Le Cordon Bleu - Lesson 15

Today I felt was Le Cordon Bleu's first slight on their so far fantastic repertoire of French foods, by unsuccessfully stealing a perfectly good Asian dish and adding nothing but confusion.  

Today we had Crevettes sautee avec legumes et tofu, aka, Prawn and Tofu stir-fry!  And to add to the fun we weren't given woks, but instead had to cook our stir fry in a pot.  So to demonstrate the ridiculousness of this execution, i have decided to replace all 'c's with 'k's (and 'k's with 'c's) for the rest of this sektion of this blog to prove how silly this really is.

In the normal world, a woc is used for its large surfake area, this helps to disperse the heat quickly, allowing you to get krispness without over koocing your food.  Konfused, yeah, me too!

A large surfaced area pot does a similar job, but with it's unrounded shape makes it hard to toss your food, also you run a risk of the food steaming instead of stir-frying due to it all being on top of itself. 

Here are a few pointers to making a perfect stir fry:

• Mise en place - have everything ready to go.  Once you start the cooking process, there is no time to stop and chop, or mix, etc.  As stir-fries to so quick.
• Cut all your veggies the same size, so they will take the same amount of time to cook.  We juilenned our carrots, snow peas and ginger, but you don't need to be that precise.
• Use a wok (or a large surface area pot), but I would suggest a wok.
• Use peanut or vegetable oil, as they can be heated to a high temperature without burning.
• Have your sauce ready on the side (we mixed oyster, soy, sugar and chicken stock)
• Have a thickener ready on the side (just incase you need to thicken your sauce at the end). Although if you're adding something that was already covered in cornflour (like our tofu), you might not need any.   However, we had a bit of cornflour and water mixed, ready.  Use corn flour instead of wheat flour as it doesn't take time to cook and thicken, corn flour thickens almost instantly after being added to your hot sauce.
• Cook your food groups separately - First your meat (then remove and rest), then your tofu (we dusted in corn flour and deep friend this first), then your veggies (withe garlic, ginger, coriander stalks) and then finish it off by returning your other cooked ingredients. 
• Add your sauce at the end, don't overdo it, just enough to cover the stir fry.  Otherwise you'll have soup.
• Don't over cook it, hard and crunchy is better than a floppy.
• Keep the wok nice and hot.
• Finally, add your herbs at the end, or just before serving to keep them crunchy and fresh.

Easy and so healthy!  You can add all sorts of things, like fresh corn, cabbage, capsicum, onions, chillis, chicken, egg plant, eggs, any thing you want.

Wonderful Chef Elke, again added in a few extras into the demonstration with regards to veggie options and showed up how to make deep fried eggs.  They were great, I've never seen this before.  Hard boil some eggs, boil and dry.   Heat your oil and then deep fry your eggs until they turn golden brown.  Finally as you remove them from the oil, drain and then marinate them.  You can also marinate them before deep frying.  Isn't that great!

Our main meal on today's menu was Calmar au sel et poivre (Salt and Pepper Squid) served with Eggplant and tomato relish.
A favourite in Australia (well the squid anyway)!  For this dish, we had to create our own salt and pepper mix by dry roasting  black and sichuan peppercorns, grinding them down and adding salt.  However, again with the day of non-matching utensils, the pestle and mortar that we were given was about the size of my thumb and the amount we had to crush was bigger then my foot!

The eggplant relish consisted of macedoine cut egg plant (1cm cubed), brunoise cut shallots (finely chopped), capers, anchovies, chilli jam, red wine vinegar, tomato concasse (blanched, de-seeded and sliced).  A relish is a cooked food that has been picked and preserved and mostly served as a condiment.  So with that in mind, there was a debate as to if this was actually a relish or a salsa.  Theoretically you can jar and store a relish, something you would do to keep something for a prolonged period of time as it has been pickled.   This recipe does have a splash of vinegar, but it really was for the eating now.  Either way, it was really delicious and later when reheating the stir-fry (in a wok) and added the relish and salt and pepper squid and it really added a great tang.  So I will definitely add a bit of ginger and a splash of vinegar in the future to my aubergine dishes.  Add some fresh chopped parsley after you have finished cooking, to add a bit of freshness.

Finally, the Salt and Pepper Squid!  We seasoned rice flour with some pepper mix (don't add salt, as salt can react with oil while deep frying) and set it aside.  We cleaned, cut and scored our squid (taking care to remove that top layer of skin both inside and outside of the squid), dipped them in slightly whisked egg whites, tossed them into the rice flour mix, shook loose any flour and threw them into a deep fryer at approx 180-190C (yes more deep frying, now can you see why i didn't loose weight this week!).  
When you hear noise starting to escape from your squid you know its cooked, as the noise is the oil reacting against the liquid in the squid.  This means that the oil has penetrated the batter.  Immediately after removing the squid from the fryer, sprinkle on the salt and pepper mix.  Dry off on paper towel and serve with relish/salsa, a couple of cheeks of lime and a few pieces of chilli.