Day 16

My left thumb is officially cramped.

This from trying to move the wok around in our chinese dry heat lesson. 

The only dish we did was yang chow fried rice!! No photos - who has time!?

We were trying to emulate this : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NHRudxFOvcg

Our instructor is a lady who barely is taller than my chin. 

I managed to make it all the way through but I spilled some and not much wok hei on mine. My thumb still feels not normal from gripping the wok handle and trying to toss the rice.

The wok is scary hot. One moment inattention at high heat is enough to burn something.

Day 15

Today was Thai.

We did pineapple fried rice, baked (grilled) salt coated Tilapia, and deep fried pandan chicken.

Some points.

1. Many restaurants tend to use lime juice from bottle. Fresh pressed lime juice is better.
2. birds eye chilli, garlic, coriander roots, lime juice, fish sauce and sugar is a good basic chili sauce. Minus the coriander root, it can be used for salad dressing for example.
3. Pineapple rice originally only has curry powder. But due to diluting influences, it now tends to have more tumeric.
4. Original Thai cooking uses less oil than Chinese (but now a lot of thai cooking is diluted by Chinese influence). In some Thai homes, they squeeze the coconut oil from coconut and just use that.
5. Always balance sweet, sour, salty. Taste, taste, taste. Spice/heat is actually not all that important.
6. Actually, fried rice does not need overnight chilled rice - chef said that is a recipe from people who don't know their rice. Actually, the rice just needs to be cooked properly - the most important being the amount of water. She advises we just always consistently buy one type of rice and get the amount of  water right. Also old rice is different from new rice.
7. When frying rice, stir it or press down lightly. Do not cut with the edge of the spatula. 
8. The stuffed fish (stuffed with saltless oyster sauce, lemon grass and kaffir lime leaves) was interesting. To stuff the fish, you go in through the gills so that there are no holes created.
1. Using a scissors, cut the ends of the gills. Remove carefully.
2. Then reach into the gill cavity, and using fingers, hook down toward the stomach.
3. After some fishing around, you should be able to remove all the fish innards.
4. wash the cavity, then stuff.

Day 14

Today was Malay Food. The chicken was fried, then added a sambal paste we made, and then finished in the oven.

The veg again had a paste and stir fried with long beans, tempeh, and a bunch of stuff.

The last is Tauhu goreng.

Day 13

Today was Indian food (dry heat), using the Tandoor Oven. 2 types of bread, 1 tandoori chicken. The chef instructor also cooked us a lentil stew (not in instruction) to complete the meal. A tandoor oven in full steam is 500C in temp.

It was actually really quite relaxed. Partly because I think the oven is a dangerous piece of equipment so the chef instructor paced us through it deliberately. Quite fun - I got to clean the (really) hot oven surfaces with a wet towel, shape bread dough, slap the bread in the oven, extract the bread, and do the chicken tandoor.

By the way, our chef instructor is an Indian Chinese!! By that, I mean that he is a Chinese by race, but he was brought up in Calcutta Chinatown (yes there is a Chinatown every where). It sounds slightly weird to hear Indian style English coming from his mouth.

Got a lot of photos today, because the class created a whatsapp group.

Here's a bunch of today's photos (a few are captioned).

A view inside the tandoor. Up to 500C at full operation.

soak the cloth in salted water and then reach into the oven to clean the sides (charred bits of food on the side will cause the bread not to stick so have to clean). heh I was the only student trying this out. Later the instructor showed a better way by lengthening the towel and then whirling it from just above the oven and scraping the sides by that action.

This is the "bread pan" used to apply the dough to the side of the oven.

Some a reddish due to more chili powder added.

Trying to shape the dough right.

sadly some of our naans dropped on the floor of the oven - due to improper application of the bread (in some cases due to skittish hands from people fearing the heat - it really is quite hot).

Our 2 youngest classmates.

Uh... my thumb?

eating our own product.

Day 12

Today was Singapore food.

Did Sambal Stingray, Satay, and Goreng Pisang.

Some things I learnt.

1. If your food smells fishy or strong, you can
(A) for seafood, immerse in a slightly acidic solution for 15 mins (we used diluted tamarind juice because it was available for the sambal).
(B) For lamb or mutton, you can use milk.
(C) other meat, try brine.

2. Stingray sometimes smells of ammonia due to the fishmonger improperly cutting it up and puncturing the internal organs, releasing urine etc. Then see 1A.

3. Toasted whole spices, then ground, taste (and smell) a lot better. We did cumin, coriander today like that. I should try to adopt this.

4. The fragrant portion of a lemon grass is the purple ring on the lower portion of the stem. When prepping lemon grass, you can remove the outer one or two coats.

5. You can impart the "charcoal/smoked" taste of satay as follows (but it is very smoky/messy). This was fun to do.
(A) Heat a cast iron pan dry till it is very very hot over as high a heat as you can. You may see smoke at first, but that is due to minute food particles still stuck on the iron. Wait till the smoke clears.
(B) Pour oil into the pan. It should immediately start to smoke and even catch fire!
(C) put the satay into the pan. It will char very fast, so watch it and be ready to turn it.
(D) after the charring, the meat is not completely done. You will still need to finish it in the oven.

6. Somebody mentioned "Satay" sounds like Sah Teh (3 pieces in Hokkien). The chef immediately turned around and agreed :-). I googled it and it seems more like a tall tale. Here's an interesting article http://www.friedchillies.com/articles/detail/the_authoritative_satay

7. Banana leaf can be prepared as follows
(A) wash it first. Strip the spine.
(B) then heat it. We did it over the gas fire directly with a tong. It can even char slightly.
(C) crumple it somewhat. It will now be flexible and be usable for wrapping.

Goreng Pisang. We only deep fried it. The batter was prepared by chef due to lack of time.

Satay in the foreground. Background has stingray (wrapped).

This was fun. I kept exclaiming as I was doing this.

Day 11

Did some cooking today. Breaded deep fried fish, stir fried veg, pan fried chicken and roast potatoes. Fairly simple stuff, but it was pretty frantic (hence forgot to take photos).

We lunched on our product. Decent stuff (not bad considering context).

Washing was a bummer. I was one of the dish washers today. So many dishes and so oily :-(. I think that will be the theme of the next 2 weeks.

Day 10

Today's lesson is on plating and we get to do a mango avocado prawn salad for practice.

We worked in pairs. The photo immediately below is from my group. The portion is a little too big partly coz the chef said to use "all" our ingredients, and we just used them all. The other mistake is in using the margins of the plate for decoration - that's a no-no (e.g. for service purposes, you need to allow the waiter space for his fingers).

More photos