Culinary School: Squid, Shrimp, Octopus and Fish
I finished another great week in culinary school focusing on cooking squid, octopus, shrimp and fish. Reapplying familiar culinary techniques like frying, sautéing and grilling on cephalopods made this week an educational milestone for me.
Technique zen: I really liked focusing on cephalopods because it demonstrated how each culinary technique applies to yet another protein. Sautéing, grilling, frying, poaching and curing all apply even to this new category of proteins. Seeing that obvious fact is so surprising to me and I feel like it’s one of the invaluable culinary lessons.
These Squids Stuffed with sweet potato were so good. The unexpected combination between the texture of grilled squid and the sweetness of the sweet potatoes was really unique.
Stuffed Squids assembly: make a mixture from cooked sweet potatoes, garlic, scallions, chili, lemon juice and cilantro. After cleaning the squids you’ll have the squids’ heads separated from the tentacles. Pipe the filling into the heads, and skewer the tentacles and head together in under-over-under skewer stitch. Grill and serve.
This poached octopus was grilled and served on a salad with kokkari dressing. We poached this octopus in olive oil with aromatics for 60–90 minutes to tenderize it. We then sliced the tentacles and head off and grilled them. Finally we served the octopus in 1" slices topping a salad.
I had to stop myself on multiple opportunities from wearing this octopus as a $60 hat. The struggle is real.
OMG, Yaaaas. We made this shrimp in gravy and grits and it was so good.
Grits: 2:2:1 ratio of milk : chicken stock : polenta whisked for 30m until it’s at the right texture.
Gravy: dice ham and cook in butter to render out fat, make a roux by adding AP flour and and pour in chicken stock. let simmer until thickened and reduced.
Shrimp: in a hot pan w/ oil sautee cleaned shrimps, garlic and parsley for 2–3 minutes until shrimp is uniformly pink. Deglaze with white wine and pour on top of shrimp.
We cured Salmon for a week and made Gravlax. The curing mixture contained salt, sugar, all spice, white pepper, dill, cilantro and coriander. To cure we put most the mixture between the two salmon fillets making sure each piece of meat is covered with the mixture and we then let it sit for a week refrigerated.
To serve we cut it up to paper thin slices and served with a mustard vinaigrette.
We made yeasted donuts and old-fashioned cake donuts. Both turned out well. The cake donuts actually end up more dense then the fluffy yeasted donuts which I didn’t expect.
The interesting thing for me is seeing all the various options for glazing and how everyone tried their own favourite flavour combination as a glaze. Mine was maple and bourbon :)
Buttermilk Pie is a southern dish and it’s just delicious. The filling is just buttermilk, eggs, sugar, flour/starch, butter, lemon juice and vanilla. The resulting custard is so sweet and tangy that I just had to go back and get another slice.
Interestingly, this pie wasn’t blind baked and the crust turned out great.
Other cool stuff that happened this week:
- We had a field trip to Williams-Sonoma’s test kitchen and spoke with Amanda Haas about recipe development.
- We fried shrimp in coconut shreds.
- We cooked a creamy celery soup with a parsley mixture added before serving to make it extra green.
Read more about my experiences in culinary school by reading about last week’s classes:
