Lesson video

Hello, I'm Mr. Donnelly, and I hope by now you recognise me as being one of the teachers for Oak Academy.

This lesson has probably been my most exciting to date because not only do I get to buy some ingredients, show you how to prepare them.

I actually make my dish, my Thai curry in this lesson.

And I'll talk all about it, how I made it.

In the next lesson, we'll talk about how it tasted, but today it's all about preparation, making the dish and also how we can change our recipe so that you can look at a dish and make it more personal to you or the person that you're making it for, to make it really exciting.

We look forward to sharing it with you in a minute.

So in this lesson, there were three things that I'm going to do.

The first thing is, I'm going to get my ingredients from the supermarket, bring them back and I'm going to show you how I prepare them so that they're ready for cooking.

In doing that, there are some different methods that I'll use to actually prepare the ingredients, some are a little bit unusual that you may only use for actually Thai cooking or making curries and pastes.

So if you've not made a dish like this, then if you watch along, hopefully you will learn a new preparation method.

And then once I've done that, you'll look at the meal that I've made.

So I'd go right from showing you packed ingredients from supermarket, right the way through different preparation techniques, and then I'll show you the finished dish that I put together.

In this lesson, there are two things that you'll need.

This is a little bit different than sort of my other lessons, you'll need a recipe and your ingredients.

Now it will be the case in this lesson that you've changed the recipe if needed to suit a particular client.

So do not be frightened about deviating from a recipe that you found on the internet or from a book, only new recipes are created by people having the confidence to think, "Well I don't really like that ingredient, I'm going to swap it with this one, see what it tastes like." And hopefully I will help you develop the confidence to change a recipe, because I'm going to go through some ingredients in a bought ready meal and show you which ingredients I've decided not to include for my dish and which ones to add.

Okay, so I'm going to do exactly the same as what I hope you gain the confidence to do yourself.

As always, there are some key words, and it's going to be really important if we can learn these now so that you can follow along and keep up with what I'm saying.

So the first word was preparation.

You may know this already, but when we're talking about food, is what you do to the ingredients so that they're ready to use.

It's unlikely, you'll be able to just buy something from a supermarket and then use it straight away.

There's normally something that we're going to have to do to that ingredients.

The next term was modify.

And I mentioned this on the previous slide, I'm going to modify a recipe to make it suitable for my clients, and I'm going to encourage you to do exactly the same.

And then the last term, it's a French term, mise en place.

And that means to put everything in place.

So if you ever watch a food programme on the television, quite often the chef will have all the ingredients in small little pots.

So for example, if they want to use some tomato puree, it's unlikely, you'll see them squeeze it from the tube.

It will be in a small glass dish, and the correct amount will be there.

That means that they've put everything in place to show the dish in one go.

If you can get used to preparing a dish like this, it means that you can spend some time preparing, once you've modified your recipe, get your mise en place all in order.

And then when you come to actually follow the recipe, it's really easy just to pick up the little dishes that have got the ingredients that you need and use them at the appropriate time.

So mise en place is really important.

So years ago I used to work in a professional kitchen, and mise en place was something that chefs would prepare during the day, and then later on when the service started, everything was in order rather than rooting around looking for ingredients.

So it's really important to a slick and fast service.

A quick recap on my client.

If you've not guessed in the way that I'm talking about the dish, it's actually it's me.

So I've decided to make and modify a Thai curry.

I love Thai food, but what I've decided to do was add extra nutrients.

So I've added extra vegetables, and mine is going to come with a large portion of wild basmati rice, just because I want extra carbohydrates, because I'm designing this dish as one that I'd have postexercise.

Here's a picture of a Thai curry.

And some of the key ingredients which you add out.

If I take away I'll just modify totally, I've just appeared on the screen as well.

So sometimes Thai dishes have actually got potatoes in them.

So one of my favourite curries called a massaman curry, it's a thick, strong fiery curry, but it's got potatoes and peanuts in.

You've got rice, which quite often is a compliment to many dishes.

I've got a selection of vegetables.

And really as long as you use some key ingredients then you can always have a Thai curry with a little bit of a twist.

So most of the time curries will have garlic, chilli, coconut milk, you'd have fish sauce, ginger or galangal, lime leaves our lime juice.

If you mix all of those together and then add something else, you've pretty much going to have a Thai dish, okay.

So you could choose to take out the fish sauce and make it completely vegetarian, or you could add the fish sauce that makes it quite fragrant and then have it with a mixture of either meat or fish.

So you can really play around with a Thai meal as long as you get some key components, we'll talk more about that as the lesson progresses.

So I'm going to add a few things as I've mentioned, just to boost the nutritional value.

And I based what I added on the Eat Well Guide.

On here you can see the front and parts of the back of a package which I bought for a Thai meal.

So you can see the picture of it at the front is me holding it, and it's just served in a bowl with no accompaniment, okay? I'm going to read down some of the ingredients.

Now and just talk about some of that you could either take out or add more of.

So this one is a red Thai style chicken curry.

So the top ingredient is chicken thigh.

And I use chicken thighs as well, I find them to be actually a tastier cuts of chicken, they've got a little bit of fat on, which if you cook it goes crispy and it's really tasty, or you can remove it before or after cooking, but it does help the chicken get a really nice colour, and I prefer it than other cuts of chicken coconut cream or coconut milk.

That's really important in a Thai dish.

If you were to take that out of the curry, I think it would have a detrimental effect on the type of dish you're trying to create.

Water, water is normally added to dishes either to thin the sauce or to allow cooking for a lot longer.

The red peppers, water chestnuts bamboo shoots, you can pick and choose amongst those.

I didn't actually have any water chestnuts or bamboo shoots.

I've used red pepper and onion, okay? The lemongrass puree, I'll show you how I made that by bashing some lemongrass with other ingredients in a thing called a pestle and mortar.

The tomato paste, that was added really for colour.

Rapeseed oil, you could use any type of oil really, I chose sunflower oil just because it's quite a stronger taste is olive oil.

I added garlic, I didn't add anchovy extract, I added fish sauce, it gives us a more soure taste.

I didn't put any sugar in, I try not to put sugar in the food I eat.

I did add a ginger, red chilies, salt.

galangal is a root, the same with the ginger.

I didn't have any galangal.

If I want that, I have to go to a specialist shop.

But ginger, that will do as a substitute.

Lime leaves, I didn't have.

Coriander, I did have.

Lemon juice, I decided to omit.

I didn't put cornflour in, because cornflour is often used for thickening the sauce.

I just reduced my sauce to get it to the correct consistency.

And you'll see a photograph of that later on.

The gelling agent pectin.

Sometimes this is used for making jam.

I decided not to add this to my dish.

In fact, I've never added it to anything other than jam.

So I've not added any gelling agent to thicken the sauce.

And then the colour, they've added paprika, that's the type of pepper, and you can add it to many Spanish dishes.

It's really quite tastes, it's got a smoky, quite deep colour, so it's lovely.

And then chilli powder, I didn't add chilli powder, I just used fresh chilies.

So some of the ingredients that you can tell that I've decided to either keep or not use because I didn't have them, and it will not alter the fact that mine was at Thai style dish, okay.

So I'll want you to take from this slide is that there's a bought meal, these are the ingredients that are within it, and you can either add them to your own meal or take some out.

Some other information that's on a package, this is really important.

The main thing is that you look at the picture just underneath in my little video, it tells you the date that it needs to be used by.

No, it doesn't say best-before, it says use-by.

So if you see on an ingredients or food type that says best-before, so for instance, maybe a loaf of bread, it will say best before a certain date.

If you eat it after that date, the chances are you are not going to be poorly, it just might be a little bit dry.

So a day or two after the date is still not bad for making toast with, you could put it in a food processor and make breadcrumbs, you could chop it up and make croissants for soup.

But eating it maybe to make a sandwich, it may have gone a little bit dry.

If you see a food ingredient that says use-by, there's no waving on that.

It has got to be used by that date, because it's highly likely that there is something within that package, which would be harmful to eat because of bacteria after that date.

So if you're thinking, now, what is the ingredient within this dish? Have a think.

So what ingredient do you think is within this Thai meal, which is making it have a use-by date rather than best-before? If you get chicken, you'll be correct.

So if you guess something that's got meat or dairy, there will be a use-by date, and then other items that often packed in a protective atmosphere, so that will have carbon dioxide within the packaging, and that can actually stop bacteria developing because oxidisation won't take place.

And as soon as you open something, it will say use within two days.

In which case it becomes a use-by date.

So always read the packaging and check the use-by our best-before date before you start eating it.

The other things on that same little photo, it shows you that there is some green, orange and red colours.

Now it means to eat a dish like this with care, don't have it too often, especially the amount of saturated fat, it's got just over a third of the saturated fat for one meal.

Now on the day that I ate this curry, I think that this was probably the only dish in a day that had any saturated fat.

So in that case, it would be okay for me to eat it.

But eat with caution if you're eating many meals that contain too much saturated fat or any fat, sugar and salt, okay? So do bear that in mind, look at the colours.

Don't be frightened to be eating something because it's got red or orange, just build it into your daily amounts and try to cut down on adding saturated fats, sugars and salts and other fats in huge constitutes for all the meals, okay? The ingredients and the cooking instructions are shown on the other packet, on the side, sorry.

And there's a small description about actually what a Thai curry is, and the difference between a red curry and a green curry, it really is just the colour based upon that the type of chilli that's used, all right? So if you have a good look at this slide, you'll see that it can take about four and a half minutes to cook the dish.

And then we've also got the list of ingredients which I've gone through already.

So, once I took the sleeve off, you could see on the picture on the left, that's what the ready meal looked like.

It went into the microwave and then after four minutes, I had that dish there, plated up, and I decided decided to serve that just with some boiled basmati rice, okay? It was really tasty.

For me though, there were some things that I would like more from the dish.

I would have liked more chilli, I think that the fragrant taste was not quite as strong as I like, I like a little bit more fish sauce.

I don't think it was under seasoned, there wasn't quite enough salt from the dish.

So I quite like seasoned meals.

And if I don't want to put too much salt, I would have got that from the fish sauce, which is still salty, but not quite as salty as actually adding table salt to the meal.

So that the little tweaks that I would have done to the dish to make it personal to me.

So we've quick comparison now.

We've got a photograph at the left, which is the bought meal, and then my ingredients that I bought in the middle slide, and then the other picture that shows what the ingredients look like when I portioned them up and took them out with that packet.

So for the mushrooms, for instance, I only made this meal for me and one other person in my house, and I decided that I just wanted to use three large mushrooms rather than the whole pack.

So if you buy a ready meal, it's already portioned up and it will be a certain price.

So this ready meal costs me four pounds, and it said there were two portions.

The ingredients underneath, they cost 14 pounds, but I think I could probably get four portions out of that without any issue at all.

But some of the things I bought, for instance, the fish sauce, that might make 20 curries, because you only need a small amount.

So it's difficult to work out whether a bought meal is cheaper than buying it yourself.

And what I would always think is that if you buy meal for four pounds per head is normally quite cheap, but if you were cooking for a dinner party, so if you had to take 10 people, it will be post-COVID of course, 10 people at a dinner party, then it's probably cheaper to go make the meal yourself, and you can make sure you get it seasoned correctly, and the correct tastes and level of spice just right to your guests.

So I always prefer to make a dish myself, but there are some times you definitely want a good, healthy ready meal close to hand, just because it's convenient.

People live in very busy lives at the moment, so sometimes be able to get something that's nutritious from the fridge, put it in the microwave for four minutes and then have something that's still tasting and ready to eat quickly.

If you notice from the list of ingredients on the previous slide as well, there were no additives or E numbers, everything was fresh.

The sell-by date was only four days later than the data I bought it.

So it was really quite a good quality ready meal with nothing to worry about.

The next slide refers to a word from the keywords at the start.

This is a mise en place, so this was me putting everything in order.

You'll notice from the picture on the left, I've actually cooked and chopped the chicken up rather than cook it raw within the curry.

Now, once I went on holiday to Thailand and joined in with a cookery course, and when I did the cookery course, I made a Thai curry as you can imagine, and the chicken was cooked raw within the dish.

The reason that I decided to cook my chicken first is because I use chicken thigh, which has got a bit of fat on it.

And I didn't want to cook the fat on the chicken in a frying pan then add the sauce, and then end up with the fact that wasn't crispy.

So what I decided to do was trim my chicken to get the fat off, so it will be a healthier meal, cook the chicken first, then chop it up, and I was going to add that to my sauce later on.

The pestle and mortar, it shows the ingredients that went into that to make a Thai curry paste.

You can buy the Thai curry paste from supermarkets, but making your own is far more fun.

I've got two small children that helped me bash top.

So in the pestle and mortar, I pot lemongrass, garlic, ginger and chilies, bash them up for about 10 minutes, and then you make a paste.

If you've made a paste, you could make quite a lot of it and keep it in an airtight container in the fridge for a couple of days, maybe even a longer.

And then you could use that to make a variety of curries over the coming time.

My mise en place contained the right amount of fish sauce in a little measuring glass, coconut milk from the 10 cooked chicken, and then a variety of vegetables.

And you can really add as many or less vegetables as you like, depending on your own personal taste.

On this slide, I'm going to show you a couple of different culinary techniques.

One, really common, the first one.

So boiling, I boild basmati rice to go with my dish.

One thing I always like to do with rice, some people find it difficult to get it so it's fluffy and doesn't stick together.

If the packet says to cook it for eight minutes or say 10 minutes, I always cook it for eight.

Reboil the cattle, drain your rice and then wash the rice and put it back in a pan with some clean water.

And that way you remove all the starch from the pan, cook it for another further two or three minutes, drain it again, and then you end up with fluffy rice which is not stuck together.

That's my top tip for getting rice to be perfect.

The next method was frying.

And I did this to make sure that the chicken was cooked through, and that any fats was left crispy, rather than it being stringy and chewy, it boiled within the sauce.

And then the last technique was using a pestle and mortar to make my own curry paste.

Maybe you've not used one, it was quite good fun because you get to bash the ingredients to put all the ingredients fuse together in one paste rather than chopping them up.

I combined the ingredients.

So on the photo on the left, that was the ingredients that were just playing along.

And then the larger photo shows the sauce actually reducing down just to get it to the correct consistency.

So the difference between the photos is, one has got all the dry ingredients in, and then the other photo has got the coconut milk and the fish sauce and the paste all cooking down just to get the flavours infused and reduced to the right consistency.

So when you look at the selection ingredients that choose, you can see I've used the Eat Well plate pretty much for every single aspect.

The only thing I've not added is something from the dairy category, so I could make sure that I tried to get some Debby food later on during the day.

But apart from that, everything was there and I'd consider the Thai curry to be a really healthy meal as long as it's part of the other meals I eat in the day to make sure there's not too much saturated fat.

But if you just look at how healthy those pictures are, when you look at them, you know that that's a healthy meal to eat.

The coconut milk, that does contain some fat, and some of the fats is saturated fats.

But generally speaking, it's a healthy meal, really vibrant colours.

And I was thinking the more colourful the dish, normally the healthier it is, because it's using a variety of different foods rather than sticking to, for instance, like a yellow meal which might just be fish fingers and chips.

So bright, colourful, rainbow food is what I always think is pleasing to the eye, and it normally always taste great as well.

So that's my finished meal.

I made two portions with boiled rice, and you can the amount of veg added to my dish rather than the bought one, there's quite a lot of difference.

So I know that the bought dish tasted really well, it was nice, nothing wrong with it at all.

But the dish that I ended up making, I felt better for eating it because it was really spicy, and I love fiery food.

It was nice and creamy with a thick fragrant sauce.

And I knew it had extra vegetables and probably more chicken than the bought meal.

So which meal would you rather eat? The home cooked meal or the ready meal? Now, whichever one you pick, I know that this is your opinion, so it's not a correct or a factual answer, it really is just your opinion.

I think you can probably guess mine already, because I love cooking, I love eating fresh food, so I went for the home cooked meal.

Which one did you go for? So I know it's an opinion, but I hope you picked my meal just because I added extra nutrients.

I used all of the things that we've learned over the past couple of lessons really to try to add extra nutritional value that was perfect for my client need, which was made for a post-run meal.

So I'd like to pause the video now, and you can guess probably what you've got to do.

You've got to the point where you're going to plan your perfect meal for your clients using the information from slide, sorry, from slide six through to 10.

And then when you've got all your ingredients sorted, and you know what it is that you're going to need, then next lesson you want to actually get to cook your dish, and then there's a few other activities which we'll do just to make sure we understand how to taste it and get it just right.

So now, pause the video, read the task, and you want to make sure that you use the Eat Well Guide to plant a dish that's perfect for your clients and their needs.

So, we've got to the end of the lesson now.

I hope you know what you're cooking, who you're cooking it for, and what dish you've adapted.

You might have found a recipe and changed it slightly to suit what you can get, or who you're making it for.

And then you'll look forward to cooking along in the next lesson.

So preparation, that's absolutely key to a chef or someone that's cooking.

And you should know now that preparation is what happens between getting your food from a supermarket or shop and getting it ready to cook with.

Modify, that was the term used when we change a recipe.

So if you look up the recipe on the internet or in a book, then it just means that you're going to change it to suit your clients.

And mise en place was the French term for just getting everything put in place.

So if you buy a bottle of fish sauce and the bottle was 200 millilitres, if you need 10 millilitres, two teaspoons, you might measure it out, put it in a little glass to the side.

And that way when you're ready to cook, and you're following a recipe, you don't need to start measuring things out during the cooking.

You know, it's all their, and it's pot in place, so your mise en place.

I hope you really enjoyed the lesson.

So I'll look forward to the next one where I know that you'll be cooking the dish that you've made.

Thank you very much.