Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey guys. I'm Kenny Monroe. I'm a chef at Bruno Pizza in the East Village in New York City, and a chef and farmer at the farm on Kant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I'm Christian Perkins. I'm a butcher at Foster Sundry in Brooklyn, New York. Today we're here to teach you about the basic building blocks of cooking. We believe that cooking is really just a collection of patterns. Our objective here is to teach you those patterns so that you can feel comfortable applying this to a whole different range of products. We want to give you the tools, techniques, and skills necessary to be able to cook good, healthy, seasonal food without needing to follow exact recipes. Cooking this way is affordable, healthy, and fulfilling. We're super excited to have you guys on for our class. Let's jump in.
2. Class Project: All right, your project for this class is just to follow along with us as we go. For the first part, we'd love for you to go to your local farmers market and grab some produce and take a picture of it and share it on the class site. For the second part, check out your pantry at home, give us a list of what you've got in your dry goods, in your closet, and what kind of pots and pans you're working with. For the third part, we'd love for you to recreate one of the dishes or components of dishes that we make in class today and share a photo on the class site. Finally, we'll get creative with a dish of your own design. Take some of the skills that we show you and make a dish completely around and share it with us. So last thing before we get started, we need to head over to our local farmers market and grab a couple last minute of things. All right, let's go check it out.
3. Farmers Market: Here we are at the Tompkins Square Park Greenmarket on the coldest day of the year in New York City. I'm going to go grab some produce. Let's go check it out. Cool. What do you think are the best apples you guys have just for a sweet sack and crunchy? Fuji. The Fuji? Yes. All right. Cool. Thank you. The great thing about the market is that you're right here with farmers. You have all this different selection. You can try out one apple, see if it works for you before you commit to buying a whole lot of it. Yeah. My favorite thing about the farmers' market is that the experts are right here for you, the farmers. If there's a vegetable you haven't tried before or if there's something new, you can ask your farmer about it, see what is the best for your certain application. Today we want a really crispy apple for our salad. Thinking about maybe a Pink Lady or a Fuji. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. Let's grab some. All right. We're going to grab these. [inaudible]. Six. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks too. You want a bag? No, I could throw it in here. [inaudible]. Awesome. Thanks a lot. Have a good day. [inaudible]
4. Pantry: Let's talk about the basics that you want in your pantry. First, before anything else, salt and pepper. I want to have a nice fine grained sea salt and fresh cracked black pepper. So peppercorns, get yourself a pepper grinder, it's really important, much better flavor than the pre-ground pepper. Absolutely. Next, olive oil. You don't have to get yourself a $60 bottle of olive oil. A nice $20 bottle can be just as good for dressing, finishing dishes with whenever you like. Yeah, nice all-around, although that's good for cooking and good for salads. Again, although it's just like picking out anything else, read the label. Some of them will have descriptors like peppery, buttery on the outside, or just ask someone at your local grocery store. As long as it's an extra virgin olive oil, it's probably going to be pretty good. A neutral oil, usually important. We like grape seed oil a lot, great for cooking with or building, dressings, and [inaudible] isn't such out of. An oil like grape seed has a higher smoke point, so it's great for searing meats, getting nice color on things, and it's also great for making a vinaigrette because it doesn't have flavor. It just builds the fat content without adding any extra flavor. Now, a vinegar is usually important as well. We like apple cider vinegar, a great deal. I'm also a huge fan of sherry vinegar. Me as well. Sherry vinegar is probably my favorite, but I love every vinegar equally, rice vinegar, [inaudible]. So you've got your basic building blocks. Oil, salt, pepper, vinegar. Exactly. Next, here's a whole bunch of extra ingredients that aren't necessarily essential, but are really great to have around. They last a very long time. Having them will let you create all different interesting dishes that you might not have thought of off the butt. We'll start with some. First off, garlic and onions hugely versatile, really helpful. Really the base of so many dishes that you should just always have them around. Also, I always love to have lemons around, really adds a little extra freshness to salad, and it's great for seizing just about anything. A wine of some sort to cook with, hugely helpful. I like white wine, it's nice and not too overpowering. It goes with just about everything. Exactly, and doesn't turn things red. Also, you'd like to have a stock or some cooking liquid, vegetable stock, chicken stock, beef stock, anything that you like. Absolutely. I think chicken stock is one of the most versatile things to have around, but vegetables is hugely helpful too. After stock, one of the things I use the most in my kitchen is a finishing flaky sea salt. I like Maldon salt. Yeah, Maldon is probably the most popular finishing salt, that's what we use at the restaurant. So really, talk about mustard. We're already using mustard today, a little bit of straightforward Dijon mustard. Yeah, it's the best. It goes way beyond just putting on a sandwich for billion dressings to finishing sauces, mounting things with, using it as a rub for meats. I use mustard surprisingly large amount. Personally, I love Dijon but I also just love whole grain mustard, even just to spread on just a piece of bread and cheese. Absolutely. One of my personal favorite ingredients is honey. You should always have honey or a nice organic sugar in your pantry. That goes from beyond the serving and cooking, and to all sorts of baking. Just having some sweet in your own hand, it's always going to be helpful. Butter, something I try to have in my fridge at all times, especially really good butter. We put some nice cultured butter here which is very flavorful, really interesting. Butter will last almost forever and you will use when were recipes than you'd ever expect. Then of course, if you want to be doing any baking, I always suggest having some AP flour on our hand, baking powder and baking soda. Lastly, some eggs, so nice pasteurized eggs. Next, we're going to go into a couple of our favorite ingredients that aren't necessarily things that everyone has in their pantry but that we love to have. I personally love to always have some fresh herbs on hand. I like to mix it up, sometimes I have dill, parsley, cilantro, just depends on what looks good at the market or the store. But it really goes a long way in finishing your dishes and really bringing them up to the next level like a restaurant quality level. Absolutely. A hard cheese like Parmesan or peperino is super useful. Great for salads, great for pretty much every meal of the day. If you wrap it well in plastic, will also last a very long time in your fridge. I really love to have a yogurt or a creme fraiche around. I personally really love creme fraiche or sour cream. Just for finishing vegetables, it's great for breakfast, it's great for anything. Nuts, seeds, and dried fruits, usually useful. Does go a long way as well and last forever. As well, we both keep pretty big variety of just dried grains, dried beans, and dried pastas. When we come home from a busy day, we don't have to necessarily think too much, our stuff is already there. Absolutely. This is what building a pantry is all about, is having a strong group of ingredients to draw upon. You can go to the market and just get a vegetable or two, or a piece of meat, and then build a little dish out of it without having to go to the grocery store. Yeah.
5. Cookware: So let's talk about pots and pans. We believe that really when it comes down to it, you only need a couple of really good pots and pans. Instead of a whole set of pots and pans that really aren't that high-quality. You really don't need them. You can just buy a couple of really high-quality pots and pans and you'll be able to cook anything. Absolutely. First and foremost to me, is a good cast iron pan. It's great for cooking all meats and vegetables, really. The great thing about a cast iron pan is it has the same even heat distribution and cooking properties of a really expensive All-Clad pan that you would pay hundreds of dollars for. But really, a nice cast iron is $20-$30. Absolutely. Yeah. Very inexpensive and really great. Super worth it. We've put a skillet in here and we think skillets are very useful. All round, small skillets. This one is only about 7". Hugely useful. Yeah. Just any high-quality smaller saute pan is great. Yeah. A Dutch oven, you will use every day once you buy one. This is Le Creuset, and it's a bit pricey, but you only really need one of them, and it's completely worthwhile. There's also similar pots and pans made by other bands that are less expensive and just as great. Absolutely. The Dutch oven is great because it's great for cooking in the oven, for braising, for making stews and soups, and also just great for general boiling, cooking pastas and rice and any other grains. Yep. Last but not least. A cookie sheet. For roasting in the oven. Super underrated, very affordable. You've got to have a cookie sheet. Well, last but not least here, let's talk about kitchen tools, what we think you really need to have in your kitchen. To start, a whisk; great for vinaigrettes, for scrambling eggs or for just about anything. A nice spatula, a variety of wooden and metal spoons, both slotted and non-slotted. A couple other things that are really important: vegetable peeler, digital thermometer. Right. For cooking meats. Scissors. A nice pair of kitchen shears and tongs. With all those tools at your disposal, it's easy to cook anything you want.
6. Knife Safety: Next, let's talk about knives. So this is a great standard chef's knife. There's two important things I want to cover here when it comes to cutting. First off, choke your knife hand, I should say, up on the blade, so you get a lot of control. Second, hold the hand that you're cutting against exactly like this. Take your four fingers here, curl them back like a claw, and tuck your thumb in. Now the reason we do this is because when we cut, all of our fingertips are tucked in, so the blade is going nowhere near them. The tip of the knife, rocking back and forth like this ensures that the knife isn't skittering off in any direction. So what we're doing is maintaining complete control and making sure that we don't cut ourselves. When we talk about what kind of knives we need in the average home kitchen? So I would say instead of purchasing those knife kits that you often see at the store that have six or seven knives, all you really need at home is one eight inch chef's knife, that Christian has here. This is a mac knife. But really anything like this will do, I would highly suggest going to your local knife store or going online and doing a little research, and buying a high-quality eight inch chef's knife. It can do anything that you need to do in your home kitchen. The only other knife that I would suggest buying is a bread knife, a serrated knife, really just for cutting bread or other vegetables with thick skins, like- Squash. yeah squash, or even tomatoes, or peppers. Anything that has a little bit of a thicker skin. But really these two knives can get you through just about anything in the home kitchen. For about the same amount of money that you would spend on a nicer set of knives, you can get these two knives, very very high-quality. If you'd like to learn some more about our knife skills and safety, be sure to check out the Skillshare knife skills class by plated.
7. Knife Skills: So next we're going to cut up some vegetables for our radish and green salad. Got some really beautiful black radishes here from Norwich Meadows Farms. Some celery root right here. Also we have some beautiful scarlet turnips and some multi-color radishes. Here's a purple daikon radish. I'm going to do some half moons of radish. Take this here, we'll cut off the ends, cut the whole radish in half. We'll take both of our halves, put them down on the board, and we're just going to go following the orbit of it here, so just like this. You end up with these really nice little half-moon shapes here. Then depending on the spiciness of the radish, you want to adjust the thickness based on. Just try a piece. Very spicy. Yeah. The black radishes are pretty spicy. These watermelon and purple radishes are a little more sweet, so you cut them a little thicker. Remember to do the rocking slicing motion that we talked about and hold your knife properly. Make sure to protect your fingers. Now we're going to cut up some celery root. Celery is one of my favorite vegetables, it's available all winter, has a really awesome celery flavor, but it's a root vegetable. It's the best. It's great, raw or cooked. For this preparation, we are going to make some matchsticks or a julienne cut of this. Once again, this is just a standard cut. You can cut any vegetable like this really. First, I'm just going to peel off with my knife here, the outer skin here. Remember to use your good knife grip and keep your fingers protected. Then yeah, once we get all of the skin off, we'll do a julienne cut or a matchstick cut on this. To do a julienne, first you want to just make your vegetable just a little bit more square to make it easier, and then you can eat these little chunks you cut off. and see how your celery tastes, it's amazing. I really just want slice thin rectangles. Put that aside. Then you want to take your rectangles and build them back up into the original shape here and a little stack and then cut them in the long way about the same thickness. This does take some practice, just like anything. Just try it on a few vegetables, and you'll get the hang of it in no time. All right, and then when we're finished here, we have this beautiful matchsticks for our salad. We got all our vegetables cut now, and one thing I like to do with raw vegetables in a salad, is just submerge them in some ice cold water. Here, I just got a little ice water and I'm just going to drop all the radishes in and keep them underwater for about 10 minutes and then we'll strain them and dry them off. It makes it just extra crispy and juicy for a salad.
8. Emulsified Vinaigrette: Next, let's make a simple salad dressing. We're going to make an emulsified vinaigrette. Kenny, what is an emulsion? To simply put, an emulsion is a liquid and a fat that are temporarily bound together. Right. So like a mayonnaise. Yeah or a pan sauce. Right. So in this case, with this vinaigrette, our emulsifying ingredient is going to be garlic, a bit of Dijon mustard. Yeah. What we mean by that is that there are some ingredients like garlic and mustard, that have natural scientific properties that help to hold liquid and fat together. In this case, vinegar with oil. Yolk, another really strong emulsifying soy. So to start off, we're going to take a little bit of garlic. I'm going to microplane it here into this bowl, which is just going to very finely grate it up into a paste. If you don't have a microplane, although they're inexpensive and really useful. But if you don't have one, you can just finely mince your garlic. After we do the garlic, set a nice generous spoonful of Dijon here. We got some great apple cider vinegar. Then it's really important for making a vinaigrette, you want to use a whisk and that helps to break up the liquid molecules to allow the fat molecules to sit in between to give it that thick consistency that we want. I'm just going to slowly pour some fat in while Christian whisks. This is olive oil. You'll be able to see as you're making the dressing, if you're whisking properly, that the consistency of the dressing will change and you'll see it binding together with the liquid. This is a perfect example of learning a skill or a pattern instead of following recipe. So in this instance, we're following a general ratio of vinaigrette. We're using one part vinegar approximately to about four parts oil, 50 percent olive oil, and 50 percent grape seed oil. Having a balance of the neutral grape seed oil and the nice spicy peppery olive oil, it's going to make it altogether more balanced vinaigrette. If you use all olive oil it'll be a little bit bitter, and if you used all grape seed, it would be a little bit too plain. Grape seed is probably my favorite, neutral. It's a tasteless oil. So it's really just there for consistency in the fat content and then your olive oil is there for flavor. We're going to go ahead and season this, and we're going to season it pretty heavily. The importance of making a really aggressively seasoned salad dressing is that you're going to put the salad dressing on a bunch of ingredients that are raw and not seasoned at all. So anytime you make a salad dressing and you think it tastes pretty perfect, take it a little bit further and make it a little bit more aggressive. Yes, so I had a little more salt. If you feel like it's not quite bright enough, just add a little bit more vinegar in, at the end. Absolutely. Always make it a little bit more intense than you think it should be, and it all balances out at the end.
9. Seasonal Grain & Radish Salad: We've got all our ingredients assembled, let's build our salad. I'm going to start here just by slicing up some of the Pink Lady apple that we got at the market today. I'm going to take some of the grains that we have here already cooked off. Now, one thing I'm going to do here is something that we're going to do as we build the salad is, season and dress everything as we go. What we're doing is building layers of flavor, essentially. It's not just all mixing it altogether at once. We're building a bunch of different elements that are all seasoned stand up on their own. Yeah, I like to imagine it visually, you just want a little bit of dressing, a little bit of seasoning on every part of the salad. Here's some apples. Thank you. Then I'm just going to grab some of the radishes that we cut earlier. They're nice and crunchy and juicy from soaking in that ice water. I'm just going to lay them out in a little bit of an even layer here. I'm just going to get a little bit of seasoning on. I'm going to add a little fresh lemon, it really makes them pop, and a little bit of the flaky sea salt. Also, we're going to add a little bit of that to our bowl here. Now we have all our crunchy ingredients in there. I'm going to start building our awesome greens into that. That's a nice shoots. As I put these down, just as you did with vegetables, I'm going to build layers of salt, olive oil, and lemon in there. Finally, we're going to finish with a little bit of this grated hard cheese. When building a salad or really any dish, it's really nice to think about a couple different components I like to have in everything, which is something nice and crunchy, something fresh, something sweet, and then something acidic. That makes perfect salad. We have our nice acidic vinaigrette. We have some crunchy apples, radishes, and celery root, some delicious grains, and some hearty green spicy arugula and pea shoots. Right. A whole bunch of great different textures. It's fresh, clean, balanced, acidic, it's everything you want to have in a salad. Yeah, I'm great for you.
10. Roasted Fingerling Potatoes: Now for the fun part, let's start cooking. We're going to start with some roasted potatoes. Really simply put, to roast a vegetable, you really just want to coat it lightly in oil and salt, and then transfer it to a preheated tray in your oven around 400 degrees. So to start out, we're going to roast some potatoes. I have these beautiful fingerling potatoes. It's a mix of a bunch of different heirloom varietals. We got these from Mountain Berry Sweet Farm in Roscoe, New York, at our local farmer's market. Really to start, we're just going to coat these lightly in some olive oil. You just want to use enough oil, so every surface of the potato is lightly coated, and you can just see the sheen of the oil on it. Then you want to coat it lightly in salt while you toss it. The idea here is that there's a little bit of salt on every bite. I think about it just visually. I try to put salt on every little part of the potato, so when you eat it later, every bite has a little bit of salt. Our fingerling potatoes are all seasoned up now and ready to go in the oven. We got our fingerlings all seasoned up with oil, salt, and pepper, and we're just going to place them on this preheated tray in the oven here. My oven is at 400 degrees. I'm going to place these potatoes on this preheated tray. We're going to cook them at 400 for about 15 minutes. It's been 15 minutes here, so we're just going to pull our potatoes out. Let's give them a little shake, move them around. We're going to test their doneness with a knife, or a toothpick, or a cake tester. These seem like they're almost done. I would probably need another five minutes. Really important thing here that chefs have always told me is the food is just done when it's done. So no matter what a recipe says, just test it when the recipe says it should be done and make sure, so I'm just pulling it out to test it.
11. Sautéed Kale: Next we're going to blanch and saute some kale. We've got some kale here that we got up the market. First, let's take the leaves and take them off the stem. You might notice the kale always has this really thick woody stems in the middle, they're not really that great to eat. What we want to focus on really is the leaves. Just go through here and pick them off. Sometimes on bigger pieces you can even take your fingers and just pull the leaves right off in one swift motion. Now we've got our kale all picked. It's important that you rinse it off before we actually cook it. There's just going to be a lot of sand and grit on this. I'm going to soak it in cold water, dry it off and then we're going to get ready to blanch it. Let's get our kale started. First things first, we got to pour our water coming out to a boil. That's boiling well. We're going to season it really aggressively. We've got a lot of salt in there so that it seasons our kale as well. Next, come through with your kale. Let's get our kale all in there. Now we're going to give it about 30 seconds cooking in this boiling water. It only needs about that much to get decently cooked. We don't want it to be completely cooked and marshy because we're going to sear it afterwards. Now that 30 seconds are up, let's get our kale out of this boiling hot water into our ice bath. Here we go. It should really rinse in that ice water, so it all starts cooking. Once it's cooled all the way down, we'll squeeze out all the excess water and then lay it out to dry here on a plate. Now it's time to saute. We're going to saute this kale. Now, sauteing means basically cooking anything in a pan with direct heat and preferably some sort of fat, in this case oil. It's a perfect way to put a nice amount of color. A really good crispy sear on the outside of some vegetables, piece of fish, piece of chicken, whatever you want. Let's go in with some shallots first. Just get these sweating out a little bit. They get translucent and a little bit golden brown on the outside. Next, let's add our garlic. Finally our kale. Give this a stir around. Lets pour a little bit of water, a little more. A little bit of water is going to help steam it out. It'll keep our delicate shallots and garlic from burning. Now the kale just texture. Last but not least, let's put a little butter in there. Sure it tastes delicious, but it also makes an even glaze to cover this kale. There you go. Now we're ready to plate.
12. Pan Roasted Chicken Breast: So next let's talk about chicken. The first most important thing, is finding out where you can get good locally sourced meat from. At the butcher shop that I work in, we know exactly where our meat is coming from. We have direct relationships with the farmers. You can have that same level of trust too. Just talk to your butcher, find out where this chicken is from, what kind of chicken it is, and how you want to cook it. Right here, we've got what we call an airline breast. This is a boneless cut of chicken breast, with the wing still attached. This is fun to cook because no bone here is going to make it really easy to make direct contact with the pan, but you still get all the dark top meat all the way. Step number one, most important thing, before it even gets in the pan, we want to season it and we want to season it pretty heavily and in advance. That's because we're going to let the salt actually have a chance to penetrate through. It's really hard to over-season a piece of meat. Absolutely. What we're going to do is give it a nice coating of salt. I know this looks like a lot, but trust us, it's really important to get a good amount of salt on here and give it a chance to set up. Don't be afraid to season pretty heavily. It should look like an even full layer all over the meat. Now that that's well seasoned, we're going to pop that in the fridge for at least two or three hours before we start cooking. Let it get a chance to really set up, and then we're good to go. To start off, we got our cast-iron pan ripping hot. I'm going to add a little bit of grape seed oil to it, not a ton. You can see we have enough to coat the bottom of the pan. Let's swirl it all the way around here, to make sure that the bottom of the pan is really evenly covered. We need a decent bit of oil there because oil conducts heat really efficiently. We need that heat to transfer to our chicken, give it a delicious golden, crispy skin. Take our chicken, skin side down. Now, it's been sitting in our fridge overnight. We seasoned it heavy yesterday. It's ready to rock. You know that your pan is ready for a good sear when the oil is shimmering, like it's moving back and forth, t almost like it's vibrating, but not quite to the point where it's smoking or steaming. Chicken in. Now listen to that nice, even sizzle as it goes down. As soon as it's in there, move it around just a little bit to make sure that it's not sticky. Then it moves once or twice, you know it's good to go. Turn the heat down, just a little bit. So it's been about two or three minutes on that first sear. Now, we know it's almost done because we can see a nice golden, brown, crispy edge around the outsides let's pick him up and check, and there you go. Already that skin is crisp, golden potato chip crispy. Throw it on there like that. We're off to a good start here. We've got our butter in the pan. When it melts out there in the corner, position your chicken up here like this. Let the butter tilt down to the base of the pan and just baste all over the outside of the chicken. Basting can be done with any liquid, fat. The reason why we baste pieces of meat is to, first of all, evenly cook them through, redistributing heat over and over again, because normally, there would only be heat coming from the base of the pan here. So we're getting some even cooking done. But we're also building up a nice crispy exterior by circulating this fat over and over the edge here. So we're going to end up with a way more delicious product, a better crispy crust. I like to baste for about a minute or two, and then I like to see where the internal temperature is at of the chicken. A piece this thick, we're probably going to need to pop it into the oven for just a little bit, but really not that long. Now we've got some great color after we basted the chicken. It needs just a few minutes in the oven, just to barely cook through. Let's pop it in that 350 degree oven. All right. Let's check the temperature of our chicken. Put a thermometer right in the deepest center part of the breast. So 138 degrees for white meat is a little bit less than most people would cook chicken, because the thing is that it's going to continue cooking here on the board for at least five more degrees while it sits down at rest. By the time it rests fully, it's going to be perfectly cooked through. Here's our finished chicken. Just take it here, look for the joint and the wing right there, cut it first here, and second right there.
13. Plating: We hope you learned a couple of techniques from our cooking we just did there. We got our kale, potatoes, and chicken, and we're ready to go to the plate. That's right. Let's start building this plate here. Now, we're trying to build up this structure, basically. Have something that everything else in the plate, the chicken and the kale can rest against. Yeah, to make it look beautiful because that's the important part. Start out with a little bit of potato and sauce here down at the bottom of the plate. Then we're just going to grab our sauteed kale, draping over the potatoes, and hit it with a little bit of olive oil and salt, a little squeeze a lemon to finish. Now this is all set up. We're going to slice our chicken here. Then lay these chicken pieces so nicely across our vegetables. I always like to finish meat with a little bit of the flaky sea salt and a little squirt of olive oil. Absolutely, a little bit of that extra fat and salt in the end always takes it to the next level. Then a really important part of finishing the plate is to bring out some of those pantry items that we talked about earlier. For me, really fresh herbs and a little creme fraiche. A little creme fraiche adds a little bit extra fat, a little sourness, a little acidity. Fresh herbs look beautiful, add a little extra flavor, it really takes it to the next level. Here we go. Here's the finished plate. Looks pretty good for something you made yourself.
14. Thank You: First of all, thanks so much for taking our class and hanging out with us today. To review, we roasted some awesome fingerling potatoes, made some delicious sauteed kale, cooked great highland chicken breast, and made a seasonal radish and green salad. So just like we did today, with the proper tools, the right equipment, basic techniques, and some confidence. You can create whatever dishes you can imagine. Just go out there, get out to the market or your local co-op, pick-up ingredients, like we did today. But really whatever your heart desires and start making dishes. It takes practice. Really, it's just about recognizing the patterns and building that skill set and then just applying it. Right. You can pan roast any small piece of meat, just like we did the chicken. Salad, switch out whatever vegetable you want. Most importantly, just get out there, try new things, have fun cooking food. It should be fun but warming. Get out there and try something new. Right on. Thanks for watching.
15. Hungry for More?:
Kenny Monroe, Chef/Farmer
