Food, Home & Lifestyle
Introduction
Lesson time 09:22 min
Chef Thomas Keller returns for his third MasterClass, focusing on seafood, sous vide, and desserts. In this opening lesson, Chef Keller discusses how to buy and look for freshness in seafood and shares tips for storing fish.
Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars
Topics include: Introduction
Teaches Cooking Techniques III: Seafood, Sous Vide, and Desserts
Chef Thomas Keller’s third MasterClass is devoted to preparing seafood, sous vide cooking, and making classic desserts.
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[MUSIC PLAYING] THOMAS KELLER: Welcome back. I'm Thomas Keller. I want to welcome all of you to my MasterClass, focused on the bounty from the sea, our oceans and our rivers. We're going to learn how to make salmon, Dover Sole, a whole monkfish tail, salt-baked branzino, butter-poached Maine lobster, shrimp scampi, and a lobster boil. We're also going to learn about sous vide cooking in two different ways-- one, in a very elementary way, and in a more contemporary way. Also, we have a wonderful class on several different types of desserts, chocolate pud a creme, apple pie, and one of my favorite, the lemon tart, with a pine nut crust. We have a number of different techniques surrounding all these dishes that you'll be able to learn little tidbits here and there and really be able to elevate your cooking abilities. Let's get in the kitchen and dive into this. [MUSIC PLAYING] Seafood, one of my favorite, favorite ingredients. It takes me back to when I was a young chef. One of my first jobs in Newport, Rhode Island was as a poissonnier. A poissonnier is somebody who cooks fish. And it was just an extraordinary moment in my life because I got to work with so much fish. There's so much more variety of fish than there is meat. We had scrod, we had cod, we had swordfish, we had salmon, we had Loup de Mer, we had turbot, we had lobsters, we had shrimp, we had clams, we had mussels, we had oysters. We had all these different things that we got to work with every day, and it was one of my most favorite times in my career was cooking fish. Here we have a variety of things and I just want to explain a few of the things. In here, we have what we call round fish. So the round fish are fish that are more or less round, and you see them in the way we store them, and this is a very important thing and something I taught myself. After realizing that when fish is stored on its side like this with ice on top, what happens is the pressure and the weight of the ice both on the top and the bottom create divots in the flesh, therefore damaging it. And I realized that we want to store our fish in the same way it swims so that there is no added pressure on these really beautiful fillets. So any fish that you get in the round, you want to be able to store as it swims, and, therefore, does not diminish or impact negatively the quality of your fillets. So we have our beautiful king salmon here, which is a salmon that's really high in omega-3 fats. This here, right along here, is going to be the sirloin of the salmon, and that is relatively the same thickness from here to about here, and that's kind of the prized area, in some ways. Here is the belly, which is also very prized because of the amount of fat that it has in it. It's a different texture and, of course, a different mouth feel, and I love the belly. And as you know, in sushi restaurants, the Toro, or the tuna belly, is the most prized. Here we have a branzino, and I just want to kind of ...
About the Instructor
In his third MasterClass, Chef Thomas Keller focuses on preparing fresh seafood like lobster and salmon, making classic desserts such as apple pie and lemon tart, and showing how sous vide cooking can be done at home to enhance flavor and texture. Whether you’re a beginning or advanced cook, you’ll learn the techniques and principles that will give you the understanding and skills to get the most delicious results.
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Thomas Keller
Chef Thomas Keller’s third MasterClass is devoted to preparing seafood, sous vide cooking, and making classic desserts.
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