This weekend has been super packed that I haven’t had the energy to blog about it all. I have a backlog of pictures to share with you. Expect two more posts after this one this week.
On Friday night, I drove down to Mountain View to pick Brian up so we could drive all the way up to Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto to attend the Dim Sum cooking class at Kitchen on Fire. Brian gifted me a cooking class for the past valentine’s day but I haven’t had a chance to go till now (plus it was really hard to pick a class). I put my email on the waiting list for the dim sum class and space opened up so we were able to go. The class was taught by Chef Chat Mingkwan and was $65 for 3 hours in an awesome kitchen space. The place was small but every inch was well utilized so that it didn’t feel cramped. When you get there they have snacks set up; we had cheese, crackers, pistachios, dried fruit, fried rice balls filled with meat, water and Thai iced tea (yum)!
siu mai
There was about an hour long lesson where the Chef explained all the ingredients and the processes but there was very little hands on demonstration. Then we were let loose to rotate around the stations to explore and try out the recipes ourselves. There were assistants to help and the Chef walked around and helped each station but if you weren’t there when he was explaining stuff then you miss out. You have to keep an open ear and ask questions to learn as much as you can. Overall, it was a fun class. The only complaints are the lack of demonstration during the lecture and how the recipes weren’t authentic. The har gou filling was an overly salted paste instead of having shrimp inside. The egg tart (dan tat) had coconut and was more like a macaroon cupcake than an egg custard (someone even added craisins to a later batch! yuck). The siu mai wasn’t bad but wasn’t like the ones from the restaurants. The best things were the pot stickers, char siu bao, gai lan, and sesame seed red bean balls.
deep fried red bean paste sesame balls
har gou
char siu bao in the making
Chef Mingkwan checking the steamers
freshly steamed char siu bao
coconut dan tat (egg tarts)
ready to eat!
food.crafts.life 