An Uneducated Palate

It’s not an easy task to teach yourself to be a great cook. You can follow a recipe, master a technique, and watch all the Food Network programming in the world, but if you’ve never tasted a perfectly cooked version of the dish you’re attempting to cook, you’ll never really know if you’ve got it right.

Developing your palate is such a vital part of culinary training that it’s built into the curriculum at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. Students there attend demonstration classes in the morning where they watch the teaching chef’s techniques in detail. The demonstrations then end with a tasting. In the afternoon, the students must recreate the recipes from the morning’s demonstration, with only their notes and their palates to guide them. Culinary expert and cookbook author James Beard referred to this process as creating taste memory. According to Beard, you can commit a taste to memory by focusing on the flavour, seasonings and textures as a guide for how foods should taste.

Culinary workshops at Mission Hills Family Estate loosely follow this same premise. Home cooks and food enthusiasts watch while a skilled chef prepares gourmet cuisine in a beautiful theatre style kitchen. The chef prepares several different dishes, all the while sharing culinary tips and secrets. Each guest receives a recipe packet so they can follow along and make notes if they like. Each finished dish is expertly paired with an appropriate Mission Hill Wine and then served to the guests for tasting. At the end of the evening, guests have a recipe booklet, any notes they may have made, and their own taste memory to guide them if they choose to recreate any of the dishes at home.

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the class La Cucina Italiana taught by Chef Jan Dobbener. This was my sixth workshop at Mission Hills and one of my favourites. Although the class was full, it still had a relaxed atmosphere – and AMAZING food. This was not Olive Garden Italian. In fact, there was not a single pasta dish on the menu.

The amuse-bouche, a crudo of raw tuna brined with citrus, pineapple, olive oil, and tiny pearls of agar agar and ginger, hinted at the light and flavourful food to come. (Amuse-bouche literally means an amusement for the mouth.)

For the starter, we learned how to make cornmeal crusted squid with an arugula, parmesan and pine nut salad. Once the squid were all cleaned and rinsed, Chef Jan cut them into thin strips, soaked the strips in buttermilk, breaded them in cornmeal, and then fried them in oil until golden brown. He gave us a great tip for testing the temperature of the oil in a shallow fry. Instead of using a thermometer, place a  1-inch potato cube in the centre of the pan. As soon as the potato starts to float and turn brown, you know the oil is the right temperature for frying the squid.

Next up was The Mother of all Pizza – Margherita. Although the only toppings were tomato sauce, bocconcini and fresh basil leaves, it was anything but minimalist when it came to flavour. The pizza skin had a wonderful char from being fired in the brick pizza oven and the tomato sauce was sweet with a hint of maple syrup.

Once we’d enjoyed the pizza, Chef Jan demonstrated a preserved lemon and artichoke risotto – an interesting flavour combination that I really enjoyed.

At this point we took a break and Chef Jan invited us into the kitchen to have a look around. What a dream it would be to cook in a kitchen like that!

After the break, Chef taught us how to make Vitello Tonnato with olive tapenade. When I looked over the recipe I didn’t think it sounded like a dish I was going to enjoy. I was even more skeptical when the server placed the plate in front of me. Chef Jan prepared the dish by searing the veal, then poaching it in olive oil. He plated it on top of a sauce made from poached tuna, aioli, lemon and cream, then garnished it with capers and shaved fennel. On the side, he plated a tapenade made from olives, garlic, anchovies, shallots, thyme, rosemary, more capers and more lemon. Much to my surprise, this was delicious! The veal was crushingly tender and perfectly rare, and the creamy tuna sauce tasted almost like hummus. While not the prettiest, it was definitely the tastiest dish of the night!

We finished the evening with a simple version of tiramisu topped with Okanagan cherries, and paired with what I like to think of as the nectar of the gods – Vidal Icewine.

On the drive home after class I thought about all the new taste memories the La Cucina Italiana workshop had helped me to create, including my very first tastes of raw tuna, agar agar, squid, preserved lemon and tuna tonnato. I also couldn’t help thinking about how much tighter my belt felt around my waist. Then another bit of wisdom from James Beard came to mind:

“A gourmet who thinks of calories is like a tart who looks at her watch.”

Mission Hill Family Estate
1730 Mission Hill Road
West Kelowna, Okanagan Valley
British Columbia, Canada  V4T 2E4

The Dynamics of Wine and Food
Culinary Classics - Fall Program ~ La Cucina Italiana
Date:  November 24, 2011
Cost:  $79.00 CDN
Style:  Demonstration, Dinner with Wine Pairing
Duration:  3 hours
Chef Instructor:  Jan Dobbener
Highlights:  Fabulous food and likeable, light-hearted chef