I love Carla Hall. She is one of my favorite Top Chef contestants. So, you can imagine my delight when Carla taught the first lesson in the first section of Top Chef University. She is the same bubbly Carla that was in Top Chef: New York, and the first video (which lasted nearly five minutes) was informative and entertaining. If all of the lessons are like this, I'll be cooking like a Top Chef in no time!
Basically the first lesson talked about the Mise en Place when you cook. The Mise en Place (pronounced MEES ahn plahss) is the area in which you work while you cook. You should have a cutting board, your equipment and all of your ingredients already measured out. This actually made a lot of sense to me. Often times, I will follow a recipe and have to keep going to my disaster area of a pantry to locate ingredients. More often than not, I don't have at least one ingredient and either make a mad dash to the grocery store or frantically call a neighbor. If you have all of your ingredients in front of you before you start cooking, then you won't run into that issue. (Hah! Who knew??)
Of course, the issue of cross-contamination was discussed. I already knew not to use the same work space if you use raw chicken and such. However, during the video, Carla took a plastic cutting board and put it on top of the wooden cutting board in order to have a separate space for her raw chicken. Genius!
I admit it: I'm not the most organized person in the world, especially when I attempt to cook. This short lesson organized me beautifully! I'm really excited to start cooking.
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