T is for Technique | Culinary Boot Camp Day 3 | Stella Culinary School

all right today is hump day um but what's great about about today today is all about technique and so things are going to start really coming together for you all right we've been talking about flavor we've been talking about sauce and how important having a singular technique or a best practice and applying flavor structure that is going to give you the ability to create your own unique dishes and then the understanding of technique is the last piece in the puzzle then you fill in some minor gaps with execution and how to get a mule out in a timely fashion uh consistently and then uh the final day we talked about preparation techniques which we've been peppering throughout our conversations talking about blanching talking about marinades talking about brining all things that at this point you are now you've had a little bit of experience with okay so this is how i like to think about my techniques so you can turn to page 73 in your curriculum to follow along so t is for technique and i like sticking technique on this day because you already understand flavor structure you already understand what it takes to make a sauce or a stock which is important for some of the moist methods of cooking but also too this helps put techniques into perspective as a tool for creating the structure or creating the the texture that you want mainly in your proteins because what happens is if we start with technique and i say oh here's here's a recipe for a pan-seared steak here's a recipe for braised short ribs you get lost in the fact that it's a recipe and you don't and you're not able to separate separate out the fact that the technique that we're applying to that short rib is brazing or the technique that we're applying to the steak is searing and everything else is just secondary flavor structures and personal preference okay so you have four quadrants of technique you have slow and moist dry and slow fast and dry fast and moist everything that you cook will fit into one of these categories every technique that you apply and all these techniques have different applications depending upon the protein that you're cooking again we're going to be focusing specifically on proteins today because that's the hardest thing to master vegetables is just usually you uh you blanch your starchy vegetables starting with cold water you bring them up until they're tender boom you're done you cool them off you blanch your green vegetables like we talked about yesterday and boiling salted water until you got that tenderness that you're looking for you shock when rice water boom you're done there's not a whole lot of deviation in those areas okay so we're going to list the techniques and then we're going to talk about why you would choose a certain technique over you know another technique and why uh you know what's what's the best technique for a given application so in the slow and moist category you have braising stewing and hopefully everyone's new found favorite technique suvi i know you guys had a lot of questions about sous vide we've answered some of them throughout the last couple of days but today is the time to really talk about sous vide okay then in the dry and slow category you have roasting smoking or barbecue barbecue is basically slow smoke to food and then confit or oil poaching in the fast and dry category you have boiling i'm sorry fast and moist category boiling simmering which is just a very slow percolating boil a couple of bubbles breaking the surface every now and then steaming and poaching and finally in the fast and dry category you have roasting slash baking grilling also referred to as barbecue in the united states but different than the barbecue of smoking or slow smoke searing sauteing and stir frying basically the same technique just the application is different one uses a wok one uses a saute pan and broiling so why does this matter why do we separate these techniques like this well it's because we if we understand how these techniques fall within the technical chart of cooking then we can make the appropriate decision i have people send me emails saying hey i watched your video on brazing so i decided i was going to braise a chicken breast but it came out really really dry why is that well it's because no one ever told you that while because they see my video on my braised chicken thighs but no one told them hey chicken breast doesn't have collagen in it okay so you need a fast cooking method whether moist or dry for meat that has little collagen okay at this point too you see me break down a tenderloin right we've looked at silver skin on the pork tenderloins we've looked at silver skin on the connective tissue that runs on the beef tenderloins we've broken down a salmon together and we see how the salmon just is pure fish flesh doesn't have a whole lot of connective tissue just one solid muscle so you're starting to identify the fact that all meat is not created equal they're structurally different okay we touched briefly yesterday we were talking about our sauces and our stocks of collagen and that was an important precursor to what we'll be discussing today so again your collagen is this triple helix of gelatin and it's there to provide structure so when you braise a short rib so you take a short rub right and you you can look at it and you can see the connective tissue but if you're not sure where the short rib comes from on the animal if the name doesn't isn't a dead giveaway then you can look at a beef chart you know just google it you look at a beef chart basically anything that comes from the upper and inside of the cow so the so the back of the cow or the back of any four-legged land animal anything that comes from the back region inside the rib cage is a lazy muscle it's insulated by the ribs it's insulated by the shoulders and the legs so it doesn't do much work that's where your new york strip comes from where you cut steaks that's where your beef tenderloin comes from where you cut steaks all right and there's other secondary muscle groups that are kind of tucked back behind shoulders all right so the the flank steak is cut from the upper interior portion of the shoulder so it gets a little bit of work you can cook a medium and it won't be chewy but i mean you're still half it's not going to be as tender as a filet mignon which gets almost no work it's not going to be as tender as a new york strip so understanding where these mussels originate from is going to dictate the cooking technique that you use and it really is as simple as lazy muscles you cook fast workhorse muscles you cook slow bottom line because of collagen you have to break this collagen down into gelatin so what happens is you have that tough short rib my dad used to cook ribs all the time on the grill right and i hated ribs when we talked about yesterday you know the reason why you hate something is because you probably haven't had it cooked right yet so he'd take these big old fat beef ribs and he would char the hell out of them on the grill for about you know 15-20 minutes until they were completely well done and i'd bite into them and they'd be chewy and you sauce them with a bunch of barbecue sauce made from like ketchup and worcestershire sauce and and that was that was ribs in my family growing up well my dad didn't know is that ribs contain a lot of collagen and they need to be cooked low and slow so grilling is a fast and dry cooking method you throw them on the grill by the time the exterior is charred and you have a golden brown you look at the ribs you're like oh look at these beautiful ribs you bite into them and they're chewy okay so you need slow heat to break down this collagen into gelatin so people talk about falling off the bone tender right they say hey i have a short rib oh it's so tender it's falling off the bone tender it shreds well really it's not tender it's not a tender piece of meat what gives it the perception of tender is all that tough chewy connective tissue that used to hold that muscle together and bind it together is now dissolved in a gelatin and you have all these little shredded pockets within and you can now chew it now what makes uh something like that interesting is the fact that to break down this gelatin normally speaking unless you're applying various different techniques that we'll talk about in a second you're looking at about a minimum of 155 degrees fahrenheit to 165 degrees fahrenheit but really in this in this 150 to 155 range is kind of the sweet spot if you're being careful about applying slow heat okay but this is about 5 to 10 degrees above the point where muscle fibers will fully contract and press out all their moisture so how then is a short rib juicy well it's not what it is is you take a shorub you braise it you give it the appearance of tenderness or the perception of tenderness by having it shreddable and you have individual muscle fibers that are not so closely condensed and then you take a great reduction sauce and you mop it into the meat and you serve it and the moisture from that good sauce on the flavor from that good sauce gives you the perception of a tender moist piece of meat that would otherwise be dry and chewy that's why techniques like applying very slow and thorough heat while cooking while cooking these tough cuts of meat are very important that's also why sous vide is universally loved by chefs because we don't necessarily have to adhere to this rule anymore okay we'll talk about that in a second so let's talk first about brazing we went over [Applause] yesterday extensively we went over pan roasting right so i told you if you if you leave this boot camp understanding not perfecting but understanding how to pan roast and create a pan sauce and how to braise and then create a sauce from that and you understand it enough to go home and practice it with various cuts of meat then you will be ages ahead of anyone else that you know who loves to cook on a hobby level okay and you'll be a way ahead of a good percentage of professional cooks out there because i find new cooks that come to my kitchen who've had experience don't always understand the finer points of pan roasting and braising and the reason why some those two techniques are so important why i stress those is because well you have a tender cut of meat you can always pan roast and make a sauce right you have a tough cut of meat you can always braise it now those aren't your only options but those will be your go-to's when you want to knock one out of the park without thinking about it those are the ones that you use when family and friends come over and you want to serve them a flame and yawn boom you get out your big 12 inch cast iron pan your 12 inch saute pan you can probably fit about six to eight fillets in there if you can't then you just parser them all and turn and you put them on a sheet tray you finish them in the oven just like you finished all your fillets last night you have your fawn your resulting sauce you make your sauce you're good to go all right so with the both the pan sauce technique and the braising technique it requires a liquid you could use water but it's not going to turn out that great especially with this pan sauce it's not going to turn out at all you can really braise in water though and you're making a sort of a stock as you go but your flavors are going to be a little weak so for home use what i do is i just have an all-purpose stock anytime i eat anything with a bone if it's enough to make a gallon of stock i just throw it in a pot i don't overthink it i throw in some carrots and some celery anything i have if i don't have aromatics if i don't have them because i don't always fully stock my kitchen at my restaurant i still have a pot i still have water right so i'm extracting the collagen okay so i eat a roasted chicken and i roast chicken a lot at home because it's really easy to to make and so i take the leftover roasted chicken i usually sacrifice the breast to my stock because i don't really like the breasts that much so we throw them in the pot cover with cold water bring up to a simmer i'll cover it with a lid and put it on my lowest burner setting and i'll leave it overnight next day i strain it if i have time if my if i'm going to work early and my wife's going to be around for a couple hours i'll just turn it up to like medium high let it reduce and tell her hey you know when this pots half full just turn it off and put it in a container pop in the fridge and we'll freeze it later so then what happens is you have this constant flow of stock so the next time i make stock i take my not so good stock that just had a chicken carcass in it right take any bones i have maybe i was eating pork chops at night throw the pork chops in there maybe this time around i have carrots maybe this time around i have onions maybe i throw some garlic in there right take the stock from the freezer pop the microwave for a couple of seconds just thought from the container put it in make another stock reduce that again and you just have this kind of ongoing stock that after a couple of times just sitting in your freezer that's keeping like the little tupperware containers and then you have a good base to create sauces from and to braise with and braising itself will also reinforce your stock with more collagen because you're braising something to break down the collagen that's in it and that collagen is going to turn into gelatin it's going to dissolve into your sauce and you can you you can take out some of your stock that you're making in that braising process reduce that down to serve with your braised meat that evening and you take the rest you freeze it right so you have this like ongoing thing and once you once you get in the habit of it it's not that hard you're putting water in a pot and you're simmering it for you know overnight don't even think about the classic like oh well you gotta simmer chicken stock for six hours and you got some reveal stock for 12 hours whatever yeah in a professional kitchen that's what we do because it's a little bit different we've got to be a little more refined and fine-tuned but i'll tell you what i make some great sauces at home with this stock and it's just popping stuff in water you bring it to a simmer and you rip it down if you're eating bones or pork chop or you know you have like a rib eye that's bone in save them throw them in a gallon ziploc bags throw them in the freezer when you fill up a freezer bag you know two freezer bags you make some stock okay then if you want to get real creative they've got they have a sale going on like a costco sometimes you get like two chickens for 10 bucks right so i'll either roast two chickens and you'll just have a bunch of like chicken salad sandwiches and all that sort of stuff we eat chicken for a couple days and use the carcasses or you make a really flavorful stock by roasting one chicken you sacrifice the entire chicken to the other one because really it's only costing you five bucks so you throw the chicken in the pot right you boil the hell out of it to extract all of its flavor and all of its gelatin and then you take the carcass from the other chicken that you ate you throw it in there and you reinforce your stock and that right there will give you a really good head start on making a stock how long you're talking about yep bones and stuff i've already cooked except for that chicken yeah and every now and then because meat adds a lot of flavor to your stock so uh i mean that's like so you have like the in the chinese restaurants a lot of their chicken stocks are actually made with whole chicken meat and the bones and that's what gives it a really nice aroma and flavor and you know people get a lot you know really caught up in waste sometimes and for me i don't see that as a waste buying a chicken on sale for five six bucks and turning it into a really flavorful rich stock that i can then freeze and have down the line like that's worth it to me you know and it makes things a lot easier because you know sometimes i just want to go home and and you know sear a steak or eat a bowl of cereal who knows but every now and then you get this this hankering to you you see like a nice rib eyes on sale and so you grab a rib eye and you grab some mushrooms like hey i got some nice gelatin rich stock at home then all of a sudden you go home you see her you see your rib eye right throwing some onions throwing some mushrooms boom boom boom oh i got some red wine your that's your deglaze grab your stock from the freezer pop in the microwave pour it into the pan once it's melted you reduce it down all of a sudden you have this amazing ribeye with a mushroom sauce and people like how the hell would you do that wait in your slow cooker you could do it silker in a slow cooker uh make a stock or something yeah you can make a stock in a slow cooker you're not gonna it's not gonna yield that much though well yeah i mean it's not as big so you can but i mean i i like to err on the side of using a lot of water because because really what i'm doing is i'm you're going to be extracting some flavor but really what i'm doing at home is i'm extracting gelatin because that's the hardest thing to get in a home in a home stock right so i boil the hell out of it i just have like a 12 quart stock pot so i so i really use a lot of water to make sure i'm fully extracting that gelatin because you can always cheat at home you can add some other flavors you know you can add some store-bought chicken stock you got a little splash of that but the store-bought chicken stock doesn't have the gelatin so it's not going to work that well for reduction by the time you add your red wine by the time you add your other aromatics like your shallots or your onions or your mushrooms for your sauce you're going to have a pretty flavorful liquid especially once you reduce it what you're not going to commonly have on hand is a gelatin rich stock have you seen those little the little by noir brand they're they're called home styles they're little things as at least for some reason have one in our refrigerator up here it's already expired but um i was looking at the ingredient list they had xanthan up in it i had some other i had lots of ingredients it wasn't just um you know meat bones and water right but it did have zam thing done you know so i you know trying to i don't was trying to get that because it's like a little gelatin thing yeah and those and those work i've never tasted them though i have no idea those do work in a pinch um and in professional kitchens we have something called demi-glass gold which we don't use but a lot of a lot of restaurants yeah it's like a chunk of of demi-gloss but they you have by the things to make it shelf stable so you can ship it you have to use stabilizers and preservatives which i'm not necessarily against it's just never going to taste as good and what i'm saying is you're eating stuff with bones all the time just don't waste it you know it's like just do it a couple of times and then you're going to be like oh this really is easy it's a simple like please don't overthink it we have a very very detailed section on how to make a proper classic stock because you understand how to make one but the most important thing is is don't waste that gelatin from the bones because that's the key to giving a great body to your sauce and even then if you reduce the sauce you're like okay look at the sauce is you know getting pretty low and i take i'm tasting it the flavor is good but it's just not looking like it's going to thicken i might not have enough gelatin there that's where your starch thickeners come in and we have a whole section on that we talked about starch thickeners yesterday you know so you can add a thickener you can have a quick little cornstarch slurry it's not it's not a big deal you know so that's going to give you a big a big jump forward but with brazing specifically it's you don't want to use store-bought stocks generally speaking because because i have too much sodium in them and the whole idea is you want to be able to reduce your stock afterwards and have a good body stock you have a good reduction sauce that's that's what really makes a braised meat special okay because the cold the meat's dry it's overcooked so you have to remoisten it with a glazed sauce how long will these stacks last in your freezer pretty much indefinitely yeah i mean it's it's liquid so you have a block of ice and and so and and to kind of to keep them a little on the fresher side every time i make a stock i just i pop my old stock in there from the freezer and so that so that's a reinforcement step so after you do this four or five times all of a sudden you're like hey i got a stella style reinforced stock in my freezer then you can say okay well it doesn't really look like i'm going to be using a whole lot of this because you get i mean four quarts very quickly of reinforced stock especially if you eat as much roasted chicken as i do right so you get to that quickly like hey look it looks like i'm not really gonna be using a whole lot of this in the in the near future and maybe just small little portions of it that's when you melt it down you pour into some ice cube trays freeze it and you pop pop out the ice cubes pop them in a ziploc bag and you keep that in the freezer and then when you're making a pan reduction sauce you know you go through you hit it with your red wine you do all that stuff you take like three or four ice cubes throw in the pan let them melt come to a simmer reduce until you have that nape consistency and you go through your finishing stage and that's a real easy way to do pan sauce for one or two people so you keep maintaining like a beef stock at home and a chip nope i combine them all yeah it's a big old all-purpose stock here we maintain a bunch of different stocks because we want to you know because you're paying good money to eat here so we want to make sure that we're we're being true to the duck breasts we're being true to you know the filet mignon you know that's what you expect when you spend 35 dollars for an entree but at home a gelatin rich reduced meat sauce tastes great no matter what you pour it on all right because no one does reduction sauces at home when's the last time you're over at a friend's house and you had a reduction sauce never and it's easy it's easy the only hard part is having that that stock okay and people are going to be high fiving you out the door the what makes what makes restaurant food especially proteins what makes it people come through that door time and time again are the sauces and the thing that people always rave about i mean yeah we can make a good complex emulsion but that's not really that hard to do once you understand the basics of emulsion or flavor structure what most people can't replicate at home is that demi-glass on their steak they can throw that steak on the grill and hit mid-rare just takes a couple of practice tries you know but they can't replicate that demi-glass so if you cook your steak to mid-rare or you cook your chicken breast perfectly after you brine it through pan roasting or you braise your chicken thighs and you serve with reduction sauce then boom people are like well how the hell did you make this right and a great a great thing is is all of you guys leaving this class should be eating chicken all the time because it's because it's a perfect it's a perfect animal to practice with we have plenty we have a couple different chicken fabrication videos online and we did a demonstration but you can go back and refresh your memory so you go to costco you buy a two pack of chicken okay you break it down into breast leg and thighs your breasts are good for what cooking technique pan roasting the thighs that get a lot of work are good for what cooking technique braising that's right so a couple of nights you practice pan roasting a couple nights you practice braising right and you have you're generating tons of carcasses to create your to create your stocks right and chickens inexpensive so you get your pan roasting technique down on a cheap chicken breast and then when it comes time to drop some money on a fat filet mignon for a special occasion you're much more comfortable with it when it comes time to to braise slow braise a short rib you're much more confident with the technique the only difference is between chicken and short ribs is you leave in the oven for another you know two to three hours okay so let's look at a traditional brazing setup only because we need to put into perspective what we're actually doing here so this is this is not just to kind of give you the punchline ahead this is actually not how modern kitchens braze but we need to put the modern technique of brazing into perspective this is a very valid technique and this is where the word braise comes from so you have your they have what's called a brazer or brassiere okay and it was cast iron very very similar to a cast iron dutch oven that you see today okay the only difference was is the lid was flat and really really heavy and sometimes it would have like a a rim that fit into the into the pot very very snuggly okay and because this is the time before the time of fancy stoves they would cook over coal so they would make their fire and they'd let everything burn down and then they'd throw this pot right on top of the coals and it's cast iron so it maintains heat really really well and they would charge you with heat and they'd throw a little bit of cooking oil down in there and they'd sear their steak or sorry not steak because you wouldn't want to braise the steak they'd sear like a shoulder they'd sear uh a roast anything that has a high collagen content a tough piece of meat they throw it in there sear why why you sear flavor not to lock in juices you sear for flavor because the mayard reaction creates complex flavor aromas that taste delicious tastes better than stewed meat that's not browned ever so you brown for flavor and also that brown flavor is going to dissolve into your sauce and what else are you generating on the bottom of that pan fun that's right see i told you this is easy so you generate that fawn you can so that technique is called farinier it's in your uh it's in the thickener section but basically you add a little bit of flour because just like a roux that when the flour browns adds a nuttiness to it classically speaking with this technique you wouldn't flour it because you're not adding a whole lot of liquid okay but you but you can and then once you add your liquid into your braising or your stewing it uh the flour will act as a slight thickening agent so they would use that residual fat in the bottom of the pan to brown their vegetables so they take you know french techniques so they're using their mirepoix which is carrot celery onions yup mirepoix and they probably use some aromatic herbs like some thyme or some bay leaf so they brown their vegetables because again brown vegetables especially in this application are going to taste better than just regular simmered vegetables and then they would add liquid whether it's water wine um stock or a combination thereof usually in this technique this is a peasant dish so they'd add maybe a little bit of of wine that was passed you know it was open too long which usually doesn't happen a whole lot in french households so for the most part be water okay so it's always fun people are like like what do you do with with wine when you don't drink it all like what never had that problem so they put the liquid in and what you'll notice is they put just enough liquid to cover the vegetables in the bottom of the pot but not to cover the meat okay and then they take this lid they throw it on top they seal it tightly and they take a little coal shovel and they pile coals on top of the lid as well what happens is you create a convection cycle of heating where this with a liquid starts to evaporate it hits the top of the lid turns into steam braze basting the meat as it falls back down creating a moist heat environment and slowly roasts this piece of meat this is actually a really cool technique to do when you go camping it's really really fun and it's pretty pretty easy because once you have the coals on top you walk away you drink some beer for like three hours and you come back and you open up this this pot and be like oh my goodness that's amazing now what happens is because you have just a little bit of liquid it becomes very flavorful because any of the liquid that comes out of this meat isn't diluted okay so this is traditional braising done in abrasion what we know it as in modern times what my grandmother called it is pot roasting now the only difference is that tight-fitting lid so normal dutch ovens that you have they can work a little bit uh but you still have a little bit of moisture evaporation from the edge of the lid what what some people do if they're really hardcore about this technique and they can't find a brassiere is they go and they get some modeling clay and they put modeling clay around the rim of their dutch oven to seal it in and it turns you know you're basically baking it into a ceramic and then when you're done you hit it with a hammer and it shatters and you pull the lid off yes i have a french cookbook where they take a simple bread dough and create a seal with the potato to roast it you could do that as well but the thing is is bread dough isn't bread isn't completely impermeable but that's just for hardcore crazies i'll pop all pot roasts at home with just a cast iron dutch oven and a lid and i'll call it good you know so this is this is the traditional method of braising so what we think of braising today is actually stewing right so yes sir could you put aluminum foil and then put the lid on there and you could but then you wouldn't be so cool because you're using a modern day thing i mean yeah i mean like like i said this is so having so keeping this environment completely moist and filled with steam is important because what are we doing we're creating a moist heat environment and we're cooking this low and slow so if if we didn't have any moisture in here or if our moisture evaporated out during the cooking process then we would be cooking this high and fast right because we're cooking this over hot coals you're still putting this in a hot oven right so what's happening is you're basically you're regulating the temperature of steam because steam can only get so hot it can only get to 212 degrees fahrenheit at sea level what what do you say for this i'd set it at 400. oh that's hot yeah because you want it because basically what you're doing because you also have the sides of the pot have radiant heat that are radiating in towards the meat that are keeping it brown or helping it to continue browning very very slowly but then you have the steam coming down and basting and that's what's keeping your meat moist okay but normally what i will do instead is i will do a stew method which today we call braising so you have you have your pot okay or you have a braising pan take my short rib i'm going to sear it again to generate some flavor if i have it if i if i was proper about searing my short rib it didn't have my pan too crazy hot then i'm going to have some fat left over my pan that i can then in a little bit of fond that i can then use to brown my aromatics in that same pan if i was being a little careless and my pan got a little bit too hot after my shorts were brown i would just toss that pan or clean it and start in a fresh pan that way i'm not giving an accurate flavor or burnt flavor to my vegetables okay but ideally you brown your aromatics in the same pan because that way you can then deglaze with red wine because you're using a browned meat you scrape straight scrape all those nummies off the bottom of the pan to incorporate them into your sauce and then your short ribs go into the pot with your aromatics underneath so again this is your mirepoix and that's just helpful because i mean they tell you to do it because of of scorching it could possibly scorch if you're cooking you if you're doing your braise your stew at the proper temperature you're probably not going to have an issue so it's not going to be a big deal but you do it like this because it's tradition and you can't piss off the french that much i mean we've already changed the names of their of the mother sauces so you know so we'll throw the aromatics on the bottom throw the short ribs on the top and then some chefs are adamant that you only cover the meat by two-thirds i never understood why i think that's kind of lame because it makes it way less forgiving than if you just cover the meat all the way all right because if something happens in that cooking process then you're going to have a dry piece of meat hanging out on top that's going to be getting you know a lot of dry air it's going to dry out on you then you place a lid on top slightly askew to allow for evaporation and your wine is going to be warm from the deglazing process but the stock that you add should be at least room temperature okay and that will cool off your wine sufficiently and the reason is is you want to take this whole mixture pop it into your oven and then turn your oven on okay and then you turn your oven on to 200 degrees fahrenheit for the first about two hours now why is that important well what makes it important so let me write this step so so deglaze add cold stock cover place in cold oven and then 200 degrees fahrenheit for at least the fir uh farthest of the second hour so the first two hours so we talked about yesterday very briefly when we were when i was answering a question about su v how meats contain enzymes so when you slaughter a a cow or a pig for meat just like any animal or any mammal or any creature really they have they go into rigor mortis okay so you can't eat them right away because it's you know it's not gonna happen so they go into rigor mortis and then enzymes go to work and start to naturally just kind of break down the tissue that's what makes uh makes it uh edible right starts to break down a little bit of the connective tissue starts to break down some of the proteins and that's what makes edible now most all the steaks that you get unless otherwise noted because dry aged steaks are very expensive to do are going to be wet age so they basically put in a vacuum sealed bag and they sit in their own juices usually on the shelf i mean they pretty much take the tenderloins they'll throw them in the bag you know ship them out and they'll sit at your supplier's shelf for a week you know then they'll go to you know the restaurant supply and they'll sit there maybe for a week and they get to us and they're a couple weeks old at that point so they've been wet aged and it's had enough time and a little bit of enzymatic reaction to to tenderize them enough to where they're they're edible and you're like okay this is a tender steak it's not a tough you know gamey piece of beef so these enzymes that do that during dry aging form all sorts of great flavors and aromas especially when you take it past 31 days but also just dry aging at you know the seven day mark is going to make a cut of beef much more tender than no dry aging at all now why is that important we're talking about braising like who cares right well number one the shorts that we do we'll dry aging for seven days just because we can we have big enough space for it that's not really realistic in a home kitchen but if you want to if you have a big fridge and you've got space to lay them out just lay them on a cheese cloth and you dry age them but that's not the point the point is this is between 120 to 130 degrees fahrenheit those same enzymes that make your meat tender and flavorful during dry aging are hyper activated so the longer you can hold your meat in this window the more tender your meat will be the more the easily the collagen will break down and if the collagen breaks down easier then you can break it down at a lower temperature okay and also too we were talking about gradient heat right cooking with a heat gradient what happens this will cook your short ribs more evenly all the way through and because of that you have this even heat that penetrates very very very slowly and the gelatin or the collagen will dissolve into gelatin and when it dissolves it doesn't immediately all exit the meat it only exits the meat when too much heat is applied and then now all the gelatin ends up in your sauce now what do we know about gelatin well everyone here has had jell-o right good because if you haven't you'd be a bunch of weirdos [Music] gelatin binds with water that's what it does so the interior moisture in the meat before the gelatin actually evacuates the meat the gelatin will bind with the interior moisture keeping your braised meat moist so what you do is after this two after this two hour mark you can raise your oven to by 50 degrees if you're in a bit of a hurry if you're not then you're going to add a couple more hours to your braised time and you're going to leave it at 200 okay but if you raise it to 250 then at about the hour mark they're not going to be done so so another additional hour at 250 for a three hour total cook time they're not going to be done but they're going to be flirting with don especially if you're at sea level okay so you want to start checking them at the three hour mark and see if they're tender once they're tender you have about a fifteen to thirty minute window to pull them before that gelatin totally evacuates out versus if you're brazing in a 400 degree oven your window would be about five minutes okay so you want to take once they're tender and up here it takes about when you raise the 250 it's going to take you about four hours and 15 minutes total cook time when you keep it at 200 the entire time it's going to take you five to six hours right but the great thing is is you don't really have to babysit this and once you do it a couple of times and you know your kitchen and you know your oven and your environment it's going to be the same pretty much every time so you wake up sunday morning you see how some meat you share some mirepoix maybe you're even thinking ahead and you cut up all your mirepoix stuff the night before so all you do is a quick sear it's going to take you about 20 minutes together to put everything in the oven and then you go about your day for six hours and you come back and you check them like oh yeah they're done that's perfect now when you pull the short ribs from the oven you want to let them cool in their own juices cool in juices until their internal temperature is about 135 to 130 fahrenheit this is for the same reason that we rest meats a lot of times people say that hey so you have a you have a steak right and you cook that steak and what happens is all the juices because you're using a heat gradient are getting pushed into the center of that meat that's why if you take a hot steak straight from the oven you cut it in half you see juice spill everywhere but that's actually incorrect what's really going on is the fact that above 135 degrees fahrenheit even though the muscles haven't contracted enough to push all the moisture out muscle fibers themselves can't actually retain moisture so the moisture is kind of pools inside the meat so when you drop your meat past or back down one below 135 more preferably 130 now the muscle fibers are again able to absorb all the meat or excuse me all the juices so when you slice that meat in half once it drops below 130 you look at it and you see a beautiful glistening wall of juices okay so what's going to happen then is even though your short ribs aren't a steak and they will be slightly overcooked even if you're very careful this method they will still have muscle fibers that aren't fully constricted that can still retain moisture so you cool the short ribs in their juices to 130 and then at that point you can start your finishing stage which is what sauce so have you used a meat performance you know what's cool down to that or yeah and i'll just i'll just take the temperature of of the sauce itself so yeah i'll take i'll take a uh because there's not a whole lot of a temperature gradient right so if i if i take just a meat thermometer or a single liquid and some 130 then i'm good to go the outside water is yep same idea yeah pretty much and this extra resting step i'm gonna be honest i don't always do at home because it takes longer okay it's gonna depending on how big your pan is sometimes it takes a couple of hours sometimes it'll take about an hour to two hours for it to fully cool down to that temperature but it depends on on how large of of a braise that you're making okay yes sir can you say ribs but this could be shanks or any anything the only difference is uh chicken legs you want to only braise for an hour poultry legs i mean like duck legs maybe like an hour and a half but this can be anything any tough cut of meat shank shoulder that's why you break these techniques up because i'm talking to you about brazing a short rib but this is a universal technique so all it would take is a lamb shank and maybe you know some indian spices and now you have a really unique you know indian style lamb dish that's tender with a beautiful reduction sauce but the only difference is the flavor structure right you're just you're applying technique and then you're doing the flavor structure to how you like it yes you said it would be two if you went 200 it'd be five to six hours and all but how long is it if you after uh i think you said three hours or after two hours you rate it to 250 then how long would you cook it for so at sea level you're looking at about so you want to start checking it every 15 to 30 minutes at the three hour mark and you're looking at about three and a half to four hours total but really you just kind of have to get in there every 15 minutes and just check it just grab a piece of meat and the meat will talk to you you can tell when a meat is still chewy and you can tell when it's when it's tender i mean you just you feel it and if you're braising on the bone which you should do only because it adds more flavor to the whole process you just grab your tongs you wiggle a bone if the bone wiggles free then you're done and then and then up here it's you're looking more four hours takes longer yeah it takes a little longer at altitude at the higher temp yeah and in general it all of your moist heat cooking methods will take longer at altitude so what about i mean the timing on other things is it similar you said chicken thighs would be different but with the lamb shank real shame same but they're they're all they're all the same so because they're all really tough cuts to meet they come from four legged animals that have a lot of collagen in them the the collagen and chicken is just slightly the structure is different it's not it's not quite as sturdy and that kind of is true for all forms of poultry but the bigger the animal the more the more structurally uh beastly their collagen will be yes sir 200 what would be your total time for poultry at at 200 i mean you're still you're still looking at one and a half hours maybe two hours but with poultry honestly i i actually raised the oven to about 350 because it's because chicken legs themselves you want to break down some of that collagen but you can take a chicken leg and you can roast it at a high temperature in the oven and it's not going to be as tender as as it could be if you braised it but it's not going to be chewy as if you did that with a short rib so the chicken eggs are kind of that that in between zone of you could either roast them or you could slow cook them or braise them it depends on the final texture you want yes there's a restaurant in dc that makes feijoada with a pork shank one of my favorite things and i'm sure they use something like this but it has a huge smoked taste to it do you think they smoke it first and then do this yeah i'm sure they do if it has that smoked taste i'm sure they smoke it first they could also possibly just be cooking it over smoke like like a barbecue method where you because the the this you control the temperature of the smoke and you do a long slow cook for anywhere from eight to you know 14 hours on something like a lamb shank yes the lid a skew i've never done that so the lid is skew is to slowly it will allow for some evaporation because that way you're kind of getting a head start on your reduction but also too what's happening is a little skew is going to release steam into your oven just ever so slightly it's going to keep a moister environment which is going to give you a more even cooking environment yes sir so like with if you're doing the indian would you do like when you did the the brown the serum and the bone and you also do like the onions absolutely i mean so so just off the top of my head in the braising liquid yeah so if i so let's let's switch stuff i was gonna go cliche indian and still it'd still be tasty um but i mean india is is such a vastly huge country and i mean so the the flavors are just insane how they range but if i was gonna do like a cliche like white boy indian dish and i want a little bit of heat maybe i take a little bit of harissa and i i rub my lamb leg with it and i sear look and you can even like let that marinate overnight if you have time right or you can just go immediately and sear it in the pan you get that nice hard almost smoky crust because it's gonna blacken on you set that aside take my aromatics whether it's garlic whether it's ginger right a lot of times they they'll toast uh mustard seed and oil so throw a little more fat down there toast the mustard seed in the oil toast my ginger my garlic throw in some garam masala kind of toast that any sort of spice mix or blend that you're using is always especially when you're talking in the sense of curries is always going to be enhanced by toasting and fat okay if you want to get really kind of technical you would use either ghee or coconut oil right it's going to so ghee is basically a clarified butter that's been browned right so it has a nutty flavor you can use coconut oil which adds its own flavor toast all your aromatics and then deglaze deglaze with water deglaze with wine you glaze with whatever liquid that you want and then you add in your stock and you go from there and then all that flavor is going to be incorporated into your sauce too okay and that's universal for anything you can go chinese style you can rub it with five spice right you can deglaze with some chinese white rice wine and then you know you can throw in a little bit of hoisin sauce for sweetness or throw in a little bit of oyster sauce for funkiness you know throwing a little bit of vinegar to give it some sourness and throwing some palm sugar brown sugar sweet use regular cane sugar to to balance that sourness from the rice wine okay yes i use a pressure cooker a lot yes that's neither boiling steaming or braising correct it's it would be considered it'd be considered brazing and and and here's why it's because so a pressure cooker basically it creates atmospheric pressure and we should probably talk about atmospheric pressure so i'm going to answer that okay are we are we good on brazing so this is but this is technically stewing so in classic french culinary terminology this is stewing but when i put a short rib on my menu that's braised in the traditional method like like a stew i'm going to call it a braised beef short rib because what do you think of when i say the word stew they have a big hearty thick bowl of soup and it's all about communicating with people uh so i'm not like the language police when it comes to cooking terms you know so i'm gonna i'm gonna say the term that's gonna most communicate the end product to you now when making a stew i'll still use this method and when braising anything you want to keep the meat as whole as possible because the smaller the meat is the more surface area it has to extract as juices so if i'm if i want to make a stew what i'll do is i'll take a big hunk of meat i'll go through the braising process and the best case scenario is you do it the day before because the flavors have a chance to meld and you allow the meat to cool completely in the sauce or in the braising liquid after it cools at room temperature you pop in your fridge and let it cool further the next day you take the meat out hopefully you have to put this on the flame for a little bit to melt the gelatin which is a good sign so it's all gelled up it means you have a lot of good gelatin in there you remove the meat while it's still cold cut it into cubes whatever size you want and then you reserve then you would take your stock warm it up you'd strain it because all these vegetables are already spent and so you want more flavorful vegetables to make a soup and then i would go through the reinforcement process again so i take my diced carrots my diet celery my diced onions whatever else i want on there maybe some ginger maybe some garlic if you want a heavy flavor you can caramelize them at the bottom of the pan if you don't want a heavy flavor you can just basically sweat them a little bit of white wine and butter if you're worried about the gelatin content in your stock you can throw in a little bit of flour or you can make a roof separately then you add your stock back in you slowly simmer your vegetables until they're tender until they're to your liking so if you like them crunchy leave them crunchy if you like them tender make them tender but what that's going to do is those vegetables are going to give some of their flavor to that sauce as well once your sauce is at the final consistency that you like whether you it's just perfect because there's a good amount of gelatin in there or you need to add a roux to make it more of a hearty stew then you throw your meat back in and you cook and you cook your meat just long enough to heat it through it's already perfectly cooked if you fold this process it already has a lot of good juices in it and so you're going to have a really flavorful stew without the the chewy sort of texture the dry meat meat that you normally get in a lot of homemade stews okay so this is brazing it's classic and simple and it's something that you ought not to overthink just understand and practice practice practice okay so pressure cookers and atmospheric pressure so pressure cookers you can braise quicker and faster and you can also make stocks and extract stocks faster in and

Channel: Jacob Burton

Views: 158,065

Keywords: Cooking School, culinary school, cooking techniques, FSTEP, fstep curriculum, Braising, steaming, sous video, pressure cooking, how to cook

Id: 0pAdeXNVi_M

Length: 55min 13sec (3313 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 03 2018