Hi guys,
Recently Claire was invited to take part in one of the cooking programs offered by Culinaryon. We never went for anything like this before and since I kind of like to cook a little, I was quite excited to join. Claire was a little 50-50 on this because she feels she don’t have the time but I asked her to set a date anyways. #Manliness #Headofthehousehold
So the day came, and we were indeed tired from work during the day. But I kept my spirits up even though I dreaded the idea of being in a room full of strangers.#introvert #hermitlife
Okay the hashtags are getting excessive here I shall stop it.
And so we spent some time looking for the place at One Raffles Place. This area is quite confusing with the excessive usage of “Raffles” in the naming of the buildings etc. We were debating whether its One Raffles Place or One Raffles Quay then there’s also One Raffles Link… So we arrived late in the end.. On the 4th floor of One Raffles Place Tower 2, its in the office area which we accessed from the shopping mall area.
The place was quite large and from the corridor I thought we entered a tuition centre. Well its not entirely wrong because we’re here to get tuition on culinary arts anyways!
We were greeted by the host of the night and he got us registered with one of the many iPads lying on the table. Easy. Then we were loaned an apron and offered drinks and canapes. Sort of ushered through everything, very efficient like how a big time restaurant’s kitchen should be. Minus all the scoldings etc, of course.
Soon we were seated and introduced to our chef of the night: Carmen Liew. She will guide us through the night with her Sous Chef.
*All photos are taken by the photographer on site at Culinaryon. I borrowed them from their FB for this post.*
We’ll eventually learn to make:
- Chocolate Lava Cake
- Salad with Caramelized Duck
- Spagehetti Chitarra with Porcini and Black Truffle
- Italian Gelato.
The names sounds intimidating at first, because we seldom cook and even though I do cook enough to be quite decent, the dishes I make are all simple stuff that only consist of a few ingredients.
See our faces just cutting the oranges to efficiently extract the juices for our salad sauce. Luckily Chef showed us how exactly to do it and monkey-see, monkey-do is what I do best. I look like a monkey anyways, that must’ve been the reason why.
With guidance, we find that the tedious part of preparing a dish is actually not that bad. Having basic knife skills would help, but an amateur like me or Claire would be able to at least make something edible.
All five of us worked together to whip up the Salad with Caramelized Duck. Oh I forgot to mention, we were broken up into groups of five per table. The duck was amazingly easy to cook but I think if I did it at home, I’ll have to wipe all the oil off the walls and cabinets… It taste awesome too surprisingly, look at us, we all don’t look like chefs, so I didn’t have any expectations especially judging from my own skill level.. Must be because of the guidance of our Chef in the house going around making sure we were alright.
Next we start abusing pasta dough trying to make spaghetti from scratch. Awesome right? When we say pasta, we will automatically think of the packs of dried sticks on supermarket shelves. Who would’ve thought of making them by hand?
Its a time consuming process making these spaghetti. We have to knead and fold and roll them repeatedly until we get the right consistency: “as smooth as baby’s skin” as what Chef told us.
Then we of course cut them to strips and cook them. A volunteer cooked the pot of mushroom cream and truffle sauce, we then each get a plate of awesomeness:
Look at our faces you’ll know how good this pasta is. We were already quite full from the salad and I still stuffed myself with 1 and a half plate of pasta (Claire couldn’t quite finish a plate like this by herself, I’m the trash can.)
But if you think this is the finale, you can’t be more wrong. We still have the lava cake and gelato to go. We made the lava cake and we know how much chocolate and eggs went into those tiny cups. And to top it off with a gelato made with liquid nitrogen? Deadly.
The lava cake really spews lava, its super scary yet it taste so good I can’t prevent myself from finishing them… Yes I said them.
All in, this is a wonderful experience at Culinaryon, I enjoyed assembling stuff and that includes cooking. If only we don’t have to wash up after that, I would cook daily. And true enough, here there are helpful staff who would grab your used plates and utensils to wash. Thanks to them we enjoyed ourselves fully without the worry of washing up after this.
All of us received a cert and from then on, we mastered the 4 dishes we had a part in making here.. or maybe not.. master is too strong a word for green horns. LOL.
Cheers people, do check out the courses offered at Culinaryon, you won’t regret joining it. Spending time with my wife and see how clumsy she is: Priceless.
Simon Tey