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Kitchen confidence? Yes, please! – Johan Emerson Grobler
The kitchen is a place I’m not yet fully self-expressed in. To date, I have mostly assembled, added, steamed, and made a few basic dishes. So, confidence is something I’m interested in.
Enter the Kitchen Confidence class at the KitchenAngel Cookery School. According to owner and teacher, Lynn Angel, this is not at all a ‘beginners’ class – it’s all about foundations.
I now know why she makes this class a prerequisite for her other classes. It was surprising to hear a chef talk about how much, even most, of what I considered true about preparing food is wrong, old hat, or not best practice – and why.
Unless you’ve had hands on training from a professional chef, you might well be in the same boat.
In this hands-on class, Lynn showed us how to focus on the art of creative, healthy cooking. To her, this means preparing and cooking “with all five senses plus the heart.”
After being fed snacks to keep us going until dinner, we started with utensils, especially knives – which to use and the various ways of holding them. We all have different ways of holding specific knives, and Lynn assisted each of us in turn until we had found the grip that worked best.
Lynn worked systematically, addressing kitchen hygiene as well as putting everything in place before one begins (what the French call “mise en place”).
It was exciting to pay attention to colours and the aromas emanating from the pan, something which I’ve never been overly present to when cooking.
We learnt how to properly brown meat as well as to rest meat after cooking, among others. Lynn demonstrated a useful five-finger readiness test for fish, meat, and poultry that allows you to make an educated guess, rather than having to cut the meat.
She taught and demonstrated the various techniques that professional chefs use, i.e. the ones most recipe books assume you already know.
Due to my height, I tend to bend while I cut, which complicates what I’m doing. So I appreciated her correcting me, getting me to stand with my hips square on to the kitchen surface rather than pulling away at an angle.
Lynn has a no-nonsense, down-to-earth, yet very patient approach. She invited questions, of which there were many. On two occasions, I actually found myself asking to be shown something again.
It was my first time de-boning a chicken breast, which proved quick and easy. The bones formed a basis for a reduction we used later. I had not used grapeseed oil for cooking before, nor considered peanut oil, and had no idea how unsuitable olive oil is for cooking, as ideal as it is for toppings and dressings.
Before we sat down to dinner, Lynn showed us how simple it is to present food well by means of layering within a simple cylindrical mold as well as with a few drops of balsamic reduction. “We eat with our eyes first,” she noted.
We opened a bottle of red wine and sat down to our meal – fluffy mashed potato, seared (and still juicy) chicken cubes, oven-baked butternut, sautéed baby spinach, fresh tomato salsa as well as caramelised onions and crushed garlic done in the pan. Yum!
There’s much to take in! And there’s a stack of practical notes and recipes.
Lynn recommends that one practices what one learns the very next day, for reasons of added retention. Many people repeat the class a few months later, she says, as they discover the difference it makes in their lives.
I’m likely to do just that (if you repeat, you pay only half the fee), and am likely to sign up for at least two others. The classes are all once-off, and take place on a Tuesday evening.
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