The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (17 page)

Donna, Shannon, Terri, and Sabra leaned close to the pan and wrinkled their noses. In unison, they said, “Hot oil.”

“Exactly. When it starts to smell like chicken, then you're getting somewhere.” We shifted back over to the worktable, where Maggie had replaced the cutting boards and set out big bowls of onions, carrots, and celery. Lisa stayed at the stove to tend to the chicken as we moved on to chopping the vegetables. Only two weeks after the knife class, the volunteers grabbed onions, sliced them in half, peeled, and chopped as if they had been working a restaurant line for ages. Only Terri struggled. Maggie tried to help her again with holding a knife. Terri nodded and thanked her. When I checked back after a few minutes, she had reverted again to her former hold. Was this willful resistance or a deep need of remedial instruction? I didn't know. It troubled me.

I asked if anyone was practicing at home. “Oh, yeah! Did I tell you that I got my knife sharpened? It's so great. It goes so much faster now,” Shannon said.

“I haven't bought baby carrots since that class,” Jodi said proudly, without even glancing up from her cutting board. “My husband likes carrots in stir-fry and my son will eat them now, so I am going through about two or three pounds of carrots a week. So instead of paying two dollars a pound, I'm paying sixty cents or something. It saves a lot.”

I walked to the end of the table where Donna was chopping. During Donna's home visit, she had said that her husband often mocked her when she used a knife. In their relationship, food seemed like a feast of control issues. I noticed that she'd brought in her own knife today. I casually asked how it was going at home.

“My husband and I made dinner the other night and guess what? I cut up all the vegetables.” She looked up and smiled, dimples flaring. “Now that I've been coming here, I can say, Hey, I know what I'm doing. Leave me alone.” She chopped silently for a minute. “I told him that I was going to start shopping.”

“How did that go?” I ask.

She kept her high-pitched voice low. “We're still discussing it.” Her face flushed crimson. Something in Donna brought out my maternal instincts. I wanted to hug her, but I settled for patting her shoulder instead.

As we finished the last of the vegetables, a powerful smell of chicken hit the worktable. The group looked up, as if they could see the scent hovering overhead. “The chicken . . .” Shannon said, thinking out loud.

We gathered around the stove as Lisa pulled out a piece with the tongs. After ten minutes, it had taken on a dark brown hue, the skin a bit shrunken and crinkly.

Cheryl raised her hand. The baby looked up. “So does that seal in the juices, when you brown it like that?”

“A culinary myth,” I explained. “Heat actually releases juices inside the meat, not seals them in. You brown the meat to caramelize the exterior of the meat, drawing out sugars and extra flavor in the process.”

“Or, in other words, browning equals delicious goodness,” Lisa said, and turned to put the thigh back into the pot.

“Exactly,” I said. “Braising is always the same. First, you brown. Add some vegetables and enough liquid to cover the meat halfway, cover the pan, and simmer. That's it. Brown, vegetables, liquid, cover, and simmer. Learn this one technique, five words, and you can cook almost anything.”

I removed the chicken to a bowl and tossed the onions, celery, and carrot that we'd just chopped into the pot. While they softened over the heat, we returned to the worktable. Each volunteer brushed a browned chicken piece with some Dijon mustard. We put them back into the pan and added some chicken stock, a few herbs, a bit of white wine. I covered the pot and set it inside the oven to simmer.

“The biggest problem with cooking chicken breasts is that while the poultry industry strives for a bigger breast, it hasn't developed them into a uniform shape or thickness. So they tend to be much thicker in the middle and thin on the ends.

“Here's a trick that I do at home.” I laid a boneless breast on my cutting board, then sliced it through the center horizontally, resulting in two thinner fillets. I held them up. “Now the chicken breast is half as thick and more uniform, so it'll cook more evenly. Not to mention, it's a more realistic serving size.”

“That's a great tip,” Shannon said. “Usually the center isn't cooked all the way through while the edges are overcooked and tough.”

To give breasts a bit of flavor, I showed them a lesson that I learned years ago from an aging Italian grandmother during a cooking class outside Florence. “She called it a
‘bacio di sapore,'
or a kiss of flavor.” I combined a bit of olive oil, a squeeze of lemon juice, salt, pepper, and dried thyme in a bowl. I added my two slices of breast meat and mixed them together. “Let this sit for a few minutes. Then it's onto the heat.”

We circled around the stove. I grabbed a small sauté pan and added oil. Once it was hot, I slapped the breasts into the pan with a pair of tongs, was greeted by a hearty sizzle, and gave the pan a shake. I turned them after three minutes. After three more minutes, I added a hearty splash of stock, turned down the heat, and covered the pan for a few more minutes. “At a restaurant where I once worked, the chef added some liquid like stock or wine at the end of cooking and I do that all the time now,” I said. “It infuses it with both flavor and moisture.”

Maggie handed out forks for everyone to take a bite. “This is great,” Shannon said, using the edge of her fork to cut off another bite. “I mean, it tastes good, it's not dry. Mine never turn out like this.”

Trish had also commented on tough chicken during our visit. “Neither do mine. I wonder if it's because I usually cook them at lower heat and longer,” she mused. “Well, a lot longer.”

“Now it's your turn,” I said. While I'd been cooking, Maggie and Lisa had assembled a collection of oils, vinegars, garlic, herbs, and spices from around the kitchen. From the walk-in, they had gathered jars of pesto, sun-dried tomatoes, gingerroot, lemons, and limes. The selection now sat as a jumble in the center of the worktable. Each person had a small bowl.

“First, you'll slice a breast in half like I did. One part we'll sauté, the other we'll grill,” I said. Maggie walked around the table distributing chicken breasts from the chickens we had broken down earlier. “Then make your own kiss of flavor. Think of what chefs call ‘flavor profiles.' These sound all chef-y, but they're easy. For instance, what flavors does Asian food have in common?”

Jodi raised her hand. “Sesame oil, soy sauce, maybe rice wine vinegar?”

“Great,” I said. “Put those together. What does Italian food taste like?”

Donna ventured a guess. “Olive oil, Italian herbs, maybe pesto?”

And so it went. Caribbean? Jerk seasoning, hot sauce, limes, a bit of coconut oil. Tex-Mex? Corn oil, chili powder, garlic, and cumin with a bit of lime. The group erupted briefly in unmanageable enthusiasm. “This is actually fun!” Jodi said. “I mean, I can do this!”

One key is to evaluate the flavor of each ingredient. “Smell or taste the oil and the vinegar, try a bit of the spice. As you taste each one, think how it will interact with the others you're using.”

The volunteers started to pick up various bottles and jars, sniffing and sometimes tasting with one of the dozens of small spoons set in a plastic shoebox on the counter. A couple looked tentative, watching the others for clues. The three of us wandered around the table offering suggestions until each volunteer came up with a flavor kiss in which to briefly bathe her two chicken breast halves. Maggie put small bits of masking tape with their names on dinner plates. As each person finished sautéing one of her breast halves, it went on her plate. Then they moved to the gas grill adjacent to the stove.

“The thing to remember about grilling chicken breasts is to avoid placing them directly over a flame. The meat's too fragile. An easy trick for grilling chicken is to cover it with a metal bowl. It will surround the chicken with heat, making it cook more quickly and keeping it from drying out. Use tongs to put it in place and lift it up so you don't burn yourself.”

The grilled chicken went onto their plates. The baked chicken came out of the oven, and everyone claimed their pieces. The roast chicken emerged deeply brown and highly fragrant.

Back at the worktable, clutching knives and forks and giddy with anticipation, everyone took a bite of their chicken.

“This is so good. And it took what? Less than ten minutes?” Shannon said. “I don't know why I never thought of cutting it like that or just putting a bit of oil and seasoning on it first.”

Sabra jumped up and down after tasting her sautéed chicken. “Seriously! This is awesome. Taste mine.” She offered her plate to Gen. It gave me an idea.

“Hey, everyone shift to the right,” I said. “I want you to taste everyone else's.”

Like a continuous Chinese fire drill, the students shifted from plate to plate to plate. The consensus: Donna and Sabra had the besttasting sautéed chicken of the bunch, while Jodi and Trish won the baked chicken round. Cheryl had not wanted to get near the stove with baby Liam in the carrier but had seasoned all of her food and Lisa had cooked it. Her spicy Tex-Mex combo won rave reviews.

Maggie retrieved the mustard braise at nearly ten P.M., as everyone was preparing to leave. The dish had the classic elements of a good braise, deeply flavored and so tender it fell off the bone. We packed up the leftovers and a full meal's worth of braised chicken in takeout containers that Lisa had picked up at a local restaurant supply store.

Sabra could barely contain herself. “This is the best class ever! I've done stuff tonight that I've never done before!”

As she clutched her takeout box, Trish lingered, reluctant to leave until she was the final volunteer in the kitchen while Maggie, Lisa, and I started to clean up. “What is it?” I asked her.

She wiped her eyes. “Tonight I learned things that I really ought to have known. Why didn't I ever just learn it?”

“Julia Child said she didn't learn to cook until she was thirty-two. Until then, she just ate. So you see, it's never too late.” I gave her a hug and then handed her a takeout box. “See you next week.”

Preheat the oven to 425°F. Mix up some flavorings. Remove the giblets from inside the chicken cavity.

Gently ease your fingers under the chicken's skin to separate it from the bird, creating a cavity across the top of the breast and around the legs. Shove your flavoring under the skin. Smear a bit over the top and generously season the skin with coarse salt and ground pepper.