Culinary School: Cooking Burmese Food and Baking Strudels

Fun week in Culinary School baking Strudels, cooking a Burmese Coconut Soup, Passion Fruit Cold Souffles, and Italian Tonnato sauce. We also had our finals, got externship assignments and came up with a menu for our restaurant week.

This beautiful Burmese Coconut Chicken Soup was delicious. The broth had marinaded chicken thighs with sautéed onions simmered in chicken stock & coconut milk and finally thickened with a chickpea slurry.
The interesting thing here were the garnishes: There’s cooked Chinese wheat noodles on the bottom, a hard boiled egg on top , chopped cilantro, deep fried wheat noodles, lemon wedges and fried shallots. The garnishes were as labour intensive then the actual soup.

This Burmese Salad tasted and looked great. This salad is 99% prep work and 1% tossing and serving.
What’s in the Burmese Salad? shredded cabbage, matchstick mangos, halved cherry tomatoes, diced avocado, sliced scallions, rough chop cilantro & mint, toasted coconut chips, deep fried sliced garlic, and toasted black & white sesame seeds.

This Passion Fruit Cold Soufflé looks like a soufflé but isn’t! Before this picture was taken we had just pulled it from the overnight fridge.
How did you make a fake soufflé? We started out making a passion fruit curd, mixed in 1tbsp of bloomed gelatin and folded in stiff peaks egg whites and whipped cream. We then poured it into ramekins with parchment collars. Basically we aerated passion fruit curd and stabilized with gelatin. EPIC.

We also made Tomato Salad with Tonnato sauce. The sauce was super interesting since it’s really just mayo tuna sauce.
To make the Tonnato sauce we started out by making tuna confit (see last week). We took the confit oil and infused it with garlic and anchovies. We then made a mayo from 2cups of that oil. Into the mayo we incorporated in 2tbsp of mortar & pestle confited tuna, chopped capers and chopped celery hearts.


This week I also took a Strudel making class with Chef Nicole Plue. Strudels are basically filo dough rolled up into logs with various fillings.
Strudel dough: the wetter the dough the less flakey it is. The dough has AP/bread flour, water, oil, vinegar, baking powder and salt. The dough should be rested oiled for 90m at room temp or overnight refrigerated.

Stretching Strudel dough: flour the entire work surface, get dough out and roll until 1cm in height. If stretching is done by 2–4 people everyone gets their hands under the dough and stretches the dough with their knuckles (like pizza) until translucent. If stretching is done alone, it’s all about getting gravity to do the work for you. Hold up a lip of the dough and gently shake. Try to anchor at the edge of the table. Tears on the edges are cool since we scissor off excess.
Fillings: most fillings are applied on a bit of neutral oil and a good amount of breadcrumbs (added for moisture control). We made strudels with apple fillings, cheese fillings, hazelnut fillings and potato fillings. The name of the game is moisture control to get a crispy crust and cooked insides.
Read more about my experiences in culinary school by reading about last week’s classes:
