Cooking Basics: Level up Your Cooking Skills

1. Introduction to the Course: In the second part of our cooking series, you're going to be building on skills and working towards learning more advanced techniques of cooking. My name is Shivanshu, I am a professionally trained chef from [inaudible]. I've been working in the culinary industry for more than a decade. I had the opportunity to work under some amazing chefs in Australia. In this class, I'm want to share some of my experiences and knowledge with you. We start this lesson by learning different techniques to cook eggs. You will learn how to make a creamy scrambled egg in a classic diner style, as well as a more traditional friends style. Then we move on to making a delicious J tomato and chorizo frittata with mozzarella cheese finished with basil leaf. To conclude this section, you will be learning how to poach an egg. It is one of the most trickiest space to cook eggs at home, but I will share all the tips and tricks with you so you can get a perfect result every time. Our second section, we learn about vegetables and learn the techniques of blanching. Blanching is a really healthy technique of cooking and helps us preserve the texture and beautiful color of vegetables. We also learn the techniques of slow roasting by making a delicious slow roasted tomato bruschetta with burrata cheese and confit garlic. In our final section, we'll be learning about chicken, we'll be learning how to butcher a chicken from scratch as that is a really useful skill to have as a home cook. Then we use the chicken breast and make a show stopper pan-seared chicken breast with rocket salad and pine nut salsa. We'll be learning the techniques of pan-searing, basting and oven roasting the chicken. I'll be sharing with you some tips on how to get a really moist piece of chicken breast. You will also learn how to plate the dish with all the elements so you can get inspired to come up with your own plating designs. This class also comes with detailed recipe notes so you can follow the recipes really easily at home 2. Class Project and Outline : Thank you for enrolling in this class. In this lesson, we'll briefly go over the class outline as well as the class project. The class is basically divided into three sections. The first section we learn about eggs, the second section we learn about vegetables, and the third section we cover chicken. We'll cover different techniques of cooking throughout the class. If you have any questions, feel free to message me and I'll definitely get back to you. The class project for this class is for you to share any one picture of any recipe you attempt during the class. It can be blanching vegetables, it can be a frittata, it can be scrambled eggs, anything you make at home. Now let's go over the class materials and how you can download them so you can easily access all the recipes and follow along the lesson. Let's have a look how to download the resources. 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'll 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. Scrambled Eggs- Diner Style Creamy Eggs: Welcome to the first section of the class. In this section, we'll be learning how to cook eggs. Eggs are one of my favorite ingredients to cook in the restaurant, even at home, because they're super easy to cook, they're very versatile, and they're really healthy as well. We'll be learning three recipes in this section. The first recipe is scrambled eggs. We'll be learning two techniques of how to cook them. The second recipe is cheese and tomato frittata. The third one is poached eggs. I'll be sharing with you different tips, and also tricks, on how you can get them really nice when you cook at home, especially with poached eggs. Make sure to pay attention to those, and you'd be really good when you make it at home. In this lesson, we'll be learning how to make a scrambled egg. We'll be learning two techniques of making it. The first one is a more creamier one, which is a French method. The second one is a little bit more custard-y one, which is an American method of making it. The recipe is super easy. We're just going to use two eggs, put about one or two tablespoons of cream, and roughly about a teaspoon of butter, then we cook the egg. I'm also going to finish it with some dried parsley. You can also use fresh parsley. You can use chives as well. Totally up to you which herb you want to use. Then I put the egg in the bowl, I'm going to season it with some salt and pepper. I know some people like to do it later, but I find doing it before actually gives it a more even flavor because it seasons nicely. I prefer doing it that way. The first step, this is for the American scrambled egg, is going to crack two eggs. [NOISE] Perfect. Put about a tablespoon of cream. Let's put about two tablespoons to be even more tasty, and just a pinch of salt and pepper. Now what I'm going to do is use a fork and just whisk it like that so everything combines nicely. [NOISE] You can also use a whisk if you want, but just use a fork, it's more easier. [NOISE] Perfect. Once you see like all the goods are nicely combined, you don't see any goods which are separated, let's start cooking the egg. We cook the eggs. We just put the heat at medium-low. Not too high, but not too low as well. Something like that is good. Put a knob of butter. I know some people put a lot. I'm just going to put about one teaspoon. But if you want, you can put even more. [inaudible] I just want this to melt and start to sizzle just slightly, and then I put the eggs in it. [NOISE] Just take a spatula, and make sure it distributed the butter evenly everywhere. We just want it to melt nicely. Perfect. Now it's nicely melted. I'm just going to pour the eggs and you can see how the butter is sizzling, so that's good temperature. Pour the eggs. What we do is for the American style, we don't want to disturb it too much. We just keep getting it inside so we get slightly larger curds. Once it sets, you just push it inside. It keeps distributing. If you think that the heat feels too high, you can actually keep taking the pan out of the heat, so that it just tempers down a little bit. We can even lower the heat. Truly depends on your cookware. You see how those curds are forming. Slightly larger curds is what you're looking for. You still want to cook the eggs nicely. That's flowing here, you get curds, you want to keep breaking them. Now I can see that the heat is starting to become a little bit too much. What I'll do is I'll lower the heat slightly. I'll just gently cook through because it's almost done. Beautiful curds. I like keeping it slightly raw. But if you want to cook it more, you can also do that. Certainly up to you how much you want to cook it. For me, that is really good. Just take it off the heat because it's still going to keep cooking. I'm just going to add a tiny bit of cream just to finish it. Just add about one teaspoon of cream and just mix it together. Just like that. Break the curds slightly. You see how delicate those curds are. Beautiful. Let's put this on a plate. Perfect. I like to just finish it with a little bit of dried parsley on top, just gives a really nice flavor. Now let's taste it. You see those are such beautiful curds. See that? Still really soft, super creamy, and that's so delicious. It's really creamy. If you want to check if it's good, you just press it with your finger, and it shouldn't feel like you [inaudible] still quite custard-y. That's really good scrambled egg. Let's move on to the next one, which is our French-style scrambled egg. 4. Scrambled Egg: Classic French Style Eggs: For our French style scrambled egg, I'm doing the same thing which I did last time. I cracked two eggs. I'm going to put about two tablespoons of cream. You can also put milk if you like, totally up to you. Season it with salt and white pepper. Just a little bit of white pepper. Just a touch. Perfect and tiny bit of salt. [NOISE] Perfect. Let's just whisk it through. Perfect. When you get like this, you start cooking it. When we cook the French style eggs, you want to get the heat like medium-low, much lower than the American style eggs. [NOISE] That much is good. Put enough of butter, and let it melt slightly so that it coats the pan. These eggs, you want them to be flowy custardy and flowy creamy. When we cook it, we'll keep using a spatula to keep moving the egg around. Also we'll keep taking the pan off the heat so that it doesn't overcook. When you see the butter is melted and you still want some amount of butter to stay un-melted, because you want that to emulsifier with the egg as well. I'm going to pour the egg now. Compared to the previous egg, the heat is actually lower, the pan is less hot. Take your spatula and keep moving it around really vigorously, just like making a custard and keep taking it off the sides because you don't want the curds to be really big. The chunk of butter which was un-melted will combine with the egg and make it really creamy as well. Once you see it starts to set on the side, please take it away from the gas. Keep moving it around. Take the heat a little bit lower. Just cool down the pan a little bit. Put it on the gas again, and keep moving it around so it remains really smooth and custardy. Take it off the gas again. You see the small curds forming on the pan. Always keep taking it off the sides, because you don't want it to stick and become like big curds. You want the curds to remain really small. I can see that it's almost there. I'm actually going to switch off the heat now because the heat in the pan will cook the eggs. Beautiful. It's really good. I'm going to take this of the heat now and put it on a plate. Add about one tablespoon of cream as well in this. Some people even add Crème fraîche, you can even add cream cheese. It's totally up to you what you want to add. This will just give it a slightly more softer texture and just break up the curds as well. Because you want really small curds. Quite delicate. Perfect. It looks really good. Let's put this on a plate. You see how custardy that is. I worked in some restaurants which even cook it lesser than this. Like it almost looks like a risotto. That's how less they cook it. I tend to cook it a little bit more. But that depends on your personal taste. If you'd like a little bit less cooked, you can also do that. Just take it off the heat before. To finish it, I'm just going to be a little bit more parsley on top. It gives it a good flavor. Beautiful. Let's check the curd of this one. See how small the curd is. Really delicate and really nice. You can also put some cheese on top if you'd like. If you'd like putting some cheddar, even Parmesan, that also tastes really good on this. See how delicate that curd is. Really small curds and really soft as well. Let's taste it. That is so creamy. I actually prefer this one over the American eggs, but the American eggs are also really good. If you're making a sandwich, I like using those ones. But if you're serving on top of a toast, I like making these eggs. It's totally up to you which one you want to make. Both of them are really good, and both of them actually require a lot of skill. Practice this at home, and also post your pictures as well when you make it. After this, we're going to move on to the next egg recipe. 5. Fritata: Tomato, Chorizo and Mozzarella : In this lesson, we'll be making our tomato, chorizo, and mozzarella fritata. A fritata is actually one of my favorite ways to cook egg. It's super easy. You can use any leftover vegetables if you have from the previous day. It's just like a blank gun, and you can put anything you want. The template you follow when you make a fritata, is have any vegetable in it when you make it. I'm using tomatoes, you can also use asparagus, you can use peas, you can also use potatoes. Anything you want, you can use that. I like to combine that with a little bit of protein. I'm using some chorizo here, this is just to give flavor, and also some cheese. In this case, I'm using some mozzarella. Now, this is just some dry mozzarella. You can also use fresh one, and you can use feta as well you can use quark cheese. There are so many cheeses you can use. Also when I mix the egg, I like to mix a little bit of cream in it. You can also use a bit of milk if you want. Just gives a little bit of more lightness to the texture of the fritata. Also use any herb when you make it. I'm using some chopped parsley here. You can use basil, you can use the rosemary, thyme, anything you like. This is the template I like to follow when I make a fritata. Let's begin with the process. First step, what we'll do is you just make an infusion of oil. We'll just cook eschallots and chorizo together with some oil. Just infuse it nicely. Then we'll just put some chopped tomatoes inside to caramelize it, and then slowly, put in our egg mixture. Then you have two options after that. Either you can cook it in the oven or you can just put a lid on and just slowly cook it like that. In our case, we'll be cooking it in the oven. Let's begin with the process. The first step, what I'll do is I'll just cut the tomatoes in half. Just some cherry tomatoes. You can also use whole tomatoes and cut them. That also works completely fine. Just cutting them caramelizes them better and they cook better as well. Perfect. Just cut the last one. Nice. You have all the tomatoes. I'm just going to set this aside and then begin cutting a chorizo. After cutting the tomatoes, I'm just going to cut the eschallots in slices. to it quite thin so it caramelizes quite well, and also taste really nice. [NOISE] You can also use spring onion if you like. It works really bad, just keep this aside. With the chorizo, what I'm going to do is I've just stack them up together and I'll cut it. I can do a medium dice. Just do it like that, and cut it like this. Perfect. Now all the ingredients are ready. What I'm going to do is just mix the eggs together. I have that ready as well, and then you start cooking the egg. For the egg mixture, I'm going to use three eggs, as well as roughly about 20 to 30 ml of cream. Now you can reduce the cream if you like, if you want to make it healthier. But I just like putting a little bit, because it tastes really nice. I just crack the egg. [NOISE] Perfect. I'm going to add the cream now, just about four tablespoons. Season it with salt and black pepper, [NOISE] and just whisk it together. [NOISE] Perfect. When it's combined and you cannot see any egg whites, that means it's ready. Let's begin by our chorizo and eschallots. Before we start cooking, make sure to put your oven to preheat at the broiled section. Just the top of the oven should be heating at about 200 degrees Celsius. Perfect. I'm going to be using olive oil when I cook this. You can also use butter, but I find that olive oil gives better flavor. About that much should be good. Once this comes up to a little bit of heat, we'll be adding the chorizo, and you'll be cooking it really slowly, just infuses the oil. To the oil that has been preheating for about 15 seconds now, so I can see that it's quite hot, just add your chorizo, and let it infuse slowly. You see the oil is not super hard because you don't want the chorizo to burn. It should be just about sizzling. That's the heat you're looking for. Because of the heat is too high, the chorizo will just burn. But we actually want to infuse the flavor, so that has to be slow cooking. Let's add this point. I'm just going to lower my heat, which is about median low. [NOISE] That sizzle is really good. We want exactly that sizzle. You see I keep lifting the pan, because I don't want it to get too hot. Therefore the oil is nicely infusing. I'm going to infuse this for about 30 seconds, and then I will add my eschallots. Probably at this point, I'll just go in with all my eschallots. I'll start to infuse eschallots, and they still got all the flavors. [NOISE] This season is slightly because we want to season all the ingredients we put today. Let's break the eschallots, stirring a little bit. You just want the eschallots to soften and calamerize slightly, and it's oily smells so good. Make sure that your pan is at low key, so it cooks clearly fairly. Then you can see that the echelots are slightly soften slightly. We'll go in with the tomatoes. Tomatoes are basically soak in all the flavor from chorizo. [NOISE] Here they go. I'm just going to season the tomatoes as that and pepper [NOISE] You hear that nice sizzle sound. That's really nice. I can see that it's calamerizing very well. I probably cook it for another minute or so, and then I'll go in with the eggs [NOISE] The tomatoes I have been cooking for about three minutes now, and you can see that the skins are charged slightly, and the tomatoes also look great soft. At this point, I'm just going to go in with my eggs. Perfect. What I'II do is I just tried to distribute all the tomatoes in the center so that they're evenly distributed, and they are not all on the side. The bottom, I just wanted to cook for about a minute, then I put the cheese but a little bit of parsley and put it in the oven. Eggs have been cooking for about 30 seconds now, and you just burn the skin in the side side just start setting. I wanted this end just a little bit more, and then I'll put the cheese and the parsley. Let's check the sides now. It's been about one minute, and I can see that it's getting nice and golden o the bottom. That means it's ready, I shouldn't be cooking it anymore on the gas, and it's time to start baking it. Let's switch off the heat. Add a little bit of parsley on the top. Just to get a beautiful color on the egg, and I'm going to add the mozzarella cheese. This should take roughly about anywhere between two to three minutes in the oven. I'll just have a look when I'm cooking it because I don't want to overcook it as well. If it needs more time, that's fine, we'll give it more time. But it's always good to check it after two, three minutes. This mozzarella will just melt really nicely, and it'll be super stretchy and nice. Let's put this in the oven and we'll check after three minutes, and then we'll assess if you need to cook it more. Now, if you don't have an oven, you can do is you can just cover it with a lid and put it on really low heat and let it keep cooking. Let's pick this. After three minutes of cooking, this is what our fritata, looks like. It's rarely beautiful, and I think this is set. How do I check it? You can put a spatula inside and just in the center, and you just check. That comes out clean, that means that it's cooked. With eggs, you always want to slightly under cook them. Because as this stay in the pan they keep cooking. Because if you overcook it, the protein set too much. You don't want that. Either, you can just cut it in the pan itself, and what I'm going to show you is how you flip on the chopping board. Just take a silicon spatula, and make sure to move around the egg. It just loosens it from the side, so it doesn't stick. Then what we'll do is I'll just try to hold it in the center, and just gently roll it out, just like that. That looks really beautiful. You see how nicely that is cooked. All the cheese is nicely melted as well. To finish this, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to cut a piece, and then I'll put some basil on top, because that'll give it nice layout because we're using tomatoes. Just let it cool down for about two to three minutes, and then we'll go slice. To finish the fritata, I'm just going to add little bit of basil leaves on top. Just spread like that, and looks so beautiful. You can sell it to your friends just like this. It looks really nice. Let's cut a piece, and check the texture inside. That's so soft. Almost like a pizza, that all the corbs, you see the stretchy, cheese, are beautiful. I can't wait to have a bite of this. [NOISE] The tomatoes still so juicy, and really soft. See the texture inside the egg, it's super soft, but at the same time it's fully cooked. Let's taste it. That's so delicious. You get so much umami from the chorizo and eschallots, it just increases when you put the tomatoes and they become really soft and they become so juicy as well than they're cooking. The egg is really soft as well, because we didn't overcook it and we cooked it properly. When you cook at home, make sure not to overcook the egg and experiment with different feelings like you can put asparagus, spinach. You can even put like potatoes if you want. You can put all things you like. I hope you make this at home and send me pictures when you make this. 6. Poached Egg: How to Make a Perfect Poached Egg: In this lesson, we'll be learning how to poach eggs. Now poaching eggs actually might seem really hard, but once you get the hang of it, it's actually not that hard. I'll give you a few tips so that you can actually do this at home really easily. The first important tip, when you poach egg is make sure that your egg is as fresh as possible. Why do I say that? Is because when you actually crack the egg and put it in the water, if the egg is really old, the white will be really loose, and it will just get really cloudy when you put it in the water. But if the egg is fresh, the white will actually stick to the yolk, and it won't spread around in the water. That is why using fresh eggs is really important. The second tip I can give you is use a bigger pot if you are poaching eggs. Now, I understand, if you're just poaching egg for maybe one or two eggs, you can also use a smaller pot like this. But, if you're basically making eggs for professional cooking or even for guests, use a bigger pot when you poach eggs. When you use a bigger pot, you will get poached eggs which look slightly more like these round shape. When you make it in a smaller pot, you will get eggs which would be slightly more flatter shaped. Both will taste really good, it's just the shape which matters because in this smaller pot, the egg just tends to sink more but in the bigger one it tends to float, and you get a slightly better shape in this one. The third tip I can give you is uses sieve when we put the egg. Today when we poach the eggs, what I'll be doing is I'll be cracking the egg, sieving out egg whites which are loose, and then putting it in a ramekin, and then putting it in the water. That actually prevents the white from separating from the egg and floating in the water. You get a more neater poached egg. The fourth tip I can give you is that you'll be using a little bit of vinegar when we poach the egg. The vinegar, what it does is it basically coagulates the egg white better, so the egg white doesn't split, and it doesn't float around in the water. It sticks to the egg yolk and you get a better egg when you poach it. You can also do it without the vinegar, but I would advise use a little bit of vinegar when you're poaching the egg. I'll show you two methods of poaching eggs. The first method, what we'll do is we'll serve it immediately when we poach it. The second method I'll show you is what we actually practice in professional restaurants. We actually poach the egg slightly lesser than a fully poached egg. Then we put it in an iceberg, then whenever we want to serve it, we just quickly reheat the egg in hot water. I'll show you both the methods. You can choose whichever suits here. Let's begin with the process of poaching the eggs. The first step I like doing is putting hot water. I just heated some water in a kettle. You can also use cold water and then get it up to a boil as well. That's also completely fine. [NOISE] Perfect. You want the water just about two inches from the top. Now I'm going to put this on the gas and get it up to a boil. Set the gas at high heat. [NOISE] Put the water. Now we want to get this to a boil and also I'll add about one tablespoon of vinegar to this. About that much is good. You don't want to add too much because otherwise you will get too much flavor of the vinegar, and just stir together nicely. Our water is now ready. Now let's move on to separating the eggs. I'll show you how actually I like doing it. To prepare the eggs for poaching, just use a fine sieve. It should be really fine, it shouldn't be loose. Otherwise, all egg whites will go down. Make sure to get a really fine sieve. Crack the egg, [NOISE] and just sieve out the white. You will see some amount of white will start to flow down. You don't want all the white to go down, just the loose bits. Then you put your egg in our ramekin like that. This basically helps us a lot when we're poaching egg. You get a much better egg when you poach it. Perfect. Put this as well. Our eggs are now ready, let start poaching them. Once you see that your water just starts to steam a little bit and you're getting this really small boils, but it's still not really vigorous, but you're seeing small bubbles coming from the bottom, that's the perfect temperature to poach the egg. You don't want the water to be extremely hot because the egg white will set too fast and it becomes really rubbery. You want the heat to be gentle when you're poaching the egg. Our water is finally ready for poaching. What am I looking for? I'm just looking for steam coming out of the water, and also really small bubbles on the surface. You don't want anything more than that. You don't want the water to boil and you don't want the water to be really hot. Otherwise, the whites will set really fast and the yolk will also get really rubbery. You don't want that at all. This water is perfect for poaching. Now before I bought, I want to keep a towel ready because I want to take the egg out and put it on the towel to dry. Also, I want a spoon like this, a slotted spoon so I can take the egg out. When I put the egg in the water, I'll just stir it, just create a vortex. So the egg just curls around itself when I put the egg inside. Take the spoon in your hand and just make this vortex. It shouldn't be too vigorous as well because you don't want the egg white to go everywhere, but just a little bit. Then I'll stop, and then I'll pour the egg really quickly. Perfect. If you want, once it sets a little bit, you can push the white over the yolk. Maybe in 10-15 seconds what I'll do is I'll just drift the white like that so it pushes over the yolk, just like this. Perfect, that looks great. Now I'll set a timer for about 2 1/2 minutes to three minutes. You don't want to cook more than that. It's been about two minutes. I just wanted to show you the egg, how it looks like. You see that looks really beautiful. I think the white could just be set just a little bit more. But it looks really beautiful. I'll just give it 15 more seconds. Every egg this size, basically the poaching time differs. What I like doing is checking after every two minutes just to make sure that I'm not over-poaching it. Usually poaching takes anywhere between 2-3 minutes. Three minutes is the maximum I poach it for. Perfect. I think that should be good. I'm going to take it out now. We poached it for a total of 2 minutes and 20 seconds. That is perfect for me. The yolk is really running and the white as well is really nice. Just set this aside in your towel, and just let it cool down. What I like doing is before I poach another egg, I'll just take a sieve and just clean it up a little bit just so that if there are any parts of egg white, they get cleaned nicely. We're going to repeat the same process again. I'll show it to you again now. Just create a vortex like we did the previous time. Not too vigorous but just a little bit. Once you create it, I'm just going to go pour the egg. Perfect. Let the eggs set a little bit. Then I'm just going to push the white over the yolk like that. Just push it over so that it just wraps it around like a cheese ball, a little bit like a mozzarella ball. Don't worry if you get these bits of egg whites flowing. Don't worry about that. Perfect. That looks good. If you want to poach multiple eggs, I would suggest don't create a vertex. You can just pour the egg directly. They'll be a little bit flatter, but you can poach like that as well. In restaurants because we need to poach maybe 20-30 eggs at a time, we don't create a vertex which is basically put it just like that and just let it poach gently. At home I would suggest do one at a time just so that you can perfect the technique, then you can slowly increase it to two at a time. Don't start with a lot because you want to get the hang of the technique before. It's been two minutes on our second egg. Let's have a look at it now. Really gentle. I can still see the white needs just a little bit more time. I'll give it another, maybe 10-15 seconds. But it looks really nice. The technique of just putting the egg white over, it just curls over the white and actually looks really nice. It's been 2 minutes and 15 seconds. Now I think our egg must be done. You don't want to overcook it at all. That looks beautiful. The egg yolk is set, the whites are set really nicely as well. If you have these bits of egg whites over it, don't worry, we can just trim that later. Just set that aside as well. These are the three eggs that we poached. I think for me the best one was this one because it looks like a complete round. But the last one we did also looks really beautiful. It's completely fine if it spreads slightly, don't worry about it. The main thing is that the yolk should be really runny. Now, before we serve it in restaurants, what we do is we just tend to clean if there are any whites hanging out like that. You can use a small scissor to cut it as well, or you can use a towel as well. It's totally up to you how you want to do it. If you're using a towel, what you do is you just take the egg and just cleaning it like that. Just get rid of all the loose whites you have there so it looks more beautiful and more cleaner. Perfect. That looks much better than before. You can also use your hands if you want and just get rid of some of the loose whites which have covered the egg. Perfect. That looks much better. You see it's nicely covered and it's quite smooth. Eggs are set nicely. The yolk is still really runny. That's good. I'm going to put this on a plate and cut it and show you the inside as well. Just season your poached egg with a little bit of salt and a little bit of black pepper as well. Perfect. Let's cut into the yolk and check the interior. Wow, that is beautiful. You see how liquidy that is? We cooked that for about 2 minutes and 15 seconds. Cooking time completely depend on the size of your eggs as well. Just check based on how it looks like. The whites are also really nicely cooked. I'm really happy with that. Let's taste it. That tastes so delicious. It's really nice. It tastes so light and the yolks as well taste so amazing. 7. Poached Egg: Second Method of Poaching : Let's learn the second method of cooking the poached egg. This time, what we'll do is we'll slightly under cook the poached egg, and then put it in ice cold water to shock it, and stop the cooking. This is really useful, and we use this in restaurants as well because we actually cannot poach eggs for customers when they order, we poach them beforehand. We've stored them in the fridge after blanching it, and then we just cook it to auto. To reheat it, what we do is we just cool it down, and then basically put it in hot water for anywhere between 20-30 seconds, and then the egg feels like new. The tip to do this is slightly undercook the egg, put it in ice water, cool it down completely to stop the cooking, and then store it in the fridge. Whenever your guest come, you can just put it in slightly hot water just to reheat it. Let's begin. Water is nice and hot now. I'm going to do the same thing again. Just create a vortex like that and just quickly boil the egg. This time I'm going to cook it for two minutes because we are going to put it in the ice and reheat it later so we don't want to cook it fully this time. It's been about two minutes. Let's take the egg out with a sieve. Perfect, we can see that the yolk is still really running. Just sieve it nicely and directly put it in the ice water. I'm going to repeat the rest for the next eggs as well and then I'll put it in the ice water. Keep it in the ice water for at least five to ten minutes because you want it to completely stop cooking and become really cold. [BACKGROUND] It's been two minutes, let's take out our second egg. This also goes straight in the ice water. Our eggs have been cooling down for about ten minutes now. I'm going to take it out of the water. Make sure you sieve all the liquid from it and then place it on a tea towel. It dries out nicely here. I'm going to dry it out for about 5-10 minutes and then I'll put this in the fridge. Whenever I want to cook it, I can just reheat it back in hot water for anywhere between 20 to 30 seconds and that should be good to use. Let's assess our poached egg. You can see it's cooked slightly lesser than the previous one. The yolk should be more softer and less set because we are going to be blanching again when we serve it to our guests or our customers. I hope you guys learned techniques from this lesson. I would really want you to try making poached eggs at home. It's not that hard to make. It's super healthy as well. Just follow these techniques and make any method you want. You can make this method as well, or you can make the previous method if you're just serving immediately. I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Blanching: Preparing the Ingredients: In this lesson, we'll be learning the technique of blanching vegetables. Blanching is one of those techniques which we use almost every day in professional kitchens, because it's super versatile and it's a really good way to cook. What is blanching exactly? Is basically cooking vegetables, and boiling water, and then taking it out of the water, and putting it in ice water to stop the cooking immediately. Blanching basically preserves all the nutrition in the vegetables, and it also preserves the flavor, texture, as well as the color of the vegetables. It's really a healthy way to cook as well. We'll be learning how to cook carrots, asparagus, peas, and broccoli, but you can cook whatever vegetable is in season when you're cooking. Let's begin with this test. When we are blanching, make sure to have a really big pot for blanching because you need a lot of space for the vegetables to cook really evenly, as well as the water should be really hot when you're blanching. Almost up to a boil, but just below boil is also completely fine. Also if you can see I have a bowl here with ice cold water. It's really important to stop the cooking immediately after we blanch the vegetables because that actually maintains the color and the texture of the vegetable. Make sure this has some ice in it and it's really cold. Also, another important tool when we are blanching is this sieve. I'll just put the sieve here [NOISE] just so that I'm ready with it. Now sieve really helps us to take all the vegetables out really nicely, and it's super helpful when you're blanching. What I'm going to do now is just fill my pot with really hot water from a kettle. You can also start with cold water and get that up to a boil. But I find it just takes less time when you heat up water in a kettle and pour in the pot. Just pour hot water [NOISE] Perfect. We just want to fill the pot and leave about two inches of cap. You have enough space for the vegetables to cook. As well as when you put the vegetables to blanch the water will rise this far. After filling the water, I'm just going to season it with some sea salt. You can use any salt you like and you can make it as salty, as you want. I'm just going to put about 1-2 tablespoons of salt in this. Perfect. I think that should be good. Now after putting the salt, I just want to disperse it nicely so the water is evenly mixed with the salt. Perfect. Now I'm going to put this at the highest heat possible so that the water comes to a rolling boil and you start preparing our vegetables. After we've prepared the water to boil. Let's have a look at the vegetables we'll be blanching today. I have broccoli, carrots, asparagus, and peas. Now you can blanch a lot of other vegetables as well but I think these vegetables will cover all the techniques we need to learn. First I'll start cutting the vegetables. With the peas I don't need to cut them. This actually takes the least amount of time to blanch because it's really small. The smaller the vegetable, the easier it is to blanch, the bigger it is, the more time it will take. Also with broccoli as well, because it is more fibrous, so it takes more time to blanch compared to asparagus, which blanches really fast as well. Perfect. I'm going to prepare the broccoli first. What we'll do is we'll just cut the stem so just take it from the center [NOISE] and just go in, and one go out, this should come out. Now the stem in the broccoli is actually edible, but we have to trim this to use it [NOISE] Just get rid of the sides, because the outside is not really edible, but the inside part is really tender and tasty [NOISE] Perfect. You can use that. Set that aside. Now with the florets, what you can do is you can just take it off with your hand. You can even use your knife to get rid of the fibrous part of the stem [NOISE] It should just come off on its own just like that. Again, perfect. Just going to take it into smaller pieces. These pieces will blanch faster than these bigger pieces. You have to be mindful of that. Perfect. Let's set this aside. Next one, I'm going to prepare the asparagus. With the asparagus, we have to be careful because the end part of the asparagus is not really edible. What you do is you just apply a little bit of pressure and it should just come off really easily. Eventually, you can just take all of them together, and if you just apply a little bit of pressure, see, just easily comes off like that. Now with asparagus, what you can do is either you can just keep it whole like this, or you can even cut it in half if you like. It's totally up to you. I keep some of them whole, and some of them I just cut diagonally like this. It looks quite nice like that. Now these will cook faster than this so I'm going to put it separately. The last one we have is the carrot. Let's peel the carrot first. Now, carrot you can basically shape in any size you want. If you want like deep the carrot, you can cut like a button. Let's cut that actually [NOISE] You can even cut like a medium dice, and then you can use that as far. Perfect [NOISE] Just cut it into half, like this, and then one more. This carrot is quite big [NOISE] Now again, like how we did our knife skills. We just going to basically flatten one side of it [NOISE] Now this goes in the bottom, and you do the same technique like we did in our knife skill video [NOISE] Perfect. Set this aside. You can use this for stock, and you get like this piece. First, we'll cut like button, but you can actually use for dipping after blanching it [NOISE] Good. This you can basically blanch it and then serve it to your guests with a meal or any depth just quiet tasty. The next one. Let's just cut a dice [NOISE] Going to basically cut this into a medium dice [NOISE] Perfect [NOISE] Then you just stack them together [NOISE] Perfect. Just set this aside you can do the same for the rest of this as well [NOISE] All of our vegetable are now prepared for blanching. Let's begin. The first one I'll blanch is the most easiest one, which is our peas. Let's start this. 9. Blanching: Learning how to Blanch Vegetables: For our blanching oil make sure to put a lot of ice cubes in it because we want it to be super cold so that when you put the vegetables in it, the vegetable actually just becomes so green and nice. The color really shines through and the water is cold, so just put all the ice cubes and this is ready. Once the water comes up to a boil, you're going to take a sieve, and put my peas in there. This is going to cook really fast. I will probably give it a minute or something and just put this sieve directly here because if you put the peas inside this is going to scatter, and it's going to take a lot of time to get it out, so this is a really good method to do it. You can even put a little bit more deeper if you like, but make sure that it doesn't fall out from the sieve. Our peas have been cooking for about one minute now, and I'm just going to taste one just to see if it's done. Let's check. You see this thing, that's really nicely cooked. If you press it, it should be really soft. Then I taste it, I can taste that it has really nice seasoning because of the water. Let's take it out, and put it in our ice water. This goes straight in the ice water, and you just see that the cream color will just come out really nicely. Let it be inside for about a minute or two until it just cools down really nicely, and then we'll set it aside on a towel just to dry out. After about a couple of minutes I can see that it's really nicely cooled down. Just see that there's no water left, I'm just going to put this on a tea towel to dry. Perfect. Set this aside. Let's begin with our next vegetable. The next vegetable we're going to be cooking are carrots. First what I'll do is I'll put the big carrots, these ones, directly in the water because these are going to take longer to cook and then the dice goes in as well. Similar to how we cooked our peas, you can just let it be like this, let it cook slowly. This should take anywhere between about two minutes to cook, and the bigger ones should maybe take about 3-4 minutes. We'll have a look, we'll taste it, and we'll check if it's good. It's been about one and-a-half minutes. What I'm going to do is I'll just take one piece, and then put it on a chopping board, and cut it with a knife to check if it's ready. Let's just cut this and check, perfect. It offers a little bit of resistance, so I'm going to cook it just a little bit more. Now if you want to keep it really crunchy, that is definitely good enough. It's been a little about three minutes and our carrots are finally cooked, so I check them with a knife and it has a good consistency, so I'm happy with that. Let's put this in the ice water. See the moment I put it, the color becomes so bright, looks really beautiful. Just let it cool down for about two minutes, and let's have a look at the other carrots as well. Let's just check if this is cooked as well, so let's cut through it. That goes straight and that means it's definitely cooked. It's really nice. Perfect. Let's put that in the ice water as well. Our carrots are finally cooled down so you can just touch it, and feel that they're really cold. Let's put this as well on the tea towel. Perfect. Let's put the other ones as well, beautiful. You see how bright the color of the carrot is? It's so nice and bright, and it's really nicely cooked. If you want I cook this for about three and-a-half minutes, this one, and this one was about two and-a-half minutes. You can even cook it lesser depending on the consistency you want. Like if you want this to be really crunchy, just cook it for one and-a-half minutes to two minutes, that should be completely fine. Also, if you want to store it, this is a really good method of doing it because what happens is that if we cut the carrots like this and if you don't blanch it, it gets oxidized. But if you've got it, you blanch it and then you put it in cold water, it'll basically retain this color really nicely and for a long period of time. You can also freeze this if you like. If your carrots are getting spoiled you can blanch the carrot and put it in the freezer, so blanching is such an amazing method to preserve the vegetables. After cooking the carrots and peas, we're going to move on to cooking the broccoli. Once our water is hot enough, I'm going to go and drop these stems as well and the broccoli. I've cut the stems in smaller pieces so they cook faster. Whenever we cook a broccoli, and then we test the broccoli the stem always takes longer to cook than the floret, so we always check from the stem. Put this inside the water, and let this float. With broccoli the time can vary between 2-4 minutes, and also depending on the consistency you want. If you want to basically use it in salads and if you don't want to cook it too much, you can cook it lesser. We're going to set this aside for two minutes first and we'll have a look at the smaller ones and then we check if it's cooked. It's been about two minutes and I'm going to check the smaller florets to check if they are done, and if they are then I'll just take them out and let the bigger ones go for another minute. If I just cut through this, that is perfect for me. I want a little bit of bite on these ones. This ones are done, so I'll just take them out and put it in ice water. Just take the small ones out because those ones are done. The big ones, I give another minute or so and they'd be done as well. You don't want to go look up the broccoli because it just gets really soggy otherwise, so I tend to undercook them slightly. I like having a bite in the broccoli. Perfect. It's been about three minutes, so I'm going to take the bigger pieces as well and they're definitely done now. The stem I'm just going to leave it for another minute or so because the stem just takes longer time to cook. It's more fibrous and I'm going to show you how this looks like when I put it in water. This gets really green when you put it in ice water. You see the moment I put it inside the color just shines through, it looks so beautiful. After four minutes I'm going to take out the stems as well now because they're definitely cooked. Our broccoli has been in ice water for about three minutes now, and if you touch it, it should feel cool so let's put this as well in our tea towel to dry. Let's move on to our final vegetable which is the asparagus. The asparagus are hard but always cook faster than the stem because the stem is more fibrous and the head is more thinner as well. Whenever we cook this, I'll just do it separately. I put the stems first and the whole asparagus as well and I'll also put the head separately because they cook really fast, and I want to take them out before I take the other ones out. Let this cook for anywhere between 1-2 minutes. It's been about a couple of minutes, and I'm going to check if the head is cooked. Let's take out one of them, and put it on a chopping board. I like to just cut it from the center to check and it doesn't offer that much resistance, so that's good. Let's taste it. That is perfect, let's take this out. Just take out all the heads, and the rest of it I'll just keep cooking for about one or two minutes more because the fibrous part takes more time to cook. It's been about three and-a-half minutes now and asparagus are finally cooked. Asparagus usually take anywhere between 3-4 minutes to cook, but you don't want to go beyond four minutes because otherwise it just gets too mushy, and it doesn't taste good. Just take it out, and we are done with all our vegetables. Let's put this in the ice water. This goes straight in, and the moment I put it the color just stands out. Let it be in ice water for two, three minutes and then we'll take it out and drain it on a cloth. These are our finally blanched vegetables, so I just wanted to show you all of them and just revise the whole process again. The first thing we blanched was peas. Peas I blanched for about 45 seconds to one minute. If they are raw you blanch it for that much, but if you're getting frozen peas in the supermarket you blanch it for about 30 seconds. The second one we blanched was carrots. Carrots, depending on this side and the texture you want, blanch it accordingly. Totally up to you, the texture you want to blanch it. If I wanted to cook this slightly more longer I would have blanched it for longer, so keep tasting it and checking. The third one we blanched was broccoli. Broccoli we blanched for roughly about three minutes, and with broccoli it totally depends on the texture you want. You can blanch it even lesser if you based on the texture you like. The last one we blanched was asparagus. With asparagus we want to make sure that the heads we blanch it for lesser time than the stems. If you're blanching the whole asparagus don't blanch it for more than three minutes because otherwise it just gets too soggy and you don't want that. What we can do with these blanched vegetables, you can eat them as is. You can also basically take a pan, put some butter in, and just toast it together. That also taste really nice, you can also solve it in a salad. You can freeze it as well. There so many things you can do with blanched vegetables. Blanching is one of those techniques, but it just preserves the vegetables so well. 10. Vegetable Gratin: Understanding Ingredients: Let's have a look at the mise en place to make our cheese gratin. First, we'll be making a Bechamel sauce. Now with Bechamel sauce, you want equal parts of butter and all-purpose flour. So this is 40 grams of flour and 40 grams of butter. I'm using all-purpose flour here. So the liquid in the Bechamel is milk. I'm using cold milk here. Now what I like using is a ratio of one is to one is to 10. One part flour, one part butter, and ten parts of milk. In this case, I'm using a little bit more milk because I'm going to be adding cheese at the end and that will make it quite thick. So this is about 450 grams of milk, 40 gram of flour, and 40 grams of butter. Now, the cheese I'm going to be using today is just smoke cheddar. If you want to make a classical French one, you can use Gruyere and you can also use Conte if you want. Anything you like is perfectly fine, as long as it's a slightly drier cheese. Also one more thing I wanted to tell you is when we make the Bechamel today, we won't be seasoning it too much just till the end. Because we are going to be adding cheese to it and the cheese is quite salty in itself. Make sure of that, don't season it before. Season it at just at the end. Now, some other ingredients I wanted to show you was a nutmeg, this is really classic French cooking spice. The Bechamel always has nutmeg in French cooking. If you don't like the flavor of this, you can totally skip it. That's also completely fine. To bake the dish, I'm going to be using a 14-centimeter baking dish. You can use any baking dish you like, but I quite like this. It's quite handy and quite small. To prepare the baking dish, now this is a really nice trick which we use in French cooking. What we do is we just take a crushed garlic, just crush it slightly, and just line the baking dish. The scent of the garlic, just gives amazing flavor. All the oils of the garlic come out and give really nice flavor. Perfect. So this is a trick I wanted to show you. Before we cook our Bechamel sauce, what we'll do is we'll grate our cheese because we want to add this to our Bechamel. You can grate it slightly big, you don't have to do it really small. Just take a grater. The cheese I've divided today in two parts. The first part will go in our Bechamel sauce, and the second part I'm going to put before I bake it, just on top of the grater so that it melts and it just looks really nice. It's about 50 grams of cheese. Perfect. Do the rest to the other one as well. Perfect. I actually really like using this smoke cheddar because it gives such a nice and smoky flavor. So much on mommy as well. Perfect. Just set this aside in a bowl. We'll just be adding this. We finished making our Bechamel sauce, so when we add cheese to a Bechamel sauce, it's called my Mornay sauce. Just remember that. Perfect. Let's move on to making our Bechamel. 11. Vegetable Gratin: Making the Bechamel: The first step in making the Bechamel sauce is to get a pan and put it on medium heat. I'm just going to melt my butter. I don't want to brown it. I just want to melt it. Once this is melted, I'm going to add my flour in it. Softly the butter is pretty melted. You're going to go in with the flour. Just put the flour in one bowl and keep stirring it. We want to make a roux at this stage. Keep stirring the flour so it nicely combines with the butter. If you want you can also use a whisk at this stage, but I'm just going to use a spatula. It's completely fine. You just want the flour to cook slightly before you add in the milk. I also want to reduce the heat I need because I can see it's quite strong. Just on light heat should be good. Now I can see that the flour and the butter is nicely mixed. You see how I've lifted the pan off the heat because it's getting really hot. I didn't want it to be that hard. It smells so good. You can smell the butter and the flour cooking. You want this to be nicely multiplied. You don't want any lumps at all. Perfect, that looks good. I can see that the flour is nicely cooked out. I'm going to add the milk slowly and just take a whisk. I'm going to shift to a whisk now, so that it's easy to combine. Just going to add our milk really slowly. Little by a little and the rest. Don't worry about it, it will combine in the milk. Just keep whisking it and the mixture will become really smooth. Add the rest of the milk as well. So you see how I'm adding the milk in parts because it just combines better. We want a source without any lumps in it. You want to keep whisking it and with the heat, it will combine and become really smooth. Perfect. I'm going to go with the rest of the milk now. That's all the milk is in now. You want to cook this until it becomes a little bit thicker and it starts to boil. I can see that there are no lumps left anymore in the sauce, it's completely smooth. Keep whisking this, and this should take anywhere between 2-3 minutes. You'll see that it'll start come to a boil. You want to boil it for about one minute just to cook out the sauce really well. You see how that's come up to a boil now. Now we're going to just whisk it for another 30 seconds so that the sauce cooks out and emulsifies really well. Perfect, that is ready. Just take it off the heat. Just keep it on a cloth and keep whisking it. That's super silky. You see how thick that is. It's really nice. Now we're going to add about half my cheese, which we grated. You have to add the cheese when the sauce is still warm so that it melts nicely. Perfect, that should be good. Just whisk it. . That smells so good and it's really thick. Sometimes what happens is if you think that it's too thick, you can add just a touch of milk just to get it to the right consistency. Perfect. It looks good. Now I'm just going to taste it and check for seasoning. I'm going to add a little bit of nutmeg, a little bit of white pepper. If it needs a little bit of salt as well. We're going to add a tiny bit of nutmeg. Nutmeg is really strong so just a tiny bit. That should be more than enough. I'm going to add some white pepper. Just a tiny bit as well. Just mix it through. Let's taste it to see if it needs salt. Just see the consistency you see that. It's almost like custard. Looks beautiful. That needs a little bit of salt. I'm going to add some salt in it. Mix it well. Perfect, that should be good. Now, if you want to store the Bechamel, what you do is, you just put a plastic sheet on top. But the sheet should touch the skin. It shouldn't be like covered like that. It should actually touch the skin because sometimes when this cools down, it actually forms a skin on top and you don't want that to happen. Just take everything from the sides to level it out nicely. Just take a sheet of plastic and just put it on the surface of the Bechamel. Now when we rest the Bechamel. if it becomes too thick, what we'll do is we'll add maybe one-two tablespoons of milk just to lighten up slightly. Just let it rest for about 15 min and then we'll assemble our grata. At this point what you can do is you can put your oven to preheat. Add 180-degrees Celsius. When we put it in the oven, and the oven is nicely preheated so that the cheese can melt really well. 12. Vegetable Gratin: Assembling and Baking: Bechamel has been cooling down for about 15 min now, so let's have a look at it. Then the oven is also nicely preheated. It's really nice. I don't need to add more milk to that. That looks quite smooth and nice. Perfect. Let's start arranging our gratin. I'm going to add a little bit of Bechamel at the bottom just to create a base to spread it around then arrange the broccoli. Just like that. You can also use cauliflower if you like. That also works really well. I'm going to add the carrots as well. Just gives a nice color and flavor. This size is really nice. It's perfect for this. Finish it with some peas; super healthy. Perfect. It looks good. Now I'm going to cover this with the rest of my Bechamel sauce. I might not use all of it. Let's see how much we use. Just cover it nicely. Perfect. That looks good. I still have some Bechamel sauce left, and that's completely fine. I'm going to store that in the fridge. I can use it again. Just to finish it, what I'm going do is I'm going to create a little bit of nutmeg on the top and put your smoke cheddar, which we sliced before. I actually like putting a lot of cheese. It just tastes so good. Perfect. It's ready now to be. I'm just going put this on a tray, so it just gets easier to take it out. Let's bake this for about 20 minutes at 180-degrees Celsius. What I want to do is basically, because all the elements are already cooked, I just want to get a nice caramelization on the top. The cheese also should be nicely melted. Let's have a look at this after 20 minutes of baking. After 20 minutes of cooking it, this is how it looks like. Now, I want slightly more caramelization on the top. Now what I'll do is I'll change it to grill setting. Basically, the top element will be on, and I'll grill it for maybe about five, 10 minutes until the crafts sets nicely and it gets nicely charred. This is our gratin after 30 minutes of baking the dough. The first 20 minutes, we baked it at 180 degrees at the bake setting, and the last 10 minutes, we put it on grill just to get a nice color on the top. Now, I'm going to cool this down for 15-20 minutes so that the cheese sets nicely. If you want, you can eat it even now. That's no problem. But we'll have it after 15 minutes. To finish the gratin, we're just going to put a little bit of parsley on top. Now, do this step only when you're going to serve the gratin. This looks really beautiful. This is such an amazing way to use blanch vegetables, and I really hope you make this at home as well. 13. Tomato Bruschetta: Slow Roasting the Tomatoes: In this session, we'll be learning how to make a slow-roasted tomato bruschetta. Now tomatoes are really good when you slow-roast them at home. Slow roasting is a technique of cooking any vegetable or meat at a really low temperature for a longer duration of time. When you slow-roast tomatoes, you get a more sweeter flavor and jammy consistency, which goes really well with this bruschetta. Today I'm going to be using Burrata cheese, but you can also use feta goats or ricotta as well. Any soft cheese would work really well in this recipe. Also this recipe, you can make all the elements in advance and just assemble it when you go into self the dish. It's super versatile and I'm sure you will really like it. Let's begin with the lesson. Before we begin the process, let's have a look at the ingredients. I'm going to be using some cherry tomatoes to make this. You can also use whole tomatoes, but I like using cherry tomatoes in this recipe. For aromatics, I'm going to use some thyme, as well as some garlic. Now, with slow roasting the tomatoes, what is the difference between slow roasting and roasting at a higher temperature? The difference is that we're going to cook this at around 150 degrees Celsius for a longer time. What happens is when you slow roast a vegetable, more sweeter flavors actually come out, rather than bitter flavors. This will basically cook really slowly and all the sweetness would get caramelized and taste really nice. First step what we'll do is we'll just cut this in half and also get the garlic out of the skin and you'll toss it in oil and salt. Let's begin. Just cut the tomato from the center. Just like that, because we want to expose the skin and want to basically caramelize this spot. After you've cut the tomatoes, I'll just set this aside in a bowl and then I start preparing my garlic. Just put this in a bowl. What we'll do after we assembled everything is we'll just season with salt and some olive oil. Just clean your chopping board. Nice. I'd just like to take the head off the garlic and just smash it slightly. We're just using this for aromatics. It's completely fine. You don't need to take the skin out completely. But by smashing it, we're releasing the flavors, which is what we want. Perfect. This garlic as well will slow roast along with the tomatoes and it also tastes so nice. We'll be using this as well, l when we assemble our bruschetta. We have all the ingredients ready. Now, what I'll do is I'll just season the tomatoes with salt, black pepper, and extra virgin olive oil. Perfect. Just toss it nicely. The reason I'm doing this now and not in the pan, it's because if you do this like this method, it just got everything evenly. Your tomatoes get seasoned evenly. But if I do it in the pan, what would happen is that some part of the tomato will get seasoned and some of it won't. Perfect. After we've seasoned tomatoes with salt, pepper and olive oil, I'm just going to add my garlic inside as well as thyme. This is basically flavor the tomatoes and it will taste so nice. Just mix it together nicely so all the oil coats the thyme. Because if you put the thyme in the oven with the tomatoes and if it's not coated with oil, it will tend to burn. It's important that the oil coats the garlic as well as the thyme. Perfect. I'm just going to set this aside for 10 minutes, so some amount of liquid can release from the tomatoes so I can drain that. While this is resting, we're going to preheat the oven at 150 degrees Celsius for about 10-15 minutes. Let's have a look at this after 10 minutes. It's been 10 minutes. Now let's just take out all the liquid this tomato has released. This just helps basically to caramelize it if you just remove a little bit of liquid. Perfect. The tomatoes are nicely seasoned and the garlic and the thyme as well has flavored it slightly. To slow roast the tomatoes, there are two options now. You can just put it on a tray with baking paper and put it in the oven directly or you can do it a second way, which I'm going to show you is to basically caramelize it on the pan for about 1-2 minutes and just putting it in the oven. You can do it either way. I'll just show you the second way now. To cook the tomatoes, I'm going to be using a cast iron pan and I'll put the gas at about medium flame. To season the pan, I'm going to be using a little bit of olive oil. This is just some cooking olive oil. Spread it around and let the pan heat up slightly, then I'll put the tomatoes to caramelize. Our pan has been heating for about 30 seconds now and I can feel it's slightly hot. Just going with the tomatoes and be a little bit far away because it's going to splash a lit bit because of the water and the tomatoes. Once you put it face down, I'm just going to sit it here for about 1-2 minutes, and then I get a slight amount of caramelization. Then I'll show you how it looks like and then we put it in the oven. Our tomatoes have been caramelizing for two minutes now and I don't want to go beyond this one. What I do is I just toss the tomatoes slightly. Now this basically goes in the oven. Now this can take anywhere between 30 minutes to one hour. Completely depends on the size of your tomatoes and also the stage you want to take this too. Say, if you're making sun-dried tomato texture, you can cook it for one hour. If you want to just caramelize it and just reduce it slightly, you can do it for 30 minutes. What I'll do is I cook it for 30 minutes first and I'll show you how it looks like. Then we'll assess if you have to cook it more than that. Perfect. Let's put this in the oven. After 30 minutes, this is how our tomatoes look like. You see the texture it's so juicy and it reduced in size as far as all the flavor has got concentrated. I can also see it's got caramelized really bad. What I'm going to do is I'm going to cook it for 10 minutes more because I want them to be slightly more drier than this. Let's put this for 10 more minutes in the oven, and then I'll show you how it looks like. After 10 minutes of cooking, our tomatoes are finally ready and they look so beautiful and at least smells so nice as well. What I'll do is I'll just take it off the pan and put it in a bowl and then we'll move on to the next element of our bruschetta. 14. Tomato Bruschetta: Assembling the Bruschetta: After you've set aside the roasted tomatoes in a bowl, let's have a look at the other ingredients we'll be using to make the bruschetta. I'm going to be using some burrata cheese this time, but you can also use ricotta cheese if you like, you can use ricotta as well, so totally up to you. Any soft cheese will work really well. I'm also going to finish the bruschetta with some chopped parsley. You can use basil but basil is not in season currently, so I'm using parsley. Also I'm using two slices of sourdough bread. You can use any bread here. You can use a baguette as well, as long as it's a lean dough, because it tastes really nice with that. Before I assemble the sandwich, what I'll do is I'll slightly toast this on a pan so that they get really nice set of caramelization. As well as what it does is it basically stops the bread from getting soggy when we put all the fillings on top of it. Let's begin. Just take the two slices of your soughdough bread, and I'm going to put some olive oil on top of this. You can also use butter totally up to you. Just drizzle olive oil and on the other side as well. We just basically want it to get a nice crust on top and let's get a ban under here, and let's start galvanizing it. I'm going to use a cast-iron pan and put the gas in about medium flame. Perfect. I'm going to put a little bit of oil on the pan, not too much because we've already put oil on the bread. Just that much should be good. Just take your bread and just spread the oil around a little bit, so it seasons nicely. Perfect. Let it come to a little bit of heat then we put the bread on. Now if you want, you can also toast the bread in the toaster, or you can even bake the bread in the oven for about 10 minutes at 180 degrees. You can also do that, so totally up to you. I like doing this method because it gives a really nice crust when you do it on a pan. It's been about 30 seconds, and I can see that the pan is quite warm. Just put your bread, and make sure you press it so that all the surface touches, and there is no uneven spots. Now I'm going to lower the heat slightly so it's like medium low, and it's going to just slowly form a crust there. You don't want to do this too fast. After two minutes of toasting the bread, I just wanted to show you how it looks like. You see that beautiful golden color forming there, I think it just needs a little bit more. I'll just let it go for one more minute, and I'll have a look at the other one as well. This one is almost there. See, so that is the color I am looking for, that golden color, so tasty. Just let it go for another minute, and then we flip the bread. It's been about three minutes, and let's have a look at the bread now. Perfect. You see that golden color, that's exactly what you're looking for. Tasty. Let's do it another two three minutes on the other side. [NOISE] After three minutes, our bread has been toasted nicely on both the sides. Let's start assembling the bruschetta. Let's have a look at the first method of assembling the bruschetta. In this case, we won't be finishing it in the oven, which speak keeping the bruschetta on top of the tomatoes. First what I'll do is, I'll take my garlic. This is like a config garlic with roasted really nicely, super soft. What we'll do is we'll just spread the garlic on the crust, so it just gives really nice flavor. Take about two pieces, you can do the same trick to like pizza as well. You know, it tastes really nice. Just gets stuck so sweet when the garlic goes really slowly. Now we put the tomatoes to spread them. Just about that much should be good. Because the tomatoes also taste quite strong because they're roasted. To finish it, you're going to put a little bit of burrata cheese. You just want to get the cuts, and I like breaking it with my hand because it's more natural. You strain it and just break it with your hand just like that. You get all the nice goods there on the top, beautiful. You can also put a little bit of the cream just to finish the curd. To finish it, we can have a little bit of parsley on the top and just a little bit of extra virgin olive oil. This one is our final bruschetta, it's got such amazing flavors with the roasted garlic on the base. Then you have the slow roasted tomatoes, burrata cheese, finished with parsley and olive oil. It's so delicious. After this, let's move on to the next method of making it, in which will actually bake the cheese in the oven. The second bruschetta, I'm going to assemble the exact same way as the previous one. Separate the garlic, and just spread it around with the tomatoes as well. For the second method, I've put the tomatoes and the garlic, just like I did for the previous bruschetta. This time, I'll put the cheese on top. I keep like bigger chunk slightly because they're going to be baking. You can use like dried mozzarella as well. In this recipe, you don't need to use fresh one you're baking it. Perfect. Now let's put this in the oven at grill setting. Just when you see that the cheese starts to melt, should take anywhere between like two to three minutes should be good. After cooking three minutes on the grill setting, actually is as nicely melted. Let's cut into it and see how it looks like. [NOISE] See here it's done, it's like the bread is so nicely toasted. Lets take a bite. That is so delicious. I actually prefer this one over the previous one, because the melted cheese actually tastes even better than the fresh one, it's totally up to you which one you prefer. You can also make this in advance if you like. You can make all the elements in advance and just assemble it at the end. It's super convenient to make, and it's super delicious as well. We learn so many techniques while we made this bruschetta, and I hope you make this at home as well. 15. Chicken: How to Cut and Prepare a Chicken: We finally reached the third section of this class. So in this section we'll be covering how to butcher our chicken as well as make really delicious fancier chicken breast with the rocket salad, and [inaudible]. Butchering a chicken is a really good skill to have as a home cook because you can select a more fresher piece of chicken. Also, you can cut it according to how you want and you can even use the bones to make chicken stock. So it's super economical to buy a whole chicken and it's also a really good skill to have. Let's learn how to butcher our whole chicken. The first thing I'm going to do is show you the setup to do this. So 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 you debone the chicken make sure to be as hygienic as possible, so we will be using two towels in that case. The first towel will be just for my hands. When I wash it, I just cleaned my hands with it and 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. 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 a 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 bad, it just moves too much and you don't want to injure your hand. Just dry it at the back as well, and 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. 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, so 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 and I cut the tie. You see this incision here. You just basically cut it like that. Then you just turn the chicken around and 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 and just set up. Gently guide it through 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. [NOISE] Perfect. You see this bone here, you just go through it [NOISE] and you get your thigh. [NOISE] Similarly for the next one as well. We just go through this line here at the back and you go through the oyster. [NOISE] This oyster, this line. Then what you do is you just take the bone out like that and just follow the bone and gently [NOISE] 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's basically a gap. If you move the wing it moves like this. Just below the cartilage, just take your knife like that and then you break [NOISE] it slightly. Then once it breaks, you just follow the cartilage [NOISE] and then it should just come out clearly easily. Similar to this as well. You just go below [NOISE] the cartilage and just take it off like that. That's your wings and your legs. Now for the breast, 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 a 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 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 [NOISE] and it should come off quite easily. [NOISE] Perfect. I'm just going to set this backbone aside. I'lI 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 with that line and just guide you knife through. [NOISE] Just guide your knife through inside. The meat should just fall off. [NOISE] Don't worry if there's some meat left there, that's completely fine. [NOISE] Perfect. That's our chicken breast, and then you'll have the tenderloin as well, which will be attached to that. 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, and now we'll do the similar thing here. It's almost like when you fillet a fish, you just go through the bone. We 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. [NOISE] Now we're just going to take the tenderloin out. Perfect. You might have some bone here from the wishbone so make sure to take that out as well. [NOISE] Just so that it doesn't come out. [NOISE] See that's the wishbone. Set this aside as well [NOISE] and that's your chicken breast. You've got one breast here. That's your two tenderloins. That's the other chicken breast as well, and make sure the skin is on nicely. Those are your wings and those are your legs. Now to cut the legs, what we'll do is, we'll just go along the fat line and the joint. You see 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 and it should come out. This should be white, this shouldn't be red and you cut it. Just set this aside, so that's your leg, that's your thigh. That's our final chicken. See how many pieces we could get from one chicken and 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 deboned the chicken breast by going through the center and just going through the bone, and just guided our knife throughout so it comes out. Then we took out the 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 and different preparations, and you have to cook them differently because the chicken breast cooks faster. These parts take more time. Tenderloin is the fastest one to cook. This is for stir fries. This one you can use roasting as well, braising. These ones are slow cook, like for soups, for braising as well and this one I usually tend to use in stocks. Or you can even make of chicken wings, but you can fry 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. 16. Chicken Breast: Making the Pine Nut Salsa: In this lesson, we'll be covering our last recipe which is a pan seared chicken breast. When you make this recipe, a few things you need to be careful of is to make sure that you don't overcook the chicken breast. Make sure you use a thermometer to check the temperature of the chicken so that you don't overcook it. Secondly, and the most important thing, is to rest the meat after you cook it, so all the juices stay inside the meat, and it stays super tender. Another tip I can give you is to always make sure that the salsa is completely submerged in oil so that the parsley does not get oxidized. Also, make sure to make the rocket salad just before you go on to serve the dish. Because otherwise, if you make this salad beforehand, the leaves can get a little bit soggy. Make sure you do it at the last moment. Let's begin with this recipe. Before we begin with the recipe, let's try to understand the ingredients and a little bit about the process of cooking this dish. The dish is really simple. It has three elements. The first one is our chicken breast, which is going to be seared as well as roasted in the oven. The second element is our pine nut salsa, which is also really easy to make, super delicious. The third one is our rocket salad. If you combine these three elements together, they become a really nice dish. This is very similar to a dish I used to make when I used to work in a fine dining restaurant. It's super delicious. What we'll do is, first, we just want to dry the skin of the chicken because we don't want it to be too wet when we sear it. In professional kitchens, what we do is we just clean it like that. Sometimes we even put it in a fridge uncovered, so that it just dries it out slightly, because that just forms a better crust when you sear the breast. Just dry it slightly here because otherwise it just leaks too much water when you cook it. [NOISE] That looks good. Set this aside. Next, what I'll do is, I'll just get the chicken breast to room temperature. Because if you cook any meat when it's cold, it just doesn't cook properly. It releases a lot of water and doesn't cook from the inside properly. It's always good to just store the meat a little bit outside at room temperature for about 30 minutes. I'm just going to set this aside for 30 minutes, and I'm going to get all my other ingredients ready, so that I'm just well prepared for the dish. To make the pine nut salsa, what we will do is, we'll just roast this in a little bit of butter in a pan, so that they don't taste raw. Because at this point they are raw pine nuts, and you want to just cook that rawness out, as well as caramelize it to give it a really nice flavor. We're also going to finally chop our parsley. What we'll do is after we've roasted these, we'll set this aside to cool down. We'll mix that with the parsley, add the olive oil, add a little bit of lemon zest and lemon juice, and that will be our pine nut salsa. This just gives a really fresh taste to the chicken when we just dress it on top when we plate it. Let's begin with the first step of roasting our pine nuts. To roast the pine nuts, we're just going to put the gas on medium flame. [NOISE] You don't want it too strong as that, otherwise, the pine nuts will tend to burn. Just add about one table spoon of butter. You can add just a little bit more. [NOISE] Roughly about 20 grams of butter. [NOISE] As the butter melts, it will brown and pine nuts will also get a really nice flavor. [NOISE] Once your butter starts to sizzle slightly, I'm going to go in with the pine nuts. [NOISE] Lower the heat to low. [NOISE] [inaudible] This cooks quite fast, just be mindful and keep a close watch of it. You don't want it to burn at all. [NOISE] I've been cooking the pine nuts for about one minute now. The mixed solids have started to just caramelized so that would also get really nice texture and flavor because the butter will brown as well. The heat is still at low, you don't want it to be high. Just keep checking how to the pine nuts are looking. You see it's just starting to brown, but you want a little bit more cooked than that. [NOISE] After 30 more seconds, I can see that the pine nuts have browned really nicely. You see that color, that is perfect. You want to switch off the gas now because the residual heat of the pan will also keep cooking it, and you don't want it to become darker than this. Otherwise they taste really bitter. But for me, this color is absolutely perfect. I'm just going to set this aside in a bowl to cool down. [NOISE] While I'm waiting for the pine nuts to cool down, let's quickly chop our parsley. [NOISE] What we'll do is, as I showed you before, you just grab the parsley in a bunch like this, just curl it up, get it together. [NOISE] You see how that's makes it so easy. [NOISE] Perfect. I just go over it one more time. [NOISE] Perfect. That looks pretty good to me. Now, you don't want it too fine as well because you want to keep the flavor inside the parsley. If I cut it too many times, the flavor will start to release, and I don't want that. For me, this is perfect. This would be really good. Also make sure your chef's knife is really sharp when you're doing it because with herbs, you want to preserve the flavor in the herb. Perfect. [NOISE] Set this aside. [NOISE] We have all the [inaudible] to make our pine nuts salsa. Our pine nuts have also cooled down, so it's perfect to use now. The first thing I'll do is, I'll just put a bunch of parsley in the bowl. [NOISE] I'm not going to use all of it. If I need, I'll add more. Just based on how much I have. The next, what I'll do is, I'll add the pine nuts in, add the butter as well because that has a lot of flavor. [NOISE] Add your olive oil. This is extra virgin olive oil. It's really delicious. [NOISE] Let's mix this together. [NOISE] I go in with the rest of the parsley, because I think the salsa needs it and oil as well. [NOISE] This recipe, you can keep adapting it based on the texture you like. I can see that this needs a little bit more oil, so I'll just add a little bit more oil to this. [NOISE] Just add about one table spoon more. You want the parsley to actually just submerge in the oil, because that will preserve the parsley, and it won't oxidize. That looks good to me. I'm going to give you the recipe, but just eyeball it. If it needs some adjustments, just do it, because cooking is so intuitive. You can't actually give exact measurements for everything. This texture looks really nice. At this point, I'm going to zest one lemon. Now this will basically go through the fat a little bit, [NOISE] and also give really nice flavor. [NOISE] I zested about half the lemon, [NOISE] and then I'll taste it and I'll see if I need more. Just take all zest from the bottom as well. Just add the juice. Now, this will basically give a really nice flavor and also cut through the fat really well. [NOISE] After adding the lemon juice and the zest, you're going to season it with salt, and let's mix it together. [NOISE] That looks really beautiful, so fresh. [NOISE] Now I'm going to taste this. As this sits, it actually becomes even better. Let's taste it for seasoning. [NOISE] That tastes so good. It just needs a little bit more salt. I'm going to put a little bit of pepper as far. [NOISE] Perfect. Let's mix this together. As the salsa sits, sometimes the parsley keeps absorbing the oil, so keep topping it, so it's submerged in the oil. [NOISE] Perfect. Let's mix this together nicely. Even in the restaurant when we make this, we keep topping it with oil and just adjusting with seasoning as we do the service. [NOISE] The dressing taste delicious. I just want to show you that texture again. You see the texture is little bit runny. That's exactly what you want, because you are going to be pouring this on the chicken breast and you don't want it to be too solid as well. Also make sure that the parsley is always submerged in the oil, just like a pesto. After you've made this, let's start cooking the chicken, and then we assemble the final dish. 17. Chicken Breast: Cooking the Chicken Breast: After 30 minutes, the chicken breast has come to room temperature and it's perfectly ready to cook. I'll just show you my Amazon plus for cooking the chicken breast. The flavored chicken breast, I'm going to be using some thyme and also garlic and you don't need to deskin the garlic, you can just leave it like that. This is just aromatic, just to flavor it. I'm also going to use some olive oil to cook it. Now, don't use extra virgin olive oil. Just use cooking olive oil because extra virgin can get really bitter at high temperatures. I'm also going to be using a little bit of butter when I add the aromatics. I'm also going to season this with salt and black pepper before I start cooking. So let's season it. Season from the top very genorously. The reason I like this season, the top of the chicken breast is because this will be gone the bottom when I start cooking it. Also, when the chicken breast has too much water on top of it, the seasoning doesn't stick. That is also a reason why we tend to dry the chicken breast before we cook it. Put a little bit of black pepper on top. Perfect. So let's get our cast-iron pan preheated and we start cooking the chicken breast. Also, make sure to put your oven at 180 degrees Celsius before you start cooking the chicken breast, because we are going to be baking the chicken breast after we sear it, just so that it cooks really nicely from the inside. So let's start cooking the chicken breast. I've got a cast iron pan here, and I'm going to put this at high heat. Just season it with our cooking oil. This is olive oil, just about that much. Make sure to just spread it around. So all the parts of the pan are covered with the oil. Perfect. Now let's wait for the oil to heat up slightly then we put the check breast inside. Just take the excess oil and just put it back in the container. You don't want too much oil, just about that much is good. So once this gets a little bit hotter, I will put the chicken breast to start searing in the pan. When we sear the chicken breast, I really like using these tongs. They are so helpful even in professional kitchens, we use this all the time. You can see the oil is just added above it slightly. So let's test if this is hot enough. You see there is no sears, so that means that's not hot enough. Let's give it a little bit more time. I think that it's good. You get it turned. I'm going to season the other side as well. Add pepper as well. That the chicken has been searing for about two minutes now. Let's have a look at the surface. You see that beautifully golden surface there. That look surely nice. The chicken breast has been cooking on the other side for about two minutes now. So I'm going to go in with my butter as well as my aromatic at this stage. You put the butter in one corner. Now what you do is use it to baste the chicken with this butter and is surely nice flavor. Perfect. Switch off the heat at this point. Just place the garlic and the thyme on top of the chicken, so when it cooks, it releases a lot of flavor as well as this fruit. Add butter on top of the chicken as well, so when it cooks, it just infuses very nicely. Perfect. So let's put this in the oven now and we have a look after five minutes. It's been about five minutes, and the chicken looks really beautiful. It's got such a nice and golden color. So let's check the temperature with a thermometer. What I like to me when I check the temperature is I don't like putting it like this because you don't get a good gauge of temperature. You should always put it from the beginning to the center here. Just like that. If you put it deep inside in the center and check. This is showing about 71 degrees and we want to cook this anywhere between 70-75. That is really good for a chicken breast. This appears that it's definitely cooked to the level we wanted. Also, another test you can do is that when you put your thermometer in, you'll see clear juice is coming out of the chicken. That means that it's cooked as well. Now, this might take more longer in your oven, so don't be afraid, just cook it longer if it's taking more time to get to that temperature. Also, another way to check is to press the chicken in the center and it should feel slightly formed, that means that it's nicely cooked. Since we've confirmed that this is cooked, what we're going to do now is let this cool down and we'll just put it on a plate, put all the juices on top of it. Because cooling down the meat after you cook it is essential. Because what happens is when you cook the meat, all the juices go in the center. If you cut the meat right now, all the juices will just flow out. But as the meat rest, the juices start to flow through all the parts of the meat and makes it really soft. So never cut any meat right out of the pan. Always wait, let it rest for about five, 10 minutes before cutting it. So let's put this on a plate and let it rest nicely. Just put the juices on the top as well. Sometimes we even use the juice to make a sauce. But in this case, I'm not going to be doing that because we are making a pine nuts salsa. But you could also reduce the juices and put a little bit of butter in it and it'll become a pan sauce. You can do that as well. So just let this cool down for about five, 10 minutes and then we'll cut it and we start plating it. 18. Chicken Breast: Plating the Dish and Tasting: Our chicken has been cooling down for about five minutes now. It looks pretty good. I'm going to show you how I'm going to cut it to plate the dish. Just take away all the garlic and thyme. What we'll do is we try to go like this. Instead of going straight, we're going like this. I'll show you. You want to just go in one go just like this, and drag it like that. Go inside and drag it. We don't want to go here and then do like this. We don't want to do that. I just want to go in one go and drag it back. The final one. When we blade this, what I'll do is I just take the bottom half off because it doesn't look very nice. Just lift it like this. You'll just find it out. You can see the white meat looks really beautiful. Just layer it together nicely, just like this. Then we'll put the sauce on top. We also put the binding salts as well. I'll show it to you again. I'm going to cut it. This time I cut it slightly thicker because I find this easier. You can also cut thinner than this if you like. It's totally up to you how you want to do it. Let's have a look again how to cut this. We're going to take our meat, then start from the corner. One go just like that. This time I've got a little bit more thinner than last time, it looks even more beautiful. You see how my knife goes and your knife should be really sharp when you're doing this. You get really neat cuts. Perfect. You see, that looks even neater than before. You just find that out like that. You should be able to see that beautiful white meat when you eat it. It looks really nice. Perfect. Let's start plating this. After we've portioned the chicken breast, as well as made the pine nuts salsa, the last element we need to prepare is a rocket salad. Rocket leaves are actually quite spicy and flavor and it cuts through the fat of the whole dish. It's quite nice to use this, but you can use any other lettuce leaves as well if you like. Now, when I dress this today, I'm going to keep it super simple. Put olive oil, little bit of lemon juice, and salt, that's it. Nothing more than that. Now this, we actually don't want to season it or dress it too much because we want this to actually stand. We want to give it height when we plate it. All I'm going to do is put a little bit of olive oil. Just about that much, not even half a teaspoon and just a dash of lemon juice. Just for freshness. That's it. Season it with some salt. Now when we do it, we don't even going to touch it that much. You just move the bowl and just do it like this. Then we mix it because we don't want to disturb the leaf at all. The leaves are so delicate. You can see the olive oil and lemon juice has coated the leaves really nicely. I'm just going to taste one. That tastes really good. Perfect. Let's start plating now. I'm going to be using a deep plate to put the chicken because this looks really nice. We're going to put the chicken on this half and the salad on this half. We space it really nicely. Just lift the chicken with your knife, put it in one corner like that, and just sort of fan it out a bit, so it looks really beautiful. You can see the white flesh of the chicken. See how that looks. You have the skin on the top and you can see they're really nice flesh here. Now just to season it, I'm going to put a little bit of the chicken juices, which I had on the plate so that it just gets really nice flavor. Beautiful. Also, if you like, you can put two garlic bulbs, which we had used for basting the chicken. This is really soft right now, it's completely cooked. This is optional. It just gives really nice flavor. That's why I'm putting it here. Just like hidden there. Take your salsa. Just mix it really well. You're not going to be using a lot, just a little bit. Because the salsa flavor is quite strong. Take a lot of pine nuts here. Just season it like this. You can actually make the dishes without the salsa if you like, just with the juices. But I find that this gives really nice flavor. Now I'm not taking too much of the oil. I'm just trying to take the parsley and pine nuts from the top. Perfect. That looks good. To finish the dish, we're going to be putting our rocket salad. When you pick up the rocket salad, we just want to grab everything in one go with a very light hand. Because we want to just let it fall naturally and give it a lot of height. Just gently. Put it like that. See how much high that gets. You don't want it to be flat. Usually serve tall. Just clear the space on the side. Perfect. Super simple dish, but really delicious. This is what our final dish looks like. That looks so beautiful. Let's taste this and see how it tastes like. Just take some of the chicken, take the sauce as well in the bottom and you can put a little bit of the salad on top. Let's taste it. That is so delicious. I can see such different flavors which complement each other. Like the pine nut, parsley, the chicken, it just compliments each other so well. The rocket as well, to skip that acidity which has cut through the fat of the chicken. I also wanted to show you like the chicken is so tender and I cut through it. It's so juicy as well. If you press it, you can just see it's so soft. It looks really nice. When you cook your chicken breasts, don't overcook it. Always use a thermometer to check. In your case, it might even take longer than it did for my chicken. Give it time, but always check with a thermometer, and never overcook a chicken breast. Always rest the meat when you cook it just to get a really nice and juicy meat. Try different combinations with the techniques I've shown you in this lesson and you can try different salads, even different sauces if you like on top. I can't wait for you to make this at home. I hope you enjoyed this lesson.