Frenchie, Food and my weekend of Free cooking lessons

Late last year I took a trip to France. It was a much anticipated trip, as I had only briefly visited Paris on a stop-over to England a few years ago. During my travels in Paris, I met a local foodie, P. P is a friendly and quirky Parisian around my age who lives and breathes food. I was excited to find out that P was in the process of relocating to Sydney. There is never enough foodie friends in the world, I was cheering.

With the blink of an eye, my month-long vacation to foodie heaven was over. The trip has inspired my quest to learn more about the rich culture (food and otherwise) France hides behind her 21^st century veil. 3 months after my epic trip, P landed down-under to start a new life. I invited P to spend a weekend in my ‘hood’ and cook together. 

I had been operating  under the assumption that I already know enough about French food to feel good about myself. Unsurprisingly, P, being as out-spoken as he is, challenged THAT assumption, and promised to teach me how to make ‘real’ French crepes to start my French cooking education 101. While my initial thought was “surely I know how to make crepes, who doesn’t?”, I suspected that there might be something P knows that I don’t. P laid out the list of ingredients on my kitchen bench, and I was slightly baffled by the presence of a potato, sliced in half. What on earth would you  need a potato for? To test the temperature of the pan? To add to the crepe batter? It turns out that the potato half is traditionally used to evenly spread the cooking oil in the pan! How ingenious! P combined plain flour, sunflower oil, eggs, milk, cooking rum and vanilla sugar (caster sugar infused with vanilla bean pods) to create a runny crepe batter and left it on the bench to ‘rest’ for an hour. When the batter is well rested and slightly thickened, P used the potato to spread some sunflower oil evenly in a non-stick pan. I was intrigued like a kid in a science class – watching P cook brings me back to the Christmas markets on the Avenue of Champs Elysees in Paris, where food markets stretch out for miles, and cooks and food producers proudly showcase their specialty. There are various kinds of foods on display, from donuts, crepes, churros and sausage sandwiches, to foie gras, pates, salami sticks, etc – every stall is a heavenly mouth-watering experience.  Just as I was off with the food fairies, dreaming and drooling over Paris, P tapped on my shoulder to inform me that crepes were ready. I AM THERE! On my plate sat a delicate crepe filled with a rich dark chocolate and banana mixture.  Being a greedy person that I am, I felt compelled to add strawberries, cream, icing sugar, sugar syrup, and whatever delicious things I can find to stuff into the crepe. Luckily, P stopped me in due course before I turned the crepe into a 3-course dinner, and advised me to learn to appreciate simple flavours as they are. Initially unconvinced, I rolled my eyes and took my first bite into the chocolate and banana-filled crepe. Hmmm…the soft crepe with a hint of rum, and dark chocolate and banana filling, is a marriage made in heaven. It might be a marriage of a couple of simple ingredients, but that, in no shape or form, discounts the quality of the union. It was simple but heavenly. They might just be crepes, and there might just be chocolate and banana, but they taught me a valuable lesson in cooking (and life in general): do not always try to overload your crepe, learn to appreciate the simple things, as they are beautiful…

My first work experience in a commercial kitchen

A week ago, I dragged my partner to a cooking class at Alio Restaurant and Bar in Surry Hills. I enjoyed the class so much I invited myself to do work experience there. Random, I know. A degree-qualified (not one, not two, but three degrees!) professional seeking work experience in a restaurant only happens when one’s passion for food dominates the decision-making process. Long story short, I shameless invited myself to do work experience at Alio, and Chef Hughes was kind enough to have me.  Next thing I knew, we locked in a time and date, and I finished the cooking class looking forward to my next cooking adventure.

A week later, I was on my way to Alio again, except that this time, I was going to be in the actual kitchen (not the ‘show’ kitchen where cooking classes are conducted) with Chef Hughes and his staff. I was so excited I almost got run over by a car while crossing the street! I managed to get myself to Alio in one piece, on time. So far so good, I thought. The reservation manager guided me to the kitchen, where I found three sous chefs prepping away alongside Head Chef Hughes for the dinner service. It was refreshing to see the Head Chef working so closely with his comrades in the kitchen. One of the sous chefs showed me to my bench top, where a large pile of herbs and green beans awaited. I was so excited about being in a commercial kitchen for the first time that even picking beans and herbs seemed as thrilling as cooking a 3-course feast for the Queen. After I proved my competency in picking beans and herbs, I quickly moved onto more exciting tasks, from making Grissini and Gnocchi to processing seafood. The honest truth is, while I am keen on eating and cooking, I am not so keen on meeting the ingredients, especially when everything is still ‘intact’, like the head. When one of the sous chefs brought out a bucket of fresh whole squid, my fear of processing whole seafood became a real obstacle I had to overcome. I could feel the heat on the back of my neck when looking at those condemning eyes of the squid. Fortunately, the sous chef sensed my fear of eyeballs and heads, so he kindly ripped the head off the squid on my behalf and handed me the rest. Phew~~…The rest was a piece of cake, as the wings and skin can be peeled off with ease. Deboning a smoked trout was quite an enjoyable task, not to mention a rewarding one too! While my fingers were busy at work, running through the coral flesh of the smoked trout for bones, my mouth was also busy at work, producing saliva at the speed of light. I was following the protocol of ‘most for the bowl, a bite for me’, when I would have loved to follow my own rule of ‘none for the bowl, all for me’ then and there. Making Grissini and Gnocchi was therapeutic, as I found comfort in turning the smooth doughs into the familiarly-shaped bouncy potato dumplings with their signature marking, and uniformly shaped bread sticks.

Good times fly, so they say. One minute, I had just stepped into the kitchen fueled with adrenalin, the next minute, it was past 5pm. While I enjoyed every minute of my 4-hour work experience in a real commercial kitchen, my legs were telling me that they need to be put up, and my stomach was starting to take over the brain. Just when my stomach was about to drive me to pick up the smoked trout containers and tip all contents into the black hole of a mouth that is mine, staff dinner was ready to come out of the oven! That was a close call! It was 4 large pizzas with meat and veggie toppings, made by Chef Hughes and his staff. While I felt privileged to be able to enjoy such scrumptious home-made pizzas cooked by professional chefs, I felt even more privileged to be able to learn from beautiful people like those working at Alio. The kitchen was a very different environment to the one I am used to. Unlike a typical office environment, where you are packed into an office space like sardines but alone in your cubical, the kitchen gives a real sense of comradeship (not to mention, you get to play music out loud in the kitchen too, which is always a bonus!). As I finished my shift, and waved goodbye to my new-found friends at Alio, I knew it was not for good, as I would see them again soon!

Alio Cooking School-Surry Hills, Sydney

A while back I had purchased a couple of tickets to the cooking school at Alio Restaurant and Bar in Surry Hills, taught by Head Chef Ashley Hughes. Always fascinated by the art of bread and pasta making, I dragged my partner along to the cooking class last week (very much to his dismay, as he is not a huge foodie like me). We were seated around the kitchen bench, not long before Chef Hughes came into the kitchen to introduce himself. Chef Hughes is a soft-spoken yet passionate food lover, whose food philosophy is about using clever combinations of simple and fresh ingredients to bring out flavours that make your tastebuds dance. While I consider myself to possess a sound understanding of Italian food, I was keen to learn more about making good bread and the various types of Italian pasta. The Chef kick-started the cooking class by making a simple, yet mouth-watering Focaccia bread flavoured with rosemary and garlic. Despite having made bread myself a few times, I am still fascinated by the magic of bread-making, and the transformation from loose-sand-like flour to a beautifully bouncy yet soft bread dough. Watching Chef Hughes mix the flour, yeast and water, form, knead and proof the dough was a satisfying, almost therapeutic experience with a surprising calming effect. As an energetic person who borderlines hyper-active, I have had friends and family suggest that I try meditation to keep calm. Personally I don't think there is a better way to meditate than making bread, plus you get to eat it at the end of the process! 

While the Focaccia dough sat on the bench with the yeast performing their magic inside of it, chef Hughes transformed a good'ol home-made pasta sheet into more than a dozen varieties of pasta, from spaghetti and fettuccine to ravioli and Tortellini. The star pasta dish was Rotolo of Spinach and Ricotta cheese. What I had imaged to be a filled pasta similar to Ravioli turns out to be a large sheet of pasta filled with stuffing, and rolled to form a thick ‘sausage’, cooked in a tea towel (with both ends tied). It was an interesting pasta-cooking technique that I was not familiar with, yet makes total sense. The end result was a simply yet beautiful pasta dish that showcased Chef Hughes’s technical skills as a seasoned pasta maker.

After over two hours of watching chef Hughes whipping out bread, pasta and a beautiful summer salad from scratch, I (more so my tastebuds) could not wait to tuck into my long-anticipated lunch of Facaccia bread with olive oil and 25-year-old balsamic, Rotolo of Spinach and Ricotta cheese, Persian feta, witlof, wild rocket and pear salad AND my personal favourite, Tiramisu. I was in heaven, eating, sipping, and exchanging food stories with my fellow food lovers. The whole experience was a much-needed boost of ‘happy juice’, after recent deflating events. The cooking class at Alio, the food, and the nice little chat with Chef Hughes confirmed a simple yet important belief of mine: good food makes good living, and I just LOVE it!