Susan's Shanghai Blog - Week 87

Starting in August, I started taking a monthly cooking class at a high-end French restaurant in Pudong called Jade on 36. They started a monthly cooking class called "Cook Like A Jade Chef". It is 3 hours in the professional kitchen at this restaurant (36th floor of the Shangri-la Pudong hotel). It is a small (10-person) hands-on class with the chef-de-cuisine and his staff. You do everything ... chop, dice, etc, and then when done, you all get to enjoy this amazing 3-course meal. I'm in total love with this and plan to do it every month!

This first month, the menu included Braised veal shank with risotto and eggplant caviar, then finished with a Grand Marnier souffle.

We started with the vegetables, diced them up and started them cooking in a large heavy pot. Mind you, the vegetables were purely for the flavor and they get tossed at the end.

As we go through, you'll see others in the pictures, which are either Chef Frank-Elie Laloum (the one here in the white) as well as the other students in the class. As you can see, we're all in a close, intimate setting where both the chef and the students are cooking.

Once we get the vegetables started (onion, carrot, celery, garlic), we deglaze with white wine and add orange juice. We pop in the tomatoes and cook until all of the liquid is back out of the pot. Then we add a veal shank, which was prepared earlier by covering with salt and chilling for 3 hours, then rinsing, drying off, and searing to a nice golden color. We added veal jus, thyme, pepper and some orange skin that we prepared by peeling with a potato peeler and then with a small paring knife, removing all of the white pith. On goes the lid and into the oven for between 3 and 5 hours.

About hourly, pour some of the juice over the shank and back in the oven. Then fast-forward a few hours and you'll get the 2nd picture, which is the finished shank. Take it out and debone, strain the veggies (toss them) and the liquid is used for a sauce.

Next we started the eggplant cavier by burning the eggplants using the flame of a gas burner. You can do this on an outdoor grill, or you don't really even need to do this .. it gives the end results a smokey flavor. Then you also take additional eggplants, cut in half, add salt and olive oil, and bake in the oven. By putting these together, the dish doesn't have too much of a smokey flavor. You can get the balance you like by increasing or reducing the ratio of burned eggplant to oven-backed. After they are burned, you can easily remove all of the charred outer skin leaving just the flesh. For those in the oven, just spoon the flesh out of the skin. Chop it up, and combine with yellow the red peppers, diced onions, and garlic, and then slowly cook for another 30 minutes.

I didn't do many pictures of the risotto because I was doing alot of stirring, as you can see here. Risotto was interesting to learn the correct way to cook it. Heat olive oil in a pan and add diced onions and sweat them slowing, then add the rice and "nacre", which means to cook it until the rice itself turns a pearly color. Then deglaze the pan with white wine and cook until the liquid is gone. THen you add chicken stock while stirring constantly, but you only add a little at a time, like add a cup at a time, and cook until the liquid goes away, and then adding more liquid. After about 20 minutes, the rice will be done, and then add butter (LOTS and LOTS of butter) and Parmesan Reggiano cheese.

Now the fun part .. souffle. I have NEVER made a souffle or even contemplated it, but here I go.

First step is the cream since it needs to cool. We zested an orange into some milk and brought it to a boil, added the Grand Marnier, and cooked for about 30 minutes. Then we strained (to ensure perfectly smooth). In a different bowl, we whisked up egg yoks, sugar, flour, and custard powder in a bowl until white (this took a bit of arm) and then added in the milk and mixed a bit more. Then it got covered with film and put in the chiller.

Next was probably the most interesting part and (we were told) the key to a good souffle or a flat one. We took our little ramkins and brushed them with melted butter. It was important to get everything covered but not too much. Then in with some sugar, moving it around to ensure that every part of the butter was covered with a thin layer of sugar without having any excess. This ensures that the souffle doesn't stick to any part of the edge and rises evenly. If your souffle ends up with one side higher than the other, probably the low side got "caught" against the side. To ensure we knew how we did, we put our names on the ramkins.

Then off to more whisking! Here we had to warm up the cream that came out of the chiller, mixing it with even more Grand Marnier. The next part Chef Frank-Elie did for all of us (the whipping of the egg whites into peaks) as there was only one mixer.

Then we very carefully folded in the peaked egg whites into our cream, then into the ramkins. Using a flat edge, we evened off the top and then made a little tiny ridge on the top edge (you can see i there if you loo close). They then got popped in the oven at just the right time (the kitchen staff did this), sprinkled with icing sugar, and served up. You'll see the final outcome in a few minutes.

A few generic pictures to try to give a sense of the kitchen. It is quite small really, when you think about 10-15 people in there cooking every night. This center part has two rectangular grills for cooking, and then across the whole side on the end (where you see the really tall guy and the chef in the white shirt) is an entire cooking section where you can move pans around freely. You can see that they must use alot of pots with them all hanging around the top. You can also see how hands-on it is for both the students and the staff (normally the head chef and an assistant chef).

We all then go sit at a table in the main dining room at Jade on 36, which by the way has an amazing view of the river and the Bund on the other side.

This is me with my partner for the day, Louise. and then me with Chef Frank-Elie.

And at the end, now we eat! We started with a gaspacho (that the restaurant staff made for us) and then you can see our braised veal (with the sauce made after straining out the veggies), the eggplant cavier, and the risotto in the back. And of course, I have to brag about my souffle, which came out amazing!