Lesson video

Hello, my name's Mrs. Finley.

Today we are going to look at different techniques in food and we're going to have a little go at doing some cooking as well.

As always you are going to need a pen and paper with you and to be somewhere quiet where you can listen to the lesson.

For today's lesson, as I just said, make sure you have got an exercise book or paper and a pen.

You should have already done today's intro quiz.

Today we're going to revisit some of the techniques you might have already learned.

We're going to have a little look at utensils.

I'm going to do a couple of demonstrations for you to really look at how those techniques happen and what dishes we can put them in.

Then as always, there's the exit quiz.

We're going to get started now on our keywords for today.

Roux, this is the base of a white sauce.

Notice how it's spelled, R-O-U-X.

Enrobing, this is the process of coating a food and this might be a sweet or a savoury food, enrobing.

The claw technique, now I know you've already done this, but it's making sure that you understand this is a method by which you can grip food to help protect your fingers.

Right now I'm going to revisit some knowledge that you have previously done.

What can you remember about the bridge technique and the claw technique.

Should we have a look? The bridge technique, can you do it? You have your hand over the top of the product.

If it's an apple or an onion, then you're going to cut between.

Your hand is making that bridge and you're cutting between.

The point here is your fingers are right out the way of the blade.

What about the claw technique, can you show me how to do that? Let's have a look and see if you're right.

Fantastic.

Now, what's really important and I found this great picture is that it's almost, it's the top of that knuckle that's hitting the blade there and not your fingers doing that.

You're more likely to be chopping the top of your fingers.

We've got the bridge and we've got the claw.

What about these foods? What if I was cutting an apple? How would I cut my apple in half? Would I use the claw or would I use the bridge? Which is the better one to use? Yes, I would say the bridge because you're holding the apple from the side and you can cut it down through the middle.

But what if I wanted to, after I cut it in half, cut it into slices? That's right, I would use the claw technique for that too.

Let's see how good you are on this next bit.

Imagine you are about to cook, how many types of personal hygiene can you think of? Pause the video now, and have a go.

Okay.

Look, there's a little example there.

For example, keeping your fingernails short.

Let's see what we've come up with.

Let's see how many you got.

Wear safety shoes.

I think the really important part here is that you're not using open toed flip flops or anything like that.

Tie your hair back, really important.

We don't want hair getting into our food.

Washing your hands.

I bet you had this one.

Jewellery should be taken off.

Wear an apron.

Cover wounds with a blue plaster.

How many of those six did you get? What about chopping boards? We're going to have a look at six different chopping boards that I know you've covered and we're going to look at whether or not you can remember what colour boards are used for which food.

To start with, chopping boards coloured are used to stop cross contamination in the kitchen.

There's red, yellow, green, I suspect you knew those.

Brown, blue and white.

They cover six different food areas.

Cooked meat, raw meat, raw fish, fruit and salad, dairy and bread and vegetables.

Pause the video now and I want you to match each colour board up with the food type.

Let's see if you got those? Red board, what did you get? Raw meat, great stuff.

Not to be confused with raw fish, we'll come across that one in a minute.

Dairy and bread for the white one, well done.

Some people often think that's yellow, so really great.

What did you get for green? Tell me.

Very good, fruit and salad, brilliant.

Not to be confused with vegetables which are different because vegetables sometimes can have soil in them as well.

Salad technically can too, I supposed.

What about blue? Raw fish.

I always think, fish is in the sea, the sea's blue, blue board.

That's how I remember it.

Yellow then, cooked meat, fantastic.

Bit of a tricky one, that one.

Brown, vegetables, great stuff.

If you get six out of six, amazing.

If not, don't panic, we're going to be covering this a lot.

Let's test your knowledge a little bit more.

Don't cheat and look at what you just wrote down, what colour chopping board would be used for this fish? Blue, brilliant because it is raw.

Fantastic.

What about this one? What colour chopping board for bread? White.

What colour chopping board would be used for this raw meat? What do you think? Yes, it's red, well done.

What about the strawberry? Good, green.

Time to have a look at some cooking techniques.

We're now going to look at a cooking technique called enrobing.

That's where a food is coated and covered evenly in another food.

We're going to look at Scotch eggs.

We're going to have an egg that is surrounded by sausage meat and then it is going to be coated in bread crumbs.

There are loads of different ways that you can make Scotch eggs.

This one uses an oven technique rather than shallow frying.

We're going to be using pork but you could use chicken or veggie alternative.

I've put the recipe in a worksheet which is attached to this lesson.

Here are our ingredients set out ready to go.

The information for that is on the worksheet that accompanies this lesson.

First job is to fill a sauce pan a third full of water.

Allow it to start to become a rolling boil, you can see the bubbles in the bottom of my sauce pan.

Then using a spoon very carefully add four of the five eggs required.

This is going to make four Scotch eggs.

I'm going to boil them for four minutes.

But I haven't started the timer yet because I'm waiting for the rolling boil to become more fierce.

Now, you can just start to see on the right hand side there, little bubbles coming up.

I know the rolling boil is going to happen very soon.

You must be very careful boiling eggs.

Producing steam requires more energy than it does to boil the water.

Here you can see the rolling boil happening in the side.

I'm quite happy to start the timer on that.

While that's happening, I'm going to get my sausage meat and using a plate and a fork I'm going to flatten it out.

This is because I'm going to add the seasoning.

You don't have the use sausage meat in it's pure form.

You could use normal sausages and just take them out of their skins.

There's details about that in the recipe.

You also could you chicken or you might decide to use a vegetable alternative.

If you use something like veggie, you might find you want to use a little bit of your beaten egg just to help bind everything together.

That's the dried stuffing gone in.

I'm now going to add the pepper.

I'm going to add the mixed herbs.

You might want to use thyme or something like that and I'm going to add the parsley.

If these weren't dried, if they were fresh, they would be really lovely, but that's all I had in my cupboard, so there we go.

Then I'm going to use my fork and I'm going to blend and mix everything together.

Now to start with you're going to think this is never going to mix up, but it will.

That's why I really like using a plate and a fork, because I feel like you can see everything.

If you got a bowl and a wooden spoon, or a bigger spoon at home, that's absolutely fine as well.

All of this is going to be mixed together.

I won't bore you seeing the whole thing but I want to make sure you've seen the technique.

I'm folding it over and using the back of the fork.

Once all of that is mixed up we can go back to our eggs, which are done.

I'm going to carefully take them out, one by one, and put them in some icy, cold water.

At this point, some people would say to crack them on the side of the bowl because this will help to be a bit easier when you peel it later.

But as you can see, I am dancing rather with the weight of the eggs.

It didn't spill.

Allow those to cool.

Whilst they're cooling, you can set up your bread crumbing station.

We've got the flour on a plate, the bread crumbs on a plate, and we're now going to add the egg.

This is the egg that you didn't boil.

Now I'm just going to rewind that a smidge because I want to show you about cracking an egg.

Have your egg in your dominate hand, mine is right, and you're going to crack quite strongly the side of that egg.

Two fingers in the middle, gently pull out either side.

Always check before you start whisking, that there's isn't any shell in there.

That's all whisked together really nicely.

That's ready to go.

By now you're eggs might be cool.

If not, give them a little bit longer.

Tap on the side and using the very, I'm going to show you here, I'm using the edge of my thumb.

I'm not stabbing into the egg.

I'm using the edge of my thumb.

All I'm doing is rolling the shell off.

The fresher the eggs are, the more difficult they are to peel because they're super fresh.

I'm just peeling those into a bowl to keep all my shell in one place.

You might find you want to rinse them off afterwards.

I'm then going to divide the meat into four on the plate.

I'm going to set out some cling film.

If you don't have cling film, you might have some freezer bags at home which you could open out, cut out, and you could use that.

I'm going to take a quarter of the Scotch egg sausage meat mix, this is such a cool little bit, I love doing this.

Fold it over and very gently, because we don't want to pop the cling film, very gently press down.

Now some of you will be saying she should be using a rolling pin.

Okay, we'll get the rolling pin and we'll use that to make the thickness more uniform.

Here I go.

Now, the whole idea when we build the Scotch egg and we put it together is that there's an even amount of meat either side of the egg.

That's the whole point.

We want to get an even amount of meat all the way around.

Actually, I wonder if I've just slightly over rolled this, but it will come good, it'll be all right.

We're going to slide our hand underneath.

We're going to, lovely little trick this, just gently flour our Scotch egg.

I'm just giving it a little bounce to make sure there's not a lot of extra flour onto it.

I'm going to put the egg inside the sausage meat and then I'm going to use the cling film like a tool to help enrobe, to help surround the egg.

I don't want to get my hands all covered in sausage meat just yet.

I'm using that cling film as a tool, lovely.

Once I'm pretty happy I'm going to put that cling film together and give it a little bit of a gentle roll.

Not trapping the cling film within the sausage meat or creating any massive disaster like that.

Just making a lovely Scotch egg style.

There we go.

Now, we're going for it, we're going to bread crumb it.

I have added a little addition on the end there, you might have seen.

A baking tray with baking paper on it.

Everything is absolutely ready to go.

I'm going to have one hand that's going to get particularly bread crumby dirty and one hand that I'm going to keep clean.

I'm right handed, I'm going to use my right hand as my messy hand.

The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to drop that Scotch egg into the flour.

I'm going to roll it in the flour so it's all covered.

I'm going to give it a tiny little bounce, just to get off any extra flour, a little shake, there we go.

Now, this is the fun bit.

Popping it in the egg, roll it all over, absolutely cover it in that egg.

Now my right hand is covered in egg, lovely.

Then I'm going to drop it in the breadcrumb.

Here comes the top tip.

I'm going to use my clean hand, my left hand, to cover the top.

I'm going to just gently roll it over with the dirty right hand, there we go.

We're going to cover it like that.

Loveliness.

Making sure it's lovely and clear.

Then with my left, cleaner hand, I'm going to pop it on the tray.

The idea is that you're going to do that four times with your four Scotch eggs.

You're going to pop them in the oven for about 180 degrees for about half an hour, but keep an eye on them because you might have different size eggs, you might have different thickness of meat around them or you might be using something slightly different.

Then, when we cut them out, this is what they're going to look like.

Do you remember what I said about them being uniform in the middle? I'm not quite sure what happened here, but at least they look homemade.

These ones at the back, unfortunately that are blurred, are slightly better.

This one's nearly in the middle, but that's what we're looking for.

I'm really interested in seeing if you have a go at making these at home.

Quick question, enrobing is the process of encasing food? Do you think that's true or false? Yeah, that's right, it's true.

What food are we enrobing in my demonstration? That's right, an egg.

We're using sausage meat, well done.

These are the ingredients we're going to use to make our roux.

The first thing we're going to do is put a sauce pan on the hob and we're going to add our butter in.

The amounts of the ingredients can be found in our worksheet.

You really need to stay with the butter because we don't want it to burn otherwise it will leave a horrible taste in our roux.

I'm just going to turn the heat up a little bit now to more of a medium heat.

This is a but of a speedy through what happens.

I'm staying with the butter because don't want it to burn.

I'm going to take it off the heat, just to a cold hob at the front and I'm going to add all the flour.

I'm mixing that in off the hob.

I'm going to stir all of that together until all of the flour has been mixed in.

It almost becomes like a paste really.

I'm putting it back on the hob to let some of that flour cook through but I'm only doing this for about a minute.

I'm not leaving it, I'm stirring it all the time.

Pulling everything in from the sides and really starting to stir it.

What happens then is any lumps or any thickness of any butter, that's all going to be cooking in with the flour and you can start to see that this is becoming yellowier and it's also becoming smoother, which is what we want.

Making sure I keep it, you can see how nice and smooth this is becoming now.

The next thing I'm going to do is take it off the heat again and I'm going to add half of the milk.

There we go, lovely and yellowy, nice and smooth.

Lovely.

Now I'm going to add in half of that milk.

200 millilitres of milk is what I'm going to add in.

Here it comes.

I'm going to pour that in.

I'm mixing that in off the hob, off the heat.

Heat control is really important when we're making sauces because what we're trying to do is get that sauce to become thick but we don't want to end up with lumps we can't control.

I'm stirring all of this in until I'm happy it's in some form of smooth paste.

I did that and then it's back on the heat again.

What I'm looking for is I'm looking for the sauce to tell me it's starting to thicken.

This normally will happen, obviously, on the bottom of the sauce pan.

Once in a while, once I'm stirring this, I'm pulling it up from the sides to see if I've got any thickening happening.

If nothing's happening I might just gently turn the heat up from a low heat to a medium heat but you must stay with it.

You can just see I'm tipping the sauce pan, nothing's thickening at the bottom at the moment, but I'm not going to leave it.

I'm going to stay with that sauce pan.

I'm going to stay with it, turn the heat up a little bit.

Just watching it really carefully, watching for bubbles.

Once I'm happy, wobbly camera.

Once I'm happy I'm going to get that spoon back in there and I'm just going to look at the edges.

You can start to see there's evidence of thickening.

I'm really going to go for it now stirring.

Obviously I can take it off the heat, I could reduce the heat.

But I'm going to introduce using a little whisk as well.

A whisk is going to bring everything together.

I've been using a stainless steel pan, I'm not using nonstick because I'd be worried that if I used my nonstick, we can see the lumps, I'm really going to have to work it now.

I'd be worried if I was using something like a whisk on the nonstick, on a not very good quality nonstick it might pull some of that into my sauce which I don't want.

There we go.

I'm going to introduce my whisk now.

I'm going to start to whisk that.

That will come together and that will pull any thickening underneath, that will pull it together in a lovely thickened sauce.

The next thing to do, once my sauce is quite thick, that's right, add some more milk.

I'm not adding all of it.

I'm probably adding a quarter of the actual amount or half of what I had left.

I'm staying with that whisk.

Relatively high to medium heat now.

Use the whisk to get it all back together then back to using the spoon and allow that sauce to thicken again.

You keep doing this until it's at the thickness that you require.

Usually you will get all of that milk done.

So here we go, I've added the last bit of milk, the sauce is thickened, very good.

Dodgy thumb in there to say it's okay.

You can see it's bubbling away and it's cooked through and it's happy.

That white sauce is now ready for something else to happen to it potentially.

A little bit more stirring required to get all those last lumps out.

Here's a quick question.

What do you call the base for a white sauce? Is it a roux? A flour base? White sauce base? Or flour and milk base? That's right, its a roux.

Can you remember how we made this? What was the first ingredient we had? That's right, butter.

We put it into the pan and we heated it up making sure that it didn't burn.

We took it off the heat and added flour, very good.

We mixed that together, put it back on the heat.

Gave it a little cook, took it off the heat and added half the, what was the liquid called? Milk, fantastic.

Got that together, blended together.

Back on the heat, let it thicken a little, add some more milk, let it thicken a little, add some more milk, until we had the consistency we needed.

Great knowledge.

Here's our white sauce as we left it.

All we're going to do while it's lovely and hot is we're going to grate up, or actually we're going to boil some pasta.

This is macaroni.

I put a pan of water onto boil.

Add the macaroni and cook it for the amount of time suggested on the packet and drain it.

Give it a little shake and drain it.

I'm going to grate my cheese.

Again, it's in the recipe, you can follow that.

I'm going to add that to my sauce that we have made.

Now, I'm going to stir that in.

Going to stir it in and I'm also going to pop it back on the hob to make sure all my lovely cheese is all melted and it's all mixed in really nicely.

You can see it gets a bit lumpy when you first start popping it in.

I'm going to pop it onto the hob just on a low to medium heat and cook through and make sure all that cheese is melted, all that lovely flavour.

I'm using mature cheddar for this one.

That's all mixed in very nicely.

There's two ways that we can do this.

We can either combine the pasta and the sauce and bake it in the oven for a bit with maybe some cheese on top.

Or we can just put it together and eat it if you can't wait.

You can see this takes quite a while for the cheese to all melt but that's because I've got it on low to medium heat.

I'm going to use that sauce pan that I use to cook the pasta in just to mix everything up to save washing up.

Adding in a little bit of my pasta there.

Adding in some of that lovely, cheesy sauce that we've just made.

Mixing it all together.

Obviously you could use something like double Gloucester or red Leicester to give it some colour as well.

I could eat my pasta and cheesy sauce at this point or I could put it into a little dish, the slowest pouring of pasta and cheese that there ever was.

I could put it into a little dish and then I could find a little bit of cheese and with the grater I could just grate that on the top and that will give you a lovely cheese crust for when you're eating your pasta and cheese.

You can just pop that in the oven on 180 for 10, 15 minutes or even if you wanted to you could put it under the grill, up to you.

There's your lovely pasta and sauce.

Changing and adapting recipes.

We're now going to think about that roux base that we made.

How would we adapt it for these different dishes? So, here we go.

Broccoli and pasta bake.

Very similar to our macaroni cheese that I showed you.

What do you think we would add to that base, that roux base? That's right, we could add some mature cheddar, a little like we did with the macaroni cheese and we could even add something like mustard to give it some heat in terms of it's taste.

I think you're getting the idea now.

What about a lasagna? Lasagna is a dish that's made with sheets of pasta and then it's built in layers.

Traditionally it would have almost like a Bolognese sauce, a tomato based sauce with meat in it as a layer.

Then a white sauce layer.

But how could we flavour that white sauce layer? What flavours do you think we could add? We could add something like onion or mustard or Parmesan cheese.

Quite similar I suppose, a little bit to our pasta bakes that we've been discussing.

But have a think when you're designing dishes and when you're making things at home, how can the flavours compliment each other and what could you add? We've done quite a lot of cheese based sauces.

Let's think about a fish pie.

If we were using something like cod, salmon or haddock with lovely mashed potato on top, what flavouring could we put within that sauce? What do you think? Well, you could add some herbs to it and maybe make it something like a parsley sauce.

Leaf parsley within it.

Maybe fresh which could be chopped up and put within.

All the time we need to, a little bit like we did with our dietary needs, changing and adapting recipes, we need to think about how we take a technique and we can adapt that for a different recipe or a different dish.

Well done today.

It's been great fun cooking with you.

If you want to have a go at some of these, we would love to see some of the dishes you guys are creating.

As always, there's an exit quiz at the end of this lesson and I look forward to seeing you again.