Hi everyone, my name is Ming.
Now, I'm a professional chef, I've been cooking for about 10 years
and I'm a massive food nerd.
As a chef I get asked a lot of questions about cooking, food and kitchens.
On this show, I'm going to be teaching you how to kitchen.
For example what kind of essential ingredients you must have at home
and how to store them.
what kind of tools you require,
how to set up your kitchen, optimize the way you cook.
And some recipes that you can try at home as well.
I'm here at Eat At My Kitchen
and they have a really nice space at Dempsey
so if you're looking for private events or private dining hit them up.
We're talking about ingredients today
specifically what to have in your pantry as an essential,
how to store them, some tips and tricks.
First of which is butter.
Butter is probably my favourite ingredient of all to work with,
you can eat it together with bread but it's when you cook with butter
and you utilize it in marinated sauces, to sear to glaze
not even talking about pastries just yet.
Butter is so versatile and having a good all-purpose butter is very effective.
Next set of ingredients, we've got garlic, shallots and ginger.
And you basically can't get to cooking without having
any one of these ingredients to start with pretty much.
Very often you can find in supermarkets pre-cut garlic,
I would prefer not to have that because the flavour is a bit more muted.
Now shallots are essentially baby onions with a more pronounced sweeter flavour.
Shallots are essential in Asian style cuisines and the bases were some of my favourite condiments.
Next up ginger, ginger comes with two forms young ginger and old ginger.
This is young ginger, the general difference is
old ginger is good for extracting long flavour in stews, soups, porridge.
And young ginger is better for eating if it's used as a condiment or you're turning it into a paste,
it's better on the mouth.
Next ingredient, eggs, everyone had these before.
Right now I'm going to show you a foolproof method on how to separate your egg yolks and your egg whites.
We've all seen people cracking the egg and then sort of tossing it back and forth
and as soon as the yolk catches on the shell and splits and it breaks.
Or your hands are kind of gloopy and you've got egg white all over that
and you need to go throw that away and wash your hands again right
here's a method that's very simple
all you need is three bowls and a spoon.
You start with a bowl to hold your egg that you just prepped,
I take the spoon, and I pick up the egg yolk
I remove the rest of the white,
and I separate that,
egg white goes into the bowl, clean and separated.
This is generally how we do it in restaurants to eliminate the risk of broken egg yolks
or especially having the shell in contact with a clean egg that's inside the shell.
Next essential ingredient is stock.
Vegetable stock, fish stock, chicken stock, beef stock all sorts of stocks
you can use them to thicken sauces, they are the basis for soups obviously
but stocks are also used in a lot of rice and pasta dishes
and you can buy them in stores, you can also make them at home.
And a good stock makes the difference between a bland dish or a flavorful punchy dish.
Next essential ingredient in my pantry is mayo.
This unit of measurement is called prup.
One prup, two prup.
It's an actual unit of measurement that we use in kitchens.
Obviously, mayonnaise is great inside a sandwich
but mayonnaise also has so many other usages.
Its texture allows you to bind and thicken sauces and dressings
and it's great spread over baked rice dishes.
Sometimes you have meats like salmon and you want a torch or you want to blast in an oven,
Mayonnaise goes a long way and it adds nice flavour
don't use too much of it though because it is quite fatty but...
so delicious.
Next essential ingredient is a bottle of sambal chilli paste
or any sort of cooked chilli paste.
We're so lucky here to always have so many different varieties of sambal chilli and bottles
I wanna, I wanna show you something real quick.
We had that mayo just now,
I'm gonna just take a little bit of this sambal and throw it in there,
and give the mayo a stir and...
poof, I have a sambal mayo ready to go inside
a sandwich or to be paired together with uh some fried chicken for an Asian kick you know.
Sambal chilli, excellent as a base,
because this adds a lot of punch if you're making a rempah, and you need a little...
Oh, it was spicier than I expected.
I'm actually very bad on spice.
I have this tongue condition and I'll show you now.
Basically, all those grooves make me extra sensitive to flavours at taste,
so I taste a lot more than I think what other people taste
but it also means I'm a lot more sensitive to these flavors as well.
So spice really hits me, sour items really hit me very quickly moving on thank you very much.
One of the things that I find very fun to do with sambal, but people find surprising is
it's a great flavouring enhancer for things like grilled sandwiches, for bread items,
pasta sauces just a little bit of it makes everything just sparkle a bit more
On to seasoning essentials.
Starting off with pepper and salt.
Basic condiments that everyone should have to season your items.
Salt comes in all sorts of textures and sizes but,
for a starter kitchen item, fine salt is all you need.
I've got pepper in a generic pepper grinder here
you can find ground pepper already
but I find the flavours from pre-ground pepper not quite as alluring not quite as entertaining.
So when you can, please always grind your own pepper when you eat it,
it is well worth the effort.
Now, of course, you need your sweet.
So every kitchen should at least have these two types of sugar.
Plain granular sugar, this is a fine grain.
And this is brown sugar, a more unrefined, slightly moister more sticky sugar.
Both of these sugars have their usage.
If I want a specific baking texture, I use white sugar.
It's got that snap and that crisp crunch but that same texture would be very poor if I used brown sugar.
Conversely, brown sugar has a definite richness that white sugar doesn't have
this is magic, brown sugar has all sorts of, of deep depth.
You have caramelization, you have raw sugar flavours
and this is what you want to use for,
things like barbecue sauces, marinades
but white sugar not so much.
So they are both equally important and they all have their uses.
This is soy sauce,
now soy sauce comes in several textures
and the most common condiment to use in a lot of Asian kitchens is light soy sauce.
So I would say don't skimp on this if you can buy a decently good quality soy sauce,
it will last you for a while and the flavours will be well worth it.
Extra virgin olive oil, this is essential to me for so many reasons.
Extra virgin olive oil has layers of flavour,
a slight herbaceousness to it and it's a little bit peppery so it's absolutely great for finishing foods with.
You should not be using extra virgin olive oil to cook.
The problem with extra virgin olive oil, it's all those lovely flavours that you enjoy,
when heated turn bitter and turn your food into this is an unrecognizable unpleasant mess.
Do not cook with extra virgin olive oil.
Refined olive oil or light olive oil, these are okay to cook with,
but extra virgin olive oil by itself should never be heated and never be used to cook anything inside.
This is probably one of my favourites on this entire lineup,
sesame oil takes front and centre amongst all the flavoured oils.
With sesame oil, a little bit goes a long way
because this oil has so much fragrance and so much aroma,
it is very important to know when to use it.
If you want to marinate with it at the start to impart some deep flavour go ahead.
Sesame oil is great for that.
If you want to finish a dish with a couple of drops of sesame oil that works really well as well.
Alright sesame oil helps to open up those flavours.
Sesame with ginger, sesame with garlic, sesame with spring onion.
These are the things that I have grown up eating,
and I have a very very soft spot for something like sesame oil.
Onto storage.
The general rule of thumb for dry ingredients is,
try not to use them in their original container because that exposes everything to the element.
Number two, don't store your dry ingredients on top of your stove
as you're cooking all that moisture and humidity goes up into your cabinets and your cupboards
I can't tell you the number of times I've opened cupboards and cabinets
and looked in and then seen the signs of extreme moisture inside dried goods
that's why salt clumps, that's why sugar clumps,
keep your dry goods out of the heat, away from humidity
and always keep them in airtight containers.
Very often you'll see salt stored at home with rice, grains of rice within,
rice in a salt shaker, break up the clumps, number one.
Number two they absorb a little bit of that moisture.
Now if your salt is not stored in a shaker, this is not going to be an issue for you.
Please don't store your salt with rice because that's actually not required
and the last thing you want to do is to pinch some salt,
and have a couple of grains of rice get into your food
because the rice will be uncooked and it's just a messy situation altogether.
Onto the granddaddy of problematic dry storage items,
baking soda, baking powder.
Put it into an airtight container,
and then you seal this with another zip lock bag to prevent any sort of moisture going in.
Once baking soda and baking powder has had moisture in it,
its efficacy its usefulness as a raising agent is reduced.
So this becomes a useless bag of powder already at that point.
Anything that is really sensitive to moisture, keep within two layers of protection
This plain chicken stock here, this broth so to speak
is best stored in the freezer.
If you have zip lock bags just pour that in and then you just lay the zip lock bags flat
and then you store them in the freezer whenever you need to you take out a zip lock bag of stock
uh and you did that in water a couple of times
and before you know it the stock is ready for you to use again.
Now the freezer makes no difference to the flavours
as long as you don't store them for like a year and a half.
Take note, sometimes with stocks in bags, the bags can burst
so be careful as you're removing the frozen stock from your ziplock bags.
If you've made a thicker stock like say a chicken collagen stock or something that's a bit more reduced,
then the flavour is a bit concentrated and you can actually pour your stock into an ice cube tray
and then freeze that, so that whenever you need to use a little bit of stock to thicken a sauce,
you pick up two of these ice cubes,
throw them into a pan melt them down and you have your thickened stock.
Now ginger needs to be kept in the fridge for optimal condition, especially young ginger.
What you don't want to do is peel the entire thing and then store that into the fridge that dries it out.
What you want to do is make sure you have a container for your ginger,
sprinkle a couple of drops of water onto a paper towel,
use that to cover the ginger loosely into an airtight container
and when it comes to storing shallots and garlic,
your best friend is actually a basket because this creates a nice bit of airflow.
It prevents them from, sort of getting a bit moist and squishy and rotting.
Food is all about having fun.
Cooking with friends and family is one of my most treasured activities.
Hopefully, with the tips and tricks, I'm showing you,
you'll be able to do that too without being too worried about setting up a space.
If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below
and we'll get back to you as best we can.
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I'll see you for the next episode of how to kitchen.