Susan's Shanghai Blog - Week 100

Yes, it is another cooking class! After missing the November cooking class, I was happy to get back into the kitchen at Jade on 36 with Chef Franck-Elie. This month: pan-seared Boston lobster with vegetables "a la nicoise" and a bernaise sauce, then a dessert of Guanaja chocolate and confit orange, coffee granite, and tonka bean whipped cream.

Starting the dessert, we took egg yolks and sugar and whipped them together and boiled a combination of milk and cream, then boiled milk and cream together. My friend JoAnn was again with me in the class! You have to stir it constantly until it starts to coat the spatula.

Then you pour it into chunks of dark chocolate and whisk until the chocolate is all melted. Add some confit orange (which was made earlier by removing just the orange peel (no white) and cooking it down with water and sugar for 3 hours until it basically makes what looks like orange jam). It then goes into a martini glass about 1/3 of the way up, and then into the blast chiller.

Next is a cocoa streuzel. In a bowl, we mixed up flour, sugar, cocoa powder, and almond powder until it all was mixed together and there were no lumps. Using our hands, we then added soft butter and mixed until we got "a big lump" (the chef's words, not mine!) Then on a silicone mat, you spread it out into little lumps and bake in the oven, then let cool.

Then the Tonka Bean whipped cream. If you are like me, you have no idea what a tonka bean is. They are black beans that are the seeds of a flowering tree called a Dipteryx odorata. The outside skin is a bit wrinkled but they have a smooth brown center. They were used as a substitute for vanilla in perfumes and tobacco before being banned in some countries. They are produced by Venezuela and Nigeria. To me, they add a smell and taste like Amaretto. So we took cream and whipped it by hand (I did a great job this time of whipping the cream, I was quite amazed) and then using a lemon zester, you take the little beans and grate them into the cream. Then we put it into a pastry bag, which also went into the chiller. The recipe calls for you to put the grated tonka bean into the cream a day in advance and let it infuse in the chiller overnight, and then whip the cream the next day before making the dessert, but we didn't have that kind of time, so this way a quick way.

The last part of the dessert is the coffee granite, which is easy to make. Sugar and espresso together and then freeze it in a flat tray overnight. We'll use it when we assemble.

Next we worked on the vegetables "a la nicoise". Nicoise is anything in the style of Nice, France, which is the southern coast. The most famous probably is a salad nicoise, which is a salad of tomatoes, tuna, hard-boiled eggs, Niçoise olives, and anchovies, dressed with a vinaigrette (note the absence of lettace in this salad). We took onions and fresh thyme and sweated them with olive oil and cooked them down until they were smooth, then put a thin layer of them in the bottom of a small casserole dish. Then we thinly sliced zucchini and yellow squash, eggplant, and tomatoes. On top of the onions, we layered all of the sliced veggies, alternating line by line. We drizzled with olive oil, added salt and fresh thyme, then baked for 30 minutes.

Bearnaise sauce is a made with clarified butter emulsified in egg yolks, white wine vinegar and flavored with herbs. It is one of the five sauces in the French haute cuisine. The difference is only in their flavoring: Bearnaise uses shallot, chervil, peppercorn, and tarragon. Supposedly, it is VERY difficult to get right, and one place on the web says it "takes years of practice for the result to be perfect". So we didn't have years ... obviously ours would not be perfect!

The first step is to get the flavors, so you take parsley, tarragon, and chervil and chop them up (he said you didn't have to get them too fine). Keep the stems and put them in a pot with sliced shallots, white wine, and crushed pepper. This gives the liquid some of the herby-flavors as well. Reduce the liquid down about 1/2 and then strain it into another pan containing egg yolks, beating it together to ensure that the eggs don't actually cook (or you get scrambled eggs).

Then you cook it slowly on the stove until it becomes a sabayon, which basically means that as you are continually whipping it, it gets to a point where you can see the bottom of the pot easily. When this happens, add in melted clarified butter slowly, continuing to whip, whip, whip, whip, whip!

We then added some lemon zest and a bit of lemon juice and the chopped herbs, salt to taste, and voila! Bernaise sauce.

Last on the cooking agenda was the Boston Lobster. This is actually the first time I have ever actually cooked a lobster ... normally I only order the tails (the whole lobster is just too much work to eat!) Chef Franck-Elie pulls out this tray of live lobsters and proceeds to explain to us how to tell the male from the female (which of course, I have now forgotten). And how the claws are very sharp and to beware.

Here is our little lobster before he decided to commit suicide by jumping into a pot of boiling water.

Here is the trick to getting perfect lobster ... the tail only cooks for 3 minutes but the claw needs 7-8 minutes. So once the lobster jumps in to commit suicide, set the timer for 3 minutes. After 3 minutes, pull him out and plunge him (or I guess her as the case may be) into a bowl of ice water. This stops the cooking process on the tail so that it doesn't overcook. Then pop off the two claw arms and drop them back in the boiling water for the next 4-5 minutes and then also drop them in the ice water to stop the cooking process.

To prepare, we cut the lobsters in half, down the middle, which to me then made a really not-that-appealing sight (and now you know why I just stick with the tails). There are parts that you eat (well, SOME people may eat but not me) and others that you toss out, and still others that you take out but use to flavor other things.

For the claws, he showed us how to basically easily crack the shells and pull the lobster claw out whole, which was really cool (again, I tend to only do tails). Then we laid the claw meat on top of the open 1/2 of the lobster.

So now the lobster is done, and the veggies come out of the oven, it was time to assemble the dessert. On top of the chocolate cream in the bottom of the martini glass, you crumble in the cocoa crumble (that came out of the oven and was cooled).

Next comes a dollop of the tonka bean-infused whipped cream.

Remember the espresso granite that we had sugar and espresso freezing in a pan? So you take it out and it should be a little layer in the bottom. Take a fork and scrape across, forming a little crumble or "granite". Then sprinkle a bit of that on top as well. And then we topped it with little sheets of caramel that they had pre-made for us.

And the finished product!

Then we headed out into the dining room to see how everything came out. We started with fois gras that they had intermixed with chicken and black truffles.

Then our bernaise sauce

The lobster half with the claw meat on top and the veggies on the side.

And lastly, the multi-layer chocolate cream dessert.

WOW ... I think one of the best classes yet! The veggies I plan to try with Tom in the next few weeks .. we'll see if he'll eat veggies that way. The lobster is a bit hard to get here, and the dessert may be a bit involved for the little tiny room that they call a kitchen here, but perhaps I'll make it for my friends once we're back in Raleigh.