Cooking the chef way

Chef Kang giving a cooking demonstration.

Luckily, not all the workshops start so early in the morning.

Opened last year, The Cooking House is still spick and span. Depending on how interactive the class is, the tables may be joined together or arranged classroom-style with three chairs to a table. With the latter, the only time you’ll actually get to sit down is during the talk and when the food is ready to be devoured.  

The rest of the time is spent watching the chef prepare the meals step by step. 

Our class kicked off with a short seminar on healthy living, covering topics from the best time to sleep to how to get the most nutrition out of your food. Naturopathic nutrition stresses the use of organic foods to heal the body of diseases. Contrary to popular belief, organic food needn’t be bland or boring.  

The school’s research chef, Ryan Khang isn’t just a chef but a food nutritionist who specialises in healthy cooking that utilises fresh, wholesome ingredients. He’s an advocate of nouvelle cuisine, a French style of cooking that uses quality ingredients and emphasises natural flavours and textures rather than smothering them with rich, creamy sauces.  

Khang, who has contributed many recipes to food journal Culinary World, shared four simple but tasty recipes with us.  

Organic Olive Wholemeal Bread 

Khang used yeast the traditional way — by proofing it first. This was done by mixing one teaspoon of dried yeast with sugar in 50ml of water. When the yeast started to bubble and release air, it was good to go. 

Proofing the yeast helps activate it and produce a light, crusty bread. As he mixed the ingredients, the chef dished out advice, like how you should combine wholemeal with white flour to make the bread lighter and fluffier, or how you can put on music as you knead the dough to give your hands a workout.  

Khang tried to get a volunteer to help him knead the dough but had no luck. So he talked about how you can use a mixer to mould the dough if you’re lazy. Kneading takes about 15 minutes, and then the dough needs to be set aside for an hour, punched down and proofed again for another hour until the dough has doubled in size before being baked for 30 minutes.  

That’s a lot of time spent on just one loaf.  

Gazpacho 

Khang’s version of this cold Spanish soup had the usual blend of tomato, onion, red pepper, celery, garlic, tomato juice and tomato purée and a delicious secret – a pinch of cayenne pepper and cumin powder.  

This he marinated overnight with red wine vinegar to help the mixture soak up the flavours before blending. After that, all one needed to do was dip pieces of fresh wholemeal bread into chilled gazpacho – simple, but oh-so-delicious.  

The Mixed Herbs Organic Rice accompanied by barramundi. — BOEY PING PING & T.K. LIM/The Star

The Mixed Herbs Organic Rice recipe was more decorative than tasty. The bunga telang (butterfly pea flower) gave the rice a rather attractive blue tinge but the lime leaves, lemongrass stalks and coriander leaves only provided a very subtle smell of herbs. Then again, a pungent herb rice would have overpowered the piquant sauce that accompanied the barramundi.  

Made from lemongrass, Thai basil, Chinese parsley, red onion, garlic, green chilli, kaffir lime leaves, honey, extra virgin olive oil and fish sauce, the pesto was an explosion of flavours in the mouth – the sweetness of honey emulsified in olive oil, the heat of the raw garlic and chilli, the sharpness of the lemongrass and lime leaves, and the tart taste of fresh basil.  

This was one secret recipe I was happy to learn.  

Some of the ingredients used were not entirely organic though since pure, organic ingredients are sometimes hard to come by. But the ingredients that were organic were definitely not bland. In fact, the organically-reared barramundi cultivated without the use of chemical compounds and antibiotics seemed tastier than usual. 

The interactive, three-hour session taught us techniques and methods, not just recipes. And we could ask the chef all the questions we wanted. The only thing lacking was a hands-on experience – a chance to don an apron, hold a ladle and cook. 

Apparently, some classes combine theory with practice while others just require you to watch. 

The workshops tend to be dominated by housewives but there are those who come to pick up some cooking skills. But at RM100, the price is rather steep for a half-day course where I only got to taste a tiny shooter glass of gazpacho with two slices of bread, a small piece of fish and two scoops of rice instead of a full meal.  

Homemaker Irene Fong, 30, who has attended two other courses here, said she liked the classes because they gave her an opportunity to meet like-minded people and learn from them.  

“The main purpose is to learn how to utilise olive oil. At least now I know I cannot use it for deep frying.”  

Fong found the fees a little pricey too but said, “I like it here because it’s clean. Other places are very messy, and they conduct the classes in the house.”  

Shirley Tan, 40, said she attended a lot of cooking workshops because cooking books could be difficult to follow. And the recipes weren’t always accurate or complete. But what attracted her most was the organic cooking, which she was interested in. 

Workshop lessons

12 of 20 Good Reasons To Buy Organic 

Avoid eating up to two kilograms of food additives every year. Many food additives
have been linked with symptoms such as allergic reactions, rashes, headaches, asthma,
growth retardation and hyperactivity in children (Heaton, 2004).

Source: BFA