiful chicken pieces and you can see it's got such a nice golden color on the outside. Now with the chicken breast, you don't want to cook it too long as well because otherwise it will overcook. I just cooked it for three minutes each side and the rest also they look so beautiful. Now what we'll do is we'll just set this aside and we'll move on to cooking our veg. We will start caramelizing the onions then we'll add the mushrooms, and then all the aromatics as well. Let's begin with the next step of the recipe [NOISE]. Add in all the onions. Just mix them together really well. Perfect. Seasoned really generously with salt. I've been caramelizing this for about three minutes now. You can see it soaked up all the oil. The salt actually really helps it break down a lot as well. But I want to cook this a little bit more. I want this to become more browner in color because that will give more flavor to the dish. Just keep clicking this and I'll show you the consistency I'm after [NOISE]. I've been cooking this for a total of six minutes now and can you see the texture of the onion? They've become really soft. They've caramelized, but they're not burnt. You want exactly that. You want them to reduce really slowly and release all their juices and caramelize and get this really light brown color. It looks really nice. At this point, I'm going to go in with my garlic, go in with all the garlic as well as the mushrooms as well [NOISE]. I'm going to season the mushrooms as well because you have to season all the vegetables individually, so that they don't taste blunt. Add pepper as well [NOISE] and mix it through really well. The mushrooms as well, you should cook until it completely caramelizes, and becomes really nice and soft. It should take about three, four minutes as well, and make sure that the gas is at medium low and it's not too strong because you don't want to burn the garlic and the onions. After three, four minutes, you can see that the mushrooms are nicely caramelized as well. You see this font at the button, that's so much flavor. That's beautifully flavor. At this point, I'm going to go in with my [inaudible] and just start it through [NOISE]. It releases all its flavor. Now just take everything to one side. I'm going to add in the wine so I can get all this flavor at the bottom. Beautiful [NOISE]. Scrape all that flavor. This is called deglazing the pot and the flavor is called fond, F-O-N-D. It's basically French for all the flavor, which is stuck at the bottom. You want that because that's so delicious. Perfect. The line is completely reduced. Am going to add the stock in now. Perfect. After adding this stock, I'm just going to gently add all the chicken pieces as far. See you just want to make sure that the chicken is submerged and its just slightly coming above the liquid. That looks good and take all the liquids left over because you want all chicken juice. Perfect. You want to basically get this up to a boil. Once it gets up to a boil, you want to reduce the heat to simmer and keeps simmering this for about 40 minutes in total. At the 20-minute mark, I'll just have a look at the chicken breast because that cooks faster than the chicken thighs. I might even take that out before. I will show you the part when it comes up to a boil. Then we will reduce the heat and get it up to a low simmer. Once this comes up to a boil, this one has skim off all the top. All the impurities at the top, that you get a clean sauce. I'm going to lower the heat slightly because I don't want it to boil so vigorously. I'm going to cook this for about 20 minutes. Then we'll have a look at the chicken breast just to check if it's done. If you see that the liquid has reduced too much, you can just drop it up with a little bit more stock. That's completely fine. Our fricasse has been cooking for about 20 minutes now. If you see the liquid is done such a beautiful brown color. It looks so nice. It's got such amazing flavor of the onions and mushrooms as well. At this point what I'll do is I'll just take out the chicken breast and check if it's cooked. Because you don't want to cook it for too long because the meat is quiet lean. But we'll leave the other part of the chicken just to keep cooking for 20 more minutes. Let's take out the chicken breast. What I'm going to do is take a thermometer and put it right in the center from the top. Just to check the temperature. That's perfect. Let me show it to you see if you see that temperature. It's about 92 degrees Celsius. That's definitely way above the 75 degrees Celsius we're looking for on a chicken breast. That's perfect. This is perfectly cooked. I'll take the other chicken breast out as well. Perfect. Just set this aside and let it rest and let's have a look at our braids. The remaining chicken, I'm going to cook for 20 more minutes because I want it to braise longer and just become really soft and nice. Our fricasse has been cooking for about 20 more minutes and it's reduced really nicely. At this point, I'm going to go in with my cream. The color will become so beautiful and the flavor as well. Mix it together. You should be able to get a really nice golden brown color. That looks really nice. I'm just going to cook this with the cream for about 5, 10 minutes more. It just becomes a little bit more thicker and then we'll put it on a plate. After cooking this for about five more minutes, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go in with the chicken breast as well, just so that it absorbs all the flavor and she's got it nicely. Perfect. The sauce is almost there. I just reduce it for like five more minutes. Our dish is finally ready. You can see the beautiful sauce, the consistency of the sauce as well. You can see that it's quite thick and that's exactly what I'm looking for. What I'm going to do now is just put it on a plate and just show you the texture of the chicken as well. First, I'm going to go in with a chicken thigh, just put it in the center. Then put the chicken leg as well. Now what we'll do is put some mushrooms on top and put a little bit of more sauce [NOISE] just on the top like that. To finish it, I'm going to put a little bit of chopped parsley on the top. That is really nice. You can also put in parsley in the pot if you like. But I just like putting it on the top because it looks more fresher. This is our final dish. Now, this goes really well with bread. You can make some garlic bread. You can even serve this with rice. That also goes through really well. I'm just going to get a fork and cut this and show you how it looks like. Let's cut the chicken thigh first. That is super soft. It's braced so well, you can see the texture of the chicken it just breaks so easily. Wow, that's so nice. Let's taste it. Put the sauce. Take a mushroom as well. Take a piece of chicken, dip it in the sauce. That is so delicious. The sauce is so well balanced and the chicken is so tender and soft. The mushrooms and the parsley, as well as the time and the onions which we cooked, they give such an amazing flavor that actually builds the sauce. You can taste just a little bit of wine as well. It's delicious. You should definitely make this at home. [NOISE] 23. Conclusion: We finally reached the end of this class. I'm sure you've learned a lot of different techniques and all these techniques will truly elevate your cooking skills to the next level. Now, if you have any doubts, feel free to message me and share pictures with me because I really like seeing your work and also follow me on Instagram and YouTube as well. I hope to see you in my other classes as well. Thank you again for enrolling in this class.