Cooking Post Mortem (Session Two)

Chef: Colin
Apprentices: Tuck Chen, Me
Dish: Pasta Primavera with Smoky Ham

Things Learnt:

1) Testing for correct consistency of the pasta sauce is done by checking if it coats the back of a batter spoon. Drip sauce over a wooden spoon and, using a sharp object, scrap a line through. If the sauce does not cover the exposed region, correct consistency has been reached.

2) Thickening of a sauce can be achieved by addition of corn starch or egg yolk. While heating can thicken as well, it has the undesirable effect of evaporating so much liquid that there’s very little sauce left. For pasta, egg yolk is preferable as a thickening agent, as it blends well with egg-based nature of pasta as compared to corn starch. (by the same logic, egg yolk would not be suitable to thicken a soup.)

3) The proper way to thicken via an egg yolk is to first beat the egg, and then add a small amount of the sauce to the egg. Addition of the egg to the hot sauce would lead to it curdling immediately; thus, we slowly add the sauce to the egg to allow it to slowly increase in temperature to avoid curdling. Continue doing this (in batches), and stir in the egg mixture to the sauce after it has been removed from heat. A similar approach is used when making Bernaise sauce.

4) A recipe should not be followed whole-sale: for example, if the recipe calls for a cup of chicken broth, add half a cup first, and add more if required. Being flexibility is important, as “cooking is not an exact science (an oft-repeated quote by Chef Liew).” For example, the dijon mustard that we used yesterday was stronger than usual, and thus we diluted the sauce by adding more cream and chicken broth than called for. This led to the sauce becoming too thin, and an egg yolk was added.

5) Cutting food into pieces reduces cooking time--- increased surface area. Thus, when clarifying butter, chop it up first to melt it quickly. This also means that increasing the size of the asparagus rounds increases the time required to cook it--- useful when cooking asparagus since the stem takes a longer time to cook then the spears. Also note that when cooking stems and spears, add the stems first.

6) Sugar can be used to temper sauces with too strong flavours--- eg: the tang of strong dijon mustard.