Lesson video

Hello, I'm Mr. Donnelly.

I'm one of the design talented teachers here at Oak Academy.

This is the fourth and last lesson in the unit of work about designing a ready meal.

It's been a fantastic unit to do.

I love cooking, I love eating.

And to get the chance to develop a dish and go through the process from start to finish, it's been really good for me.

This lesson, we're going to analyse a dish that we've made.

We're going to decide what characteristics we look for when we're about to try a dish, and then eat it with the good bit, and then compare what we eat and what we see to what we were hoping it would taste like and look like when we're working out how to evaluate the food.

Once you've done that process, you should then be well-informed about what tweaks and changes you'd make to a recipe, if you were going to make the dish again.

So if you follow along with me, you'll know what to look for when you come to try a dish and then how you can alter a recipe to make it better next time you cook it.

In this lesson, there are three things that we're going to do.

The first thing is that we're going to produce a production schedule.

And that is a little bit more than just a recipe, it's the order and the timings, so how you spend your time to make a dish.

The next thing, we're going to cook a prototype dish, it's arguably the most exciting part.

And then the last thing is, once we've made our dish, analyse the dish so that we can adapt a recipe to make it better next time.

So rather than just making something and eating it, there's a little bit more analytical to make sure that you're looking for certain characteristics so that the recipe can be tweaked, amended and hopefully perfected.

As always, there's normally two things that you need for my lessons, but this is a little bit more in a way, because your set of ingredients will be more than one thing.

So for me to make my Thai curry there was a lot of different things that I needed to get.

So I've needed my recipe and my ingredients for this lesson.

As always, there are some key words.

And if we can learn these at the start that will make the understanding of the lesson far easier as we progress through it.

So the first term production schedule.

This is the way you spend your time while you're preparing a dish.

So a schedule is maybe something similar that you might write in a diary like a timetable, but a production schedule is the way you spend your time whilst producing something.

It helps you organise your time to make sure that the order of production is correct.

The next term is star profiling.

No, I believe that this is also used on FIFA.

So I've never played FIFA myself, but if you wanted to weigh up the strengths and weaknesses of one player compared to another, a star profile can be shown where it lets you work out, say for instance, if speed was a characteristic you were looking for, then a star profile can help highlight that key feature.

So it's used to analyse different aspects of something.

So it's quite useful, it's visual and it's a good evaluation tool.

The next was a development chef.

Now supermarkets use development chefs all the time.

Every time you see a dish that's for sale on the shopping aisle, then it will have gone through a huge amount of research and development to make sure it is perfect for the clients in mind.

So it's not made by one person, they taste it and think that's great, we'll sell it.

It's gone through a huge process of making sure that lots of people have tried the dish, it will have had to be made for a certain price, certain amount of salt, different types of fats.

There'll be a strict criteria, and the development chef makes sure that the dish meets that specification and tastes as good as it can, while sticking to the constraints that they're given.

I've got a photo here of the ingredients that I used.

So this is not with them prepared for the dish, it's just the ingredients out of the packet.

And some of them were not everyday ingredients.

So on the next slide, you'll see a photograph, and I want you to try to work out which ones I had to buy specially, because they were not everyday ingredients.

So here's the photograph.

I'm going to give you a few minutes, just to have a little think and a look while I have a chat to you.

So you can see that there's an arrangement of ingredients and they're all on my chopping board.

Some of them, everyday ingredients, and you might have those at home as part of the weekly shop.

If you choose to make a recipe though, like a Thai curry, that does not use everyday ingredients, certain things on here need to be sourced specifically for the recipe.

And I'd like you to try to work out which ones they are.

So the first one was coriander.

This is really tasting, it's got a very fragrant taste and smell lovely on a salad or great in a curry also.

And with it being green, once it's been cooked down in the sauce, that helps make it a green Thai curry also.

So coriander was something that's not an everyday ingredient for me, and it's something I need to go and buy.

The next was ginger.

I really like the taste of ginger in lots of different curries, and I didn't have any in my house, so I needed to go and buy ginger to make this dish.

Fish sauce.

You only really buy fish sauce if you're making Thai curries.

There are probably other uses for it as well, but I've only ever used it in cooking Thai food, they are very salty taste.

I also like anchovies on top of a pizza, and sometimes fish sauce is made from anchovies, and is a way of seasoning your food whilst also making it smell great.

Coconut milk, that's not something that I always have.

So again, I needed to go and buy this specifically for this recipe.

And then chilli.

I like chilli a lot, but it's not something that's always everyday.

So again, I needed to go and get fresh chilies for the dish.

And then the last one was lemongrass.

Lemon grass, it smells amazing, it's got a fantastic flavour to it, but it's not something I would ever buy unless I was making a Thai meal.

So there are the six ingredients that were slightly unusual and not everyday.

The term I used in my third lesson was mise en place, and that's a French term.

I don't know if you can remember what it means.

So, yes, I hope you've got it right, and even better if you said it out loud, is putting in place.

So if you open your packets of ingredients, set them on the chopping board, is what you do next to them before putting them in a pan.

So it was making sure that I had the correct amount of ingredients, and I prepared them by bashing up some ingredients on a pestle and mortar to make a Curry paste, and then selecting the amount of each vegetable and other ingredients, and even with the chicken, I fried it off, crisp up the fat and then chopped it.

If I was making this dish using chicken breast, then I would not have cooked it first, I would have done it raw.

So use the chicken raw, and that would have been fine, because there's not any fats crisp up on chicken breast, unless you've left the skin on.

But in this case, chicken thigh, I think it tastes great, but it does have a little bit of fat, and I wanted it to be crispy.

So my mise en place is shown on the picture just below my video.

You can see some preparation has taken place with every ingredient.

The ingredient list on the back of the bought ready meal is quite a nice list of ingredients to see, there's no additives, nothing unusual, no e-numbers or chemical additives.

The only thing that's on there that I wouldn't choose to use was the gelling agent pectin.

But if I was making jam, then I might use pectin, and it just makes the sauce slightly thicker.

And if you're wondering, how did I get myself to be thick enough? It was from reduction.

So I cooked it in a frying pan until water evaporated to give me the correct consistency.

Because this has been made elsewhere, and then it's reheated with a microwave, that reduction in a frying pan doesn't take place.

So I'm assuming that's why they've added a gelling agent, which is still natural.

And it just gets the sauce to be thicker, before it's been put into a frying pan at home.

So it was a microwaveable dish.

The sauce was a good consistency, and a gelling agent will just make sure that the sauce is nice and thick.

You can see the dish that I made at the bottom full of vegetables, and the things that will appear on the screen now it's how I made my dish.

So this isn't particularly a recipe.

It's not my production schedule, it's a rough overview of the order that I will use to make a production schedule.

So it's important that once you follow the recipe, you can take the order and then work out the exact timings to make a production schedule.

So I started off by a stir fry the beans, and I quite liked the beans cooked through rather than being crispy.

So I like my french beans go into the frying pan first, medium high heat for a couple of minutes.

I then added the rest of the vegetables, just for two more minutes.

And I cooked my chicken first, and that wasn't for safety reasons, to make sure it was cooked through, it was to make sure that the fats on the chicken thigh was cooked through, so it was a personal preference.

And if I'd use chicken breasts, as I said, I would've added that raw, but it would have been the first ingredient I added to the pan.

The curry paste went in with the chicken, and then by the time I'm up to step four, I added all the other ingredients, cooked it down until it was piping hot, and the correct consistency.

And then I served that with boiled rice, and I just like rice to go with the curry, because I like it quite fiery hot.

And the rice has got quite a calming effect when I've got a few of the ingredients, all with the spoons together.

My production schedule, in a minute a pause symbol will appear on the screen, and you'll be able to go through carefully and read each of the seven steps.

And the thing that's clever about my production schedule is that I end up spending some time working on step two for instance, whilst step one is going on.

So if you were to just read on the recipe, cook the chicken for 50 minutes, some people might do that, wait for 15 minutes and then pick up with step two.

A production schedule though will enable you to spend your time wisely so that you're actually being productive during the 15 minutes cooking time for the chicken.

So I trimmed, fried and then slice the chicken, and that was 15 minutes.

Whilst that was happening, I moved on to step two.

So whilst the chicken cooks, I then prepared my ingredients that went into the pestle and mortar, that took a minute, and bash them up for 10 minutes.

And then by the time you've done that, you've pretty much cooked chicken, ready to slice, and a curry paste.

The next, I pickup with the french beans, the rest of the vegetables, add the chicken and the paste, then the coconut milk, the fish sauce, and anything else left all to the pan, and reduce that down.

The whole meal was made in under 20 minutes, and that included time as well to cook the rice.

But because the dish is actually about making a Thai curry, the rice took about 12 minutes to cook, and that's not part of the preparation schedule for the curry, but for the whole dish, still all in the 20 minutes easily.

So a production schedule is that how you spend your time, and you can really only work one out, I think on the second time, so you get the recipe, cook it through, and make notes of exactly what you did, how long it took.

And it's from that point on, you could have a production schedule to follow for maybe your second attempt at the dish.

So pause the video, have a little read through, then you'll be able to use information like this to help with your own production schedule.

So the best part about this job, I got to make the dish, taste the dish and produce this slide here about all the things I look for when I'm trying the Thai curry.

So if you can imagine for a minute, I was going to go to someone's house and they said, "Well Mr. Donnelly, you're going to have a Thai curry for dinner." It's those things that I expect to eat, that I would start thinking about before I'm given the meal.

So I would always want a certain smell.

I think Thai food smells fantastic, I would want that.

Fragrant fresh smell, coconut, maybe some lime and fish sauce.

For me, those ingredients, especially with the lemongrass as well make for a great smelling meal.

So that would be the first thing before I even start about eating it.

The second thing I love, fiery heat.

So lots of fresh chilli, bashed up into the pestle and mortar and then sometimes even fresh chilli scattered on top.

So that's the second thing that I'd want.

The third thing, I would want a creamy sauce, and that would actually help calm down some of the heat added from the chilli.

The fourth thing, some of the seasoning, rather than it being added from salt comes from a fish sauce, and that also helps with the smell of the curry, but that's how I'd like it to be seasoned, and a little taste of the anchovies extract.

Crunchy vegetables, I think go really well with the soft creamy sauce.

So that would be the other characteristic.

And then the last thing is fluffy rice that will help balance and calm down the dish.

So I'd like now for you to pause the video, think about the dish that you're making, and jot down some of the things that you hope to taste before you taste it after it's cooked.

So at the start, we mentioned a star profile.

Now I've got a five things that I look for in a Thai curry.

And what I've decided to do was shorten the list from the previous slide, so I've taken off the rice, and I've just focused on the curry.

And I've thought if I want a really good curry, these five things are, a great smell, fiery heat, creamy texture, salty taste and crunchy vegetables.

And then what I've gone and done, is I've gone and made a worksheet.

So you can download the worksheet to take part of this yourself.

I want you to see if you can guess how we'll use that star profile.

So pause the video, look at the shape of the star profile, look at my key points and see if you can work out what we're doing to do.

So if you got it right, you will have your worksheets, you will have printed it out or even just sketched your own, if you've not got access to a printer.

And I'd like you to write down at the end of each point of the star, the characteristic that you're looking for.

The next thing which is the good bit is about you to taste your food, but each time you taste check for one of the characteristics.

So first of all, you know in your mind what you'd like it to smell like.

Smell the food and see if it meets your expectation.

The next, if like me, you'd like it to be really fiery hot, you can try it, and the only thing you focus in on at that point, is it hot enough? Don't think about anything else, just do you think that the heat is correct for that food.

For the creamy texture, do you think that when trying the food? So now you forget about all other characteristics and just focus on, is it creamy just like you want.

So once you've done that for each individual strand for the star, you could then put a point along each of the lines.

Now these are the points that I put on for the curry that I made.

So the smell was really good, but not perfect.

And if you also look at the salty taste was a little bit low also.

So the further out the star, the dot is, the better.

And I know that if I added a little bit more fish sauce then the smell and the salty taste both would have increased to be absolutely spot on.

So next time I would add a little bit more of the fish sauce.

Maybe if I tasted the food as I went along, then it would have been perfect at the end rather than just following the recipe.

The fiery heat it was present, but not quite hot enough for my liking.

Creamy texture was perfect.

And the vegetables, they were just slightly over cooked.

So I would have cooked them for maybe less at the beginning, so maybe just like maybe one and a half minutes rather than two, and that might have led to a perfect meal.

Then you can join up the points.

If you were to join them up and actually cut out that profile, I've seen before people stack them up, make sure they're orientated in the right way.

Then you can start to build a 3D paper model from layered star profiles.

And that way you can work out whether it's a unanimous decision from everyone that's tried the dish that the characteristics are all on in agreement.

So if I said we were making a curry, I don't want it to be fiery hot.

If the point of the fiery heat was low for everybody, then it would be unanimous that the next take on doing the recipe we would increase the chilli content.

So development chefs would use a technique like this to make sure that they're tweaking a recipe to be perfect for the person that they would like to sell the dish to.

So you've got it by now, you can pause the video, recap on some of my slides, download the worksheet and produce your own star profile for the dish that you've made.

And then when you've done that, you could go about can tweak your recipe for next time.

So for me, I know I'd like more chilli, more fish sauce and cook the vegetables a little less, and I'd make a note of that on my recipe and production schedule so that the next time I cooked my dish, it would be even better.

So the end of the lesson now, I think it's been a fantastic lesson.

I've had great fun in developing a dish, making it and trying it.

So we're just going to recap on the key words and hope that you've learned these as we've gone through the lesson.

So the first one was production schedule.

You'll know that if you stick to a time plan that you've worked out through research and development, you could have a production schedule which will mean that you cook all the ingredients in the correct order and follow the correct amounts of time.

Star profiling is used to evaluate, not just food, but it could be used for other products that you do work on as well, but for food is great because you might be looking for a few different aspects within a dish, you can have as many star points as you want and then you grade them from the middle of going outwards to let someone know what you think of the dishes as a whole.

And then the last term was a development chef, which I think would be a fantastic job to work with a supermarket to make sure that the dishes developed to a perfect specification to fulfil a brief, so that a particular client would want to buy them.

So I'll say it again, it's been a great lesson.

I've loved this unit of work, I hope you have as well, and I'll see you in the next set of lessons that I produce.

Thank you.