Transcripts
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.