Cooking pork tenderloin will be the focus of our Elements of Entrée Production class today, as we’re serving 30 hungry diners using a Family Style Service in cooperation with the Hospitality class in the next room.

It’s great exposure to both sides of dining room service for the students at Stratford University, because our class produces the food using specific cooking methods, and they serve it using a variety of service methods. When they’ve completed these two classes, the students will have been exposed to both the front and back of the house.

That’s our challenge today, to work together to provide outstanding food and service to 30 people invited to lunch at chef college. Today’s meal will be served using a Family Style approach. Simply, this means that platters of food are placed on the table for diners to serve themselves.

The best example of Family Style service is the American tradition of Thanksgiving Dinner. The family is gathered around the dining table and the food is displayed in the center. Each person can serve themselves, or it’s more polite to assist someone else in plating their food.

The hospitality class also examines Russian style service, similar to Family Style except a waiter makes the plates from a platter. French style has the meals prepared from a tableside cart called gueridon. A la Carte service is like a typical restaurant, prepared to order. Lastly, Coordinated service is like a banquet hall where everyone gets a pre-made plate, served simultaneously.

Since it’s Family Style service today, our class wants to create a Fall Harvest menu that might be reminiscent of a country inn. That’s why we’re stuffing and cooking pork tenderloin with cranberries and apples to sit beside country smashed potatoes and string beans with almonds.

The first skill in preparing the stuffed pork is using a boning knife to create a cavity for our apples and cranberry compote. Using a very sharp knife, an incision is made along the length of the pork tenderloin at a 45 degree angle. This shouldn’t be deep enough to cut entirely through the meat, just about half-depth to create an angled slit.

The second cut with the knife is also a 45 degree half-depth cut, but now against the inside wall of the previous cut. The long muscle should now open up with a small ridge in the middle. This technique not only gives the future chefs a place to put the stuffing, but also creates a consistent thickness throughout the pork so it will cook consistently.

The stuffing is an easy thing to make. Everyone at chef college already knows how to sauté, so a simple sauté of diced apples, cranberries, onion, thyme and sage is a cinch for these students. The apples will start to release some of their juice during cooking, combining with other ingredients to make a great stuffing. After it’s cooled, we’re ready to stuff.

The next skill for this Fall harvest dish is how to truss a piece of meat. These stuffed tenderloins won’t stay together during cooking, so they must be tied. With a piece of butcher’s twine that is at least 4 times as long as the piece of meat, we’ll tie it around the farthest end with a knot.

The twine is passed under the pork and the loose end is threaded through the loop created by pulling on the opposite end. Thread under the loop and pull tight. Then pass the twine under the meat again and repeat the process until the stuffing is secured.

Cooking pork tenderloin in a convective manner is the right choice for this type of meat. Because it’s thicker than a normal steak, it has to be cooked softly and slowly. It will burn on the outside before cooking in the middle if we try to sauté or grill it. We wouldn’t choose to fry in a pan either, so, off to the oven it goes until it reaches a finished internal temperature of 165F (74c).

A few hours later, our guests are enjoying a great Fall Harvest meal and our Elements of Entrée Production class can be proud of their efforts. They’ve created a unique meal, using many different cooking methods that was served to the enjoyment of the guests. Perhaps the greatest benefit of chef college is the pride you feel after providing other people a great meal. That’s why we do it.

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You can fry in a pan or sauté on the stove top, but knowing the differences between the two methods is an important lesson in cooking college. There are big differences between the basic cooking methods of Pan Frying and Sauté.

Since we’ve already covered the two types of heat for cooking in another class, immediately my cooking college class can point out the first major difference.

Sauté is a conductive cooking process, meaning the heat is directly applied through the sauté pan and a SMALL amount of fat to help conduct it. Items cook very quickly during a stove-top sauté, following the progression of temperatures outlined in the lesson called “How Does Food Cook”?.

When you apply heat directly to food, as in sauté, proteins stiffen and shrink. Then, moisture evaporates as the product dries out. Lastly, sugars start to caramelize and the product turns brown. Under sauté, these steps can happen very quickly.

But, take the product and fry in a pan with enough oil to cover it three-quarters of the way up and you’ve changed the cooking method from direct to indirect heat. You’ve changed from conductive heat to convective heat.

It’s our job at Stratford University,the cooking college at which I teach, to examine how food reacts under different exposures to heat. A professional chef is never surprised at the outcome of cooking. He or she understands and controls the heat to their desires.

During pan frying, the fat or oil is the medium to transfer the heat. Now, with an indirect cooking process, the effects of the heat will be different than sauté. It’s a lower temperature and slower time method of cooking.

The best advantage of stove top cooking in hot oil is the texture you can develop. Items cooked this way are usually brown and crispy. The crunchy texture is because pan fried items are most often coated in flour or crumbs to retain moisture and create a barrier from the hot oil.

These are the other two major differences saute and pan frying. Items to be sauteed are not usually coated in crumbs and use a small amount of oil. Otherwise, coat the item in crumbs and submerge it in hot oil and you’ve got something that’s been pan fried.

Our 6 Step Fry In A Pan Procedure:
1) Coat the item to be fried in some type of crumbs or cracker meal. This ingredient is entirely up to you. Whether you choose Japanese Panko, bread crumbs, saltine crackers, graham crackers, or potato chips, the crumb must be used in a three-step breading procedure.
- Coat the dry raw item in seasoned flour. The flour sticks to the food.
- Dredge the item in beaten egg. The egg sticks to the flour.
- Bread the item in your chosen crumbs. The crumbs stick to the egg

2) Heat your oil. The best result of an item pan fried is a golden crunchy crumb. If your oil is too cold, the product will marinate in fat and slowly come up to cooking temperature. This will leave you with a soggy coating. If your oil is too hot, the crumb will burn before the interior cooks.

The best way to tell if your oil is hot enough to cook is with a thermometer and heated to about 350F. Otherwise, you can take a pea-sized piece of your crumbs and drop it into the hot oil. If it immediately bubbles, races around the pan and starts to brown, your oil is ready. If the oil begins to smoke at any point, quickly lower the heat to avoid imparting burnt tastes.

3) Don’t overcrowd the pan. Since this is a convective cooking process, where the heat is transferred by the oil, then the oil must be touching all sides of each product. If you crowd a pan of breaded pork chops and let them touch, you’ll have raw spots where they didn’t cook.

4) Cook 75 percent on the first side. Just like a sauté procedure, you want to be able to witness the changes in the product. If you flip a pan fried item too quickly, you’ll just be looking at a brown item and loose all those indicators of whether it’s done or not.

5) Use your thermometer to tell when it’s done. A finished internal temperature of 165F (74c) is the best target for food cooked this way. However, if you notice that your dish is getting too brown in the pan, but is not at the correct temperature yet, you can change the cooking process. Remove the item from the hot oil and finish cooking it in the oven where it will not brown as quickly.

6) Let the item rest and drain. When your thermometer tells you it’s done, remove the item and let it rest like a steak. Placed on a rack for optimal air circulation, the juices will redistribute and any excess oil will drain. This is a better technique than placing a pan fried item on a paper towel because the contact can make the crumb mushy by steam from the item.

Just because your pork chop will fry in a pan instead of roast in the oven doesn’t mean you can’t take a lesson from cooking college. There is a standard procedure to each of the basic cooking methods, that when duplicated consistently, can take your cooking from fair to professional!

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Grilling is the great male excuse. Most men could benefit from a few tips for grilling because they’re hiding behind their barbeques. Why do most men say they can cook outdoors but they can’t cook indoors?

“I’m a grill master,” my father often said. But, ask him to cook a steak on the stove-top, he was lost. Is grilling more “macho” than sauté? Do men think that just because you burn something outdoors, it’s acceptable? If you created something with a thick black char in the oven or stovetop, it would be unacceptable to everyone.

But, if you burn it outdoors, it’s somehow beautifully “blackened”. It’s the great male excuse.

The essence of all cooking is controlling heat, and the barbeque grill is one of the hottest, most intense pieces of cooking equipment you have at your disposal. A sauté pan won’t get as hot as your grill; your oven won’t reach those temperatures, not even a commercial deep-fryer. Your grill is hottest.

When you combine the most intense method of cooking along with male bravado, you get a total disregard for cooking basics, whether inside or out. Understanding HOW the grilling method works will make all men (and women) better cooks in the back yard and the kitchen tile.

As we continue with our Elements of Entrée Production class at Stratford University, our topic today is grilling and my professional level tips for grilling.

Last week, we examined the general concept of How Does Food Cook and classified all cooking methods as either conductive (direct heat) or convective (indirect heat). Grilling is a dry conductive cooking process because there is no medium for the heat to be transferred. It’s applied directly from the flame below.

When working with a dry conductive process, you need to be aware that the item will cook very quickly, making it through the progression of temperatures we discussed in “Do You Know The Two Types of Heat For Cooking”. Proteins will coagulate quickly, stiffening and shrinking. Then sugars will caramelize, turning brown then black, giving us the lovely grill marks we desire.

The issue here is that the item won’t cook in the center while the outside is burning and stiffening. Grilling is used for food items that are already tender. The basic cooking method of grilling won’t make your product more tender like braising or poaching might.

That’s the first of my tips for grilling, select a delicate tender product to grill. Rather than whole roasts, choose thinner steaks. Instead of whole fish or poultry, use filets and cutlets. The thinner cut will allow the item to cook completely before it burns on the outside.

Tip Number 2 - Use marinades to add flavor and tenderize. Since the grill won’t tenderize anything, and can dry food quickly, adding moisture and flavor can be the difference between fair and excellent.

Marinades with an acidic product like tomatoes, lemon, citrus juices or vinegar have a slight tenderization effect. The acidic ingredients help to break down connective tissues, making the product better for grilling. It’s won’t turn stew beef into filet mignon, but it helps.

Tip Number 3 – Always grill on HIGH. You should use your barbeque like a rocket ship engine. I never reduce the heat once I’ve got it blazing. Grilling is different than pan frying or sauté where you might lower the heat to reduce a sauce or simmer a liquid. Grilling is about fast, intense cooking and full throttle is the way to go.

Tip Number 4 – Coat your grilled item in fat. By brushing a steak with olive oil, you aid in the caramelization of sugars. You help keep the item from sticking to the grill, but also help get the attractive grill marks that indicate a nicely cooked steak.

Tip Number 5– Show side down. Chicken has a “show” side and a “no” side. The most attractive side is the show-side. It’s what you’ll eventually want showing up on the plate, staring at the diner. Because most of your cooking will be done on one side, it’s the first side down that goes up on the plate.

Tip Number 6 – Peek after a few minutes. Don’t cook by a watch. You should never cook with the idea that time dictates doneness. You have to watch the changes in the product to know when to turn the item over.

Tip Number 7 – The 90 degree turn. After you peek under your steak and see the beginnings of grill marks, pick the item up, move to a hot spot on the grill and turn it 90 degrees. This will result in the attractive cross-hatched grill marks that give you finished dish even greater plate appeal.

Tip Number 8 – Cook 75/25. Grill the item as long as you can on the first side and watch the changes taking place. You’ll see the steak turn from pink to grey. You’ll witness the blood start to rise from the meat. These are indicators of whether the product is ready to be flipped or not.

If you flip your grilled item after a set amount of time, then you’ll just be looking at a grilled piece of meat. You’ve lost all the indicators of whether this is done or not.

Tip Number 9 - Always use a thermometer! The only way to quantifiably tell if your grilled item is done is with a thermometer. Forget every other wives tale about poking your chin or your palm in comparison to the toughness of the steak. It’s ridiculous.

Tip Number 10 – “Bump and Run”. Just because you’ve removed the steak from the grill, it hasn’t finished cooking yet. You get a few minutes of carry-over cooking as the temperature changes and liquids within the meat resettle.

If you take the steak directly from the grill to a plate, you’ll have a bloody pool collecting within seconds. This is amateurish. Bump and run means that you rest the steak on a towel or separate plate, transfer it to the service plate, and then run it to the dining room. Bump and run.

My tips for grilling may have been given in culinary school, but you can use them in your own back yard. The challenge is issued to all men. Stop hiding behind sloppy outdoor cooking and accept that there is a standard procedure to applying heat to food, inside or out.

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It’s a new semester at culinary college, and the grandest question I can answer for the students is “How does food cook?” The easy answer is that food cooks when we transfer heat from a source to the food product.

In the previous class I asked a similar question. “Do you know the two types of heat for cooking?” This also seems like a daunting question, but these topics are crucial to success in becoming a professional chef. The students learned that all food is cooked in one of two ways, convectively and conductively.

Convection is when heat is applied indirectly, conduction is direct application of heat. However, regardless of the WAY heat is applied, all food items have the same reactions at certain temperatures.

Whether you poach a chicken breast or grill a chicken breast, you can be sure that the end result will be smaller than the raw product. Protein products stiffen and shrink when you apply heat, either directly or indirectly, dry or moist.

Sometimes you can achieve a nice brown color during sauté, or create characteristic grill marks when grilling. These are similar effects of heat on food no matter what method you decide to use in cooking it.

The answer to “How does food cook?” is a very important one that will guide my class of future professional chefs because they are mile-markers on the road to cooking anything. Being able to recognize the results of the four main temperature points will take their cooking from fair to fantastic.

Mile-markers are crucial in any journey. If you cook with a written recipe but don’t recognize the temperature progression of the effects of heat on food, it’s like driving with a roadmap while blindfolded. You may have all the instructions, but you’ll never see the landmarks along the way, and you’ll never know when you’ve arrived at the destination.

At 150 degrees Fahrenheit, (65c) starches gelatinize. Starches in food absorb liquid and swell at this temperature. You’ve witnessed this if you’ve every made rice. The combination of heat, raw rice and liquid results in bigger rice and no liquid. Gelatinization of starches starts at 150f and is the way to thicken sauces as well.

At 165 degrees Fahrenheit, (74c) proteins coagulate. This is the temperature that solves the ‘how does food cook’ puzzle. When you apply heat to protein products, they stiffen and shrink. This is coagulation of proteins. Everyone has seen the difference between a raw hamburger and the cooked result. It shrinks and stiffens.

Coagulation of proteins is an important landmark in the cooking progression because it’s the temperature at which most items are finished cooking. When your chicken breast turns from pink to white, you’re seeing coagulation of proteins.

At 212 degrees Fahrenheit, (100c)moisture evaporates. You might remember this from grade school. Water turns to steam at 212 f or 100c. This is how roasted items dry out. Roasting is a dry convective cooking process where heat is transferred through dry air. At 212f the air helps evaporate moisture, drying the product being cooked.

At 320 (160c) degrees Fahrenheit, sugars caramelize. The sugars in food turn brown and get brittle, just like making candy or peanut brittle. Caramelization of sugars is what gives you the attractive grill marks or browned plate appeal of a well cooked item.

Upon internalizing this 4 temperature progression, you can start to answer a few of your own questions. Perhaps you wonder why steamed fish never turns brown. Wonder no more!

Steam never gets hotter than 212f or 100c, much lower than the 320f needed to caramelize sugars. Steamed food will never get brown. Similarly, items that are poached or boiled will never reach the necessary temperature for a caramel color and plate appeal.

So, how does food cook? It cooks by making its way through the progression of temperatures that act upon the starches, proteins, moisture and sugars found in most foods. HOW you manage and direct its journey through this zone will dictate the color, texture and nutritional value of everything you cook.

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Cooking becomes much easier when you discover that there are only two types of heat for cooking. We’re starting a new semester in culinary college, and this is the very first lesson. What type of heat you use and how you apply it to food is the basis of all cooking.

My Elements of Entrée Production class will eventually be cooking for 30 people in the adjacent student dining room, so this is not just theory. We must put it into practice and be able to duplicate the process with quality and consistency every time. That’s what makes a professional chef.

I challenge the class to use this basic information to question everything they apply heat to. They need to ask themselves, “Am I applying heat directly or indirectly to this food?” Most often, direct heat results in quick cooking and brown color. Indirect heat can take longer and be harder to develop plate-appeal.

Direct heat versus indirect heat is the first lesson in your expectation of the final result. This may seem obvious or overly basic, but still very important. When planning meals or following recipes, being aware of HOW the heat is cooking your food is paramount.

There are only two types of heat for cooking, conductive and convective.

Conductive heat is direct-source heat. This is when there is no medium or liaison between the heat source and the food product. Sauté’ is a dry conductive cooking method because the stove-top burner is heating a pan, the product in direct contact with the pan.

Broiling and Grilling are conductive cooking processes as well. They can be considered mirror images of each other. Grilling applies heat directly to food from below through gas, charcoal, or heated stones. Broiling applies heat directly to food from above through gas or electric element. They cook the same way, just from different positions.

Convective heat is indirect-source heat. You can consider a cooking method convective when there is something between the heat source and what you’re cooking. Roasting is a convective cooking method because the heat is transferred to food through hot air.

Steaming is a moist convective cooking process because it uses steam as the medium for imparting heat to food the same way that Smoking uses dry heat to give a distinctive flavor. Whenever you boil, simmer, or poach something, you’re using a moist convective cooking process.

This is an important concept to use as the foundation for any culinary education. When you add so much olive oil to a sauté pan that your food floats, you’ve changed from a conductive to convective cooking process. Instead of the item being in contact with the pan, using direct source heat, it’s now being cooked indirectly through the oil, a convective process.

When you discover and become aware of the two types of heat for cooking, your end results will improve because you’ll have a better initial plan. Just like my culinary students, you’ll be asking yourself questions about HOW to cook something rather than WHAT to cook.

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I’ve gathered three types of eggs for today’s Great Egg Test. If you missed the last blog post, there’s still an opportunity for you to see the Farm Eggs Challenge from the Downtown Baltimore Farmers Market.

I’ve just returned from there after interviewing two egg providers. The first raises their hens in cages and feeds a corn and soybean meal. The second feeds a vegetarian diet and the chickens are raised in hen houses. Both treat their animals in the kindest, most humane fashion. Each explained how they give the birds twice the room required by law.

But, the egg test is not about passing judgment on the treatment of animals, that’s for another day. I’m concerned with the end-product. I want to know if a cage free egg is actually better than one from a hen that lives in a cage.

I’ll also bring in a third contestant, a plain white egg from the grocery store. I have no idea of its origin or how its mother lived. Since most people get their eggs from a display case and not the farmers market, I’ve chosen to bring in the mass-produced egg as a comparison.

The first event in my Egg-lympics is the spread test. After cracking each raw egg onto a plain white plate, I notice how it fills the surface. The more an egg spreads on the plate, the less fresh it is.

A truly fresh egg is measured by how high the yolk sits atop the white. Instantly, I notice a difference between both farmers market eggs and the grocery store one. The mass-produced egg spills like water onto the plate and rolls around as I pick it up to view. The yolk is spread almost flat and has a dull yellow color.

The egg that came from a caged hen being fed corn and soybean gave a much better display. The bright yellow yolk displayed a high arched dome sitting on the jiggly albumen. The egg still spread to the edges of the plate, but did not slide around like it was in water. It’s clearly a fresher egg than the grocery store version.

The third contestant is the cage-free bird that eats a vegetarian diet. This egg has the darkest yolk, more orange than yellow. The yolk perches on the egg white like it’s sitting on a throne, up straight and proud. It does spread more than the caged egg, but the yolk is stronger.

Event number two in this egg test is the frying test. As I put each egg into its own omelet pan, I notice immediate differences. The grocery store egg flattens as it cooks and the yolk becomes a cloudy yellow. The cage-free egg cooks nicely, the yellow yolk sinking a bit into the white that quickly dries out.

The winner of the cook test is the cage-free egg. Once cracked into the pan, it retains its original position, not spreading, now weeping. It looks like a picture of an egg in a magazine, with three tiers leading to the orange yolk. The white stays moist and shiny. It clearly looks the best cooked.

However, it’s really the flavor test that I’m most interest in and the grocery store egg is again last in the race. It tastes like water. The yolk is mealy and flavorless. While egg whites are not usually known for their flavor anyway, this one has LESS flavor than water.

There’s a clear difference in flavor between the mass-produced egg and both eggs from the farmers market. The local eggs both have a much more pronounced flavor. There’s an “earthy-ness” to both eggs that the factory egg just can’t match.

From this point, it’s really just a matter of your personal preference. For my palate, the cage-free vegetarian-fed egg had a creamier yolk, a moister white, and a more complex flavor that gave me a sense of the farm they were raised on. The eggs from caged hens was excellent also, just not as much complexity of flavor to my tastes.

So, who wins the Great Egg Test? You do. Start buying local eggs from your farmers market. It will be your gateway into seeking out wholesome, fresh ingredients that benefit your community, your farmer, your earth, and your body as well. Buy local, buy fresh and you’ll always have the best ingredients.

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I love fresh farm eggs! The first time I saw and tasted the difference between a local product and a national producer’s egg, my eating habits were changed forever.

This concept has been difficult to convey on a written blog, although I’m trying. Over the past 4 years I’ve created more than 500 videos and interviewed farmers growing tomatoes indoors in North Carolina to the Koloa Sunshine Farmers Market- in Hawaii, to Paris. They all say the same thing. Local is better. You have to taste for yourself.

When I visited France, I learned the secrets of a Parisian spice store owner. He said, “Good Food is Simple Food.” . Europeans live and practice the concept of “Terroir” (terr-wah). Terroir is loosely translated as “a local product, from your local soil, aided by the sun and the love of the farmer”.

Fresh farm eggs can be your gateway into this way of choosing what to eat. Many believe that when you consume items from within 100 miles of where you live, you gain the minerals, nutrients, and anti-bodies native to you. This helps your body better adapt to your specific environment.

The argument in my head is not about fresh versus factory. What I’ve come to the Baltimore Farmers Market to explore is HOW my local chickens are raised and what they are fed. I know there is a difference between what the chickens produce here versus the grocery store, but does a cage-free bird lay a better egg than a caged bird?

There are two vendors here; one uses cages and a soybean/corn meal to raise their flock. The other uses hen houses and feeds a vegetarian diet. Today’s task is not to pass judgment of how the animals are treated, that’s an entirely different discussion. Both vendors have a passion for what they do, love and treat the chickens humanely, each giving them twice the room they need to grow. What I’m concerned with is the final product. How good is the egg?

As I leave the farmers market, I’m quite happy with myself. I’ve spoken with two egg farmers who are passionate about what they do. I’ve supported them with my patronage, I’ve helped my local community, and I’m about to put the most nutritious, wholesome local foods I can buy on my plate.

The Farm Eggs Challenge continues in my next video where we’ll put three eggs through an “Egg-lympics” of tests to determine which one truly is the best. Be there when we start cracking some shells and see for yourself.

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Most home cooks would begin searching cookbooks for a Chicken Kiev recipe that met their tastes, cooking skill, and ingredients on hand. This is most often a time consuming task. Actually, it takes MORE time just to find the recipe that it would to cook this stuffed chicken entrée.

In today’s Elements of Entrée Production class at Stratford University, Baltimore’s culinary arts school, we have to prepare lunch for 35 diners in the next classroom. Their class deals with elements of dinner service, and our class provides the food. We’re the chefs, they are the servers.

An authentic Chicken Kiev recipe actually calls for the boneless breast to be stuffed with a heavily herbed compound butter. This is where the discussion begins among tomorrow’s chefs. We conclude that we don’t want the butter to melt and leave a hollow cavity in the middle of our chicken.

We decide we need a binding agent to keep the stuffing together, and agree on a variation of the Russian stuffed chicken. Perhaps we’re headed more into Italian cooking territory, but our interpretation of Chicken Kiev will be stuffed with spinach and cheese to hold the stuffing together.

When we consider that this dish is normally breaded, it poses a possible complication. In what method should we cook stuffed chicken breasts to assure that the filling doesn’t fall out during dinner service?

My culinary arts school class is very familiar with pan frying, as it was last week’s lesson. However, pan frying uses a lot of oil, could possible burn the bread coating before cooking the chicken, and means that our dish needs to be cooked in batches. This could be a headache if we were serving 150, 300 or 500 people.

We want to make production as problem-free as possible. The final decision to use a roasting method to cook the chicken is a good one because this type of cooking will allow us to compose the item in one large single batch and place them on sheet pans for the oven. We don’t have to mess with oil and we can cook them all at once.

After a simple sauté of spinach and onion, we add some sharp white cheese to create our stuffing. The chicken breasts are pounded thin, and filled with equal amounts of the cooled spinach mixture.

We don’t need any string or toothpicks to keep the stuffing in place, because we’ll use the natural cooking process to do that for us. Don’t you hate when you find a cooked toothpick in your food? It’s unnecessary. Coagulation of Proteins means that the chicken breast will stiffen and shrink, actually grabbing the stuffing and holding it in place for us.

When our improvised Chicken Kiev recipe emerges from the oven, it’s brown and crispy on the outside and moist on the inside thanks to our spinach stuffing bound with cheese. This is a basic cooking method that you can use in your household; you don’t have to be in culinary arts school to cook like tomorrow’s chefs.

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Welcome back to culinary college! Today’s lesson is How To Steam Food. I’m glad you are punctual to class because you’ll want every minute of this four and one half hour lecture and laboratory class.

The students at Stratford University in Baltimore aspire to careers as professional chefs, hospitality managers, and entrepreneurs of many different kinds. One particular graduate of the Baltimore culinary college actually became a cooking instructor on the internet! He now helps thousands of people all over the world improve their lifestyles through food.

Today, that graduate is at the front of the class helping to examine the basic cooking method of steaming. Steaming is a moist convective cooking method because heat is imparted to food indirectly through moisture in the form of steam.

In the previous lab class, we explored the differences between boil, simmer and poach. Items are poached at 165F, simmered at about 185F, and boiled at 212F. In my opinion, boiling is not a cooking method, it’s a terrible way to treat your food. The large violent motion of liquid in a full, rolling boil tears up protein products and makes them shrink and toughen.

When you discover the secrets of how to steam food instead of poaching it, then you help retain nutrients and texture of the item. Nutrients can leach from vegetables when they are immersed in poaching liquid. However, the indirect contact of moist heat through steaming means you can retain much of the texture and nutrient quality of foods.

Another advantage of a steaming method is that you can cook items that are assembled or composed. In today’s assignment, we’ll make a stuffed Flounder pinwheel by spreading herbed cheese along with sliced raw shrimp onto a fish filet, roll it into a log and cut in slices. This type of composed item would disintegrate in a poaching liquid. But, suspended above steaming liquid helps it retain its shape.

A disadvantage of steaming is that you may not have the most visually appealing item through moist convection. Those grill marks on a steak, or nice brown color on a sauteed chicken breast come from caramelization of sugars at 320F. Since steam is never hotter than 212F, a steamed item will never be brown. However, you can bet it will be moist and flavorful.

Steaming takes advantage of the highest moist heat without boiling and subjecting your food to violent motion. This type of cooking method is the best to make vegetables even your children will want to eat. The gateway to healthier eating goes through steam.

When you know how to steam food correctly, you’ll be using this basic cooking method more often than in the past. It’s fast, it’s simple, it’s low-fat, it’s flavorful, and you can never burn something that you’re steaming. It’s fool-proof, whether you’re in culinary college or not.

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Steaming is just the beginning.  Discover more basic methods with my cooking DVDs

Chef college is calling me…again! I’m on the same campus that inspired me to become a chef, but now I’m the one doing the teaching. Call me “Professor” if you’d like, but the correct response in this school is “Yes, Chef”! I’ve returned to my alma mater in Baltimore to help shape the minds and skills of tomorrow’s next great chefs.

Discover what tomorrow’s great chefs are learning in my classroom by subscribing to the RSS feed for my blog, or “LIKE” me on facebook and you’ll get the latest class notes. I’ll be reporting from the culinary lab each week with the actual lesson plan that my students experience.

Stratford University has entrusted me to help prepare these students for a career in the culinary arts. I think it’s the most noble of professions and worth the commitment it takes to graduate from a chef college that can make you immediately employable or entrepreneurial.

My class is “Elements of Entrée Production”. The class studies basic cooking methods as they apply to a commercial foodservice operation. This instruction runs in tandem with the class across the hall, “Elements of Hospitality Service”, which studies different service styles in restaurants and banquet halls.

My students will prepare food using one of the basic cooking methods each week. The Hospitality class will serve invited guests and the general public in a certain style of service. For example, my class will prepare a menu using the saute method and it will be served “family style”, where large platters are shared by the table.

The following week may be grilling method and we’ll design a menu of grilled items to be served in the dining room “a la carte”, like a restaurant where a waiter supplies an order to the kitchen. Then, it might be food that is braised paired with French tableside service.

I call it “welcome to the real world” because it’s not about culinary theory, it’s about actually producing quality food under the time pressures of a commercial kitchen.

The new semester is just starting, but I wanted to invite you to peek into my classroom and look forward to the coming series of videos and blog posts that will share the many professional level techniques and methods that my students are learning, so that you might bring them into your own home.

You can save the tuition of chef college and still get the benefits by subscribing to the RSS feed, or LIKE-ing me on facebook. Wait! I think the bell just rang. Don’t be late, and don’t forget your knives. “Yes, Chef”!

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You don’t have to go to chef college. Discover basic cooking methods with my cooking DVDs