Cooking School in Beijing

Today I am blogging from the Lenovo Ilounge at the Bank of America home town hopefuls. The bank of america house is very nice offering families and olympians a place to relax, get tickets, eat, and have something to drink.

I took a cooking class on wednesday at a cooking school in Beijing. Despite some intial trouble trying to find it we arrived ten minutes early. The school is small with only 12 or so classrooms. Some of the rooms were big enough for 18 people and a couple of others had full sized kitchen woks.

Our instructor was a famous sichuan chef. I didnt know him but the school indicated that he was very young and very famous. After 5 hours of cooking I was very impressed with his skill. Everything he made tasted fabulous.

The first dish he taught us was Kung Poa chicken. We learned how to de skin and fry peanuts. I think he taught us how to de skin peanuts so that we would do it for him. While no hard there is a special technique that takes a while to learn. When frying peanuts you have to scoop some up and let them drop on the other peanuts. When the falling peanuts hitting the other peanuts start to sound hard that is when they are done.

Saving all the oil he drained the peanuts and moved onto making fresh chile oil by fring chiles in oil and then draining off the chiles. The chicken was coated with corn starch and egg white then fried. To finish the dish the chef sauted some large scallion, garlic, vinegar, laoxing wine, sugar, msg, and salt with the chile oil. He threw in the chicken and peanuts and it was ready to serve. It was not super spicy but it was very delicious.

The second dish was sweet and spicy beef. The process was much the same. The main flavor for this dish was a chile bean paste. The one thing the chef added to the beef coating was baking soda. This was my favorite dish. The peppers and beef really stood out on their own. The sauce took a back seat but made the dish.

The final dish was peppers in oyster sauce. Very straightforward. Pull out stems on peppers, cut into thin strips, saute with oyster sauce and normal mise en place. These were very good. The only problem is that when I made them for the group we had a lot of peppers to cut. The room filled with capasin and we all were coughing. Even the head chef had trouble breathing. Too many peppers in a room with poor ventalation is a bad idea.

All who wanted to got to try there hand at the wok. I have used woks in the US but never like this. The wok was small but utilitarian. The hand so short and close the the flame that you needed a soaked rag to hold it. The flame underneath looked like the exhaust from a jet engine. When i tried flipping a dish like a pancake i found out exactly how hot the flame is. When flipping things in a wok do not put your hand in the flame. The comibination of fire and chile oil on my hands tingled for the rest of the day.

Overall it was a great day. The cooking class was fun and the food all very good. I would recommend if you are in beijing seeing if you can get into a cooking school.