Leiths School of Food and Wine - short course

To celebrate the start of my new venture and to perhaps pick up a few professional cooking and lesson-giving tips along the way, in early December I had a little cooking holiday and attended the enthusiast's course run by Leiths School of Food and Wine - Intermediate Course (I did the 'white' course - there is also a 'blue' course which covers different dishes and runs in April-May).

Along with their main diploma courses and a host of one-day, evening and half-day lessons, Leiths run two 'key skills' courses, two intermediate courses and one advanced course. Aside from being an internationally well-regarded school with alumni including current TV chefs and restauranteurs, a friend had whole-heartedly recommended the school, having completed a course there herself.

Though I'd been looking forward to it immensely I found myself a little nervous as the day arrived, not knowing what types of other students would be attending - how competitive it might feel, and what atmosphere the teachers would create.

After coffee and a short orientation delivered by Managing Director Camilla Schneideman (Prue Leith sold the business in 1995, and there are currently two separate Leiths businesses - the main school in West London, with some informal pop-up courses held in a new Portobello road location, and a catering business) we were straight into the kitchens and let loose fairly quickly on choux pastry for our first dish - aubergine and prosciutto gougeres.

Not being a particular staple of British home cooking, I hadn't made choux pastry since school but the teacher pointed out the key steps (when to pour in the flour, how long to beat initially, the appropriate cooled temperature at which to begin incorporating eggs and what a "reluctant dropping consistency" should look like) in his quick demo and everyone ended up with an eminently successful lunch along with the choux pastry knowledge with which to create eclairs, cheese-puffs, profiteroles etc. in future at home.

During our first practical session we also had a professional kitchen health and safety run-down. This included never leaving knives in the sink, using appropriately coloured chopping boards to prevent cross-contaminating food (Leiths has two, red for raw ingredients to be cooked, and brown for ready to eat things. Some other businesses use a variety of colours for fish, meat, vegetables etc.), and my favourite rule, which was calling out "hot pan" as you walked across the kitchen carrying dangerous things.

With about 20 people including staff in each side of the teaching kitchen (a large room divided in two by rows of ovens and gas burners, with 4 aisles of 3-4 students in each classroom half) movement within the kitchen became more gracefully dance-like as the week progressed and as we all got used to each other, where things were, and to not just waiting around for the staff to bring us things. I'd say there were between 30-40 people on the course in total.

Included in the course fees were the new (huge! heavy! excellent!) Leiths How to Cook recipe book which we used extensively throughout the week but could thankfully leave at the school each evening, and an enthusiasts course apron to use for the week and take home at the end. Leiths also sell their smart and simple white aprons with the Leiths logo at reception, along with knife sets and additional copies of the book.

When you sign up for the course they recommend that you bring tupperware to take food away with you each day, but this wasn't actually necessary as they had rather snazzy take-out foil trays and paper bags for the purpose.

At the top of the school is a recipe book library - a lovely little room I got kicked out of at closing time on the first day with books lining the walls, some of which were very well-loved and well bookmarked.

Speaking of cool things at the school, outside the classrooms I was intrigued to find this motley array of tools on display outside the classrooms (above), once belonging to Elizabeth David.

Video screens in the seminar kitchen

Tasting different stocks

The one-week courses are made up of half a day of quick-fire demonstrations of multiple dishes and methods in the seminar room (all passed around to taste too) and half a day in the kitchens preparing related dishes. Ingredients were generally weighed-out for us ahead of the lesson and awaiting us at our stations.

Our course covered meat, fish, pastry, meringues, bread, emulsion sauces and dinner party cooking. Foundational skills such as how to prepare different types of stock, or how to hold the knives and cut appropriately are assumed to be understood to some degree, but the teachers were quite happy to answer questions and demonstrate if anyone was unsure. Below are small dice sized tomato concasse (square and diamond) and julienne strips for fresh spring rolls.

It was interesting to see some of the brand choices in ingredients for the course, including some Shipton Mill flour (hurrah!), also how some things were stored and measured including this enormous bin of caster sugar:

Most butter at Leiths is salted, but this was for hollandaise

When applying I had wondered whether to do the key skills course instead of the intermediate, as I wanted to make sure all of my foundational techniques were best-practice, but I was slightly put off by the recipes being quite basic - crumbles etc. However, seeing how much additional insight you get, I think I needn't have feared being disappointed had I applied for a key skills course instead. The intermediate course seemed to be designed around 'wow' dishes to impress people with at home, this was great fun and certainly will be attempted at my home in that very spirit :)

My favourite part of the course was probably the fish day (heh, not very cake related!). The teacher giving the demonstration was so knowledgeable and excited about fish that her enthusiasm was quite contagious. She advised on sustainability, further reading, apps!, buying guides, and demonstrated a number of cooking methods including (I could not bear my own excitement at this) smoking mackerel.

This British breakfast flavour has been one of the foods I've dearly missed while in Japan - while we have probably the most wonderful fish in the world available to us in Tokyo, including various dried and smoked varieties of mackerel, I am yet to find the precise taste of the smoked mackerel from home. Until now! Hopefully… I asked lots of questions and took many notes :)

On top of the morning's wonderful demonstration, when we got to the hands-on part of the day, oh yes, there awaiting us were perfectly whole and beautiful sea bass, ready for us to descale, gut, fillet and de-bone. What an experience.

Despite my initial nervousness, the other students on the course were another very positive part of the experience. Students tended to stay at the same stations during kitchen sessions for the week and so you got to know your fellow aisle-mates a little and swap tips and opinions.

I found that most of the people I spoke with were really quite accomplished home cooks, and many had attended Leiths courses previously. Many were also living abroad like me, and had fit the course in as part of their winter vacation plans. I certainly had the impression that most of the people on the course were going to go straight back home and repeat and build on many of the recipes from the course, and the book.

Tarte tatin

Since returning to the North of England for Christmas my family has already suffered through choux pastry cheese puffs, courgette fritters with dukkah, pavlova, seared rib-eye steaks with chimchurri, pecan sticky buns, roasted red pepper and red onion polenta pastry tatin, braised red cabbage with apples… and I have many more pages of the book marked for experimentation when I get back to Japan!

Can Bramleys make it big in Japan?

I've done quite a few posts about how great I and members of the Bramley Apple Fan Club here in Japan think Bramley apples are, and about their story here, but what about Japan in general - what are the chances of these cooking apples being a hit over here?

Indeed, don't I have my work cut out for me in general, starting a business based around British sweets when so many of them are unknown here and not very, erm, 'elegant' in appearance?

Let's begin with the taste - I did a little experiment recently, sending a few pies to friends in Kyushu to see what they'd make of their first taste of Bramley apple pie. The feedback was mixed.. "certainly unique, I think I like it" but "too sour, almost like vinegar! The little kids couldn't eat it" gosh.

True, I'd held back a little on the sugar a little with the idea that Japanese people prefer subtly sweet desserts (甘さ控えめ / amasa hikaeme), but it certainly seems that further experimentation is needed. Comparing a few well known British chef's Bramley apple pie recipes, sugar ranges from 10-20% of the weight of prepared apples, though it of course also depends how tart your particular apples are to begin with and whether you add lemon juice to stop them browning etc.

At the recent Bramley apple lunch I sat next to a master pâtissier, owner of a famous French-style cake shop in Tokyo who has been using Bramley apples for 15 years. He said that using enough sugar with the Bramleys is important as it brings out their 'umami', and talked about how butter also enhances the natural sweetness in the apple.

It's going to be important to find just the right balance, as people with Bramley cravings would be most disappointed to have the unique flavour smothered in a sweetness too syrupy. Challenge!

How the pie is explained to customers will probably be the key to the chance of a positive first encounter - someone expecting American style apple pie might end up a bit shocked tasting a spoonful of British style pie. Like when I first tried kombucha - I was told it was "tea" and expected something astringent and bracing and had quite a shock with a mouthful of salty broth. If it had been described to me as tasting like soup I may have liked it immediately!

Additional challenges for apple pies and various rough-and-ready English desserts in Japan come from their appearance and use. My friends in Kyushu were concerned that people might not be able to cut neat slices out of the pie with the filling being puree rather than the slices of fruit that they are used to seeing in apple pie. Similarly, attendees at the Bramley lunch told Celia that things like the apples cooking down to a puree and juice/jam leaking from the top of the pie are often seen as failures in Japan - all things that are not problems at all for the enthusiastic British family waiting to dig-in after dinner.

Being unpretentious and not too fancy makes these desserts somehow more genuine, certainly more authentically British :) Are we too serious for frills, embarrassed by something too showy? The French friends in this funny and savagely-written article may have a point "This so-called 'baking' is not patisserie, it's masonry".

These kinds of dishes are firstly comfort foods in the UK, good honest treats made at home for sharing. In Japan however, perhaps more of my customers would be wanting to use them as gifts, and perhaps they'd prefer individual portions of something a bit neater-looking.

Still lots to think about and tinker with then, and I imagine that things will need to evolve during the course of the business too.

There is definitely something special about the flavour of Bramley though, and I think it will win many more Japanese fans - that balance of acidity and sweetness is mouth-wateringly craving-inducing once the taste has been acquired. After all, it has been charming people for over 200 years.

So yes, I can see Bramleys being fiercely popular with those people it wins over in Japan, though it might take a couple of encounters with the fruit to get there.

Free range and other eggs in Japan - vocabulary, ethics and sources

To pick up a thread I started in this post about the ethics involved in supplier choices, today I got cracking on some further egg research. (The Japanese vocabulary is about halfway down the post.)

Organic free range eggs, with farmer's photo

Japanese people eat a lot of eggs, estimated over 300 a year per person (compared to Australia's 213 and Mexico's 365). The demand for eggs and egg products in Japan is greater than the domestic supply and so Japan imports a considerable amount, and does not export. The chart on this page shows that in terms of whole-shell egg production, Japan is closer to self-sufficiency than for many other food stuffs, importing generally less than 10%. Higher percentages of dried egg and liquid yolk and albumen are imported however. Japan's overall food self-sufficiency is low, reported at 40%, meaning 60% of food consumed in Japan is currently imported, and so it was a nice surprise to see an area where Japan appears to be faring well. Most of the whole, shell-eggs you'll see in supermarkets here then will be domestically produced.

There are quite a few interesting small domestic farms taking great care to produce eggs with the aim of superior quality and often also via humane methods that aren't possible in larger enterprises. This article estimates that just 6-7% of Japanese egg output is automated. (If all these statistics are correct, then over 34 billion eggs are being produced domestically, by non-automated methods...) Some of these small farms sell directly to the public and businesses online, as well as in your local supermarkets. I'll include some links at the bottom of this post.

You might notice a strange obsession of those farms with the fact you can pick up the yolk by its membrane using your fingers, or stand toothpicks up in it and it doesn't break like regular yolks, something I've only ever seen extolled on Japanese sites. Have a look :) Though I wonder if this could be more to do with the freshness, as all eggs start off firmer and denature over time, becoming more runny (good for making macarons!).

Above - a further 3 free range egg brands

Here's some Japanese terminology for those looking for help to make informed decisions in the Japanese supermarket.

• The two main terms used to describe free range are 平飼い / hiragai and 放し飼い / hanashigai.

Hiragai translates literally as 'flat kept' and hanashigai is like 'let lose'. Though these terms are used interchangeably by many people, in 2004 the Japan Free Trade Council requested that an official agreement be made regarding the labelling of eggs to reduce confusion for consumers. Hiragai means that the chickens are not caged and can walk around freely. Whether they are kept indoors or have access to outside is not specified by this wording, it seems that neither is the brood density.

Hanashigai means that for most of the day the birds have access to the outside - density of birds also not specified in this wording. The modifier 特定飼育卵 / tokutei shiiku tamago / specially raised eggs - means that from when the chickens were 120 days old, they are guaranteed to have been kept in a condition no more restrictive than 5 birds per square metre. This is likely to be a more expensive egg, but avoids yarded free range eggs, in which hens do have access to a restricted outdoor space but can still be densely populated which can lead to stress, cannibalism and disease. In the EU there has been a similar fixed categorisation of eggs based on their production methods since 2004.

As in many other countries then, simply having free range on the box doesn't mean that the image you have in your mind of happy hens running about in the fresh air is necessarily the case for the company you're buying from. Most companies have websites with information on how the birds are kept, if you want to be sure.

Other handy egg carton terms are:

• のびのび / nobinobi - relaxed and carefree, often used to emphasize the lifestyle of hens in a conventionally understood 'free range' context, though not legally defined ;).
• 自然 / shizen - natural. Not a particularly precise term in relation to eggs.
• オーガニック / oganikku - organic.
• JAS 認定 JAS nintei, or use of the JAS green leaf symbol - certified organic according to Japanese agricultural standards.
• JA 全農たまご / JA zennou tamago - eggs produced to Japan agricultural cooperative standards, that monitor hygiene and aiming to improve Japan's food self-sufficiency. Usually caged hens so that safety consistency can be guaranteed at a competitive price.
• 有機栽培 / yuukisaibai - organic farming methods.
• 有機卵 / yuukitamago - organic egg.
• 鶏舎内 / keisshanai - inside the coop.
• パック日 / pakkuhi - day the eggs were packed into cartons.
• 採卵日 / sairanbi - day the eggs were harvested.
• 国産 / kokusan - domestic.
• 自由に歩き回る / jiyuuni aruki mawaru - walk around freely.
• 生食用 / namashoku you - for eating raw.
• 生 / nama - raw.
• 低温殺菌 / teion sakkin - pasturised.
• 卵白 / ranpaku - egg white.
• 卵黄 / ranou - egg yolk.
• 賞味期限 / shoumi kigen - best before date.
• 温泉たまご / onsen tamago - soft boiled egg, not raw!

Don't buy onsen tamago for baking :)

I found an interesting contrary point of view in this series of posts that discuss the relative pros and cons of the 3 main ways of producing eggs in Japan: free range, regular caged, and caged in a windowless poultry system.

Keeping in mind that the company uses the windowless method and so wants to extol that system's virtues, they suggest that free range is hazardous because wild animals can have contact with the chickens and introduce disease, that it’s hard to check and be sure that all the birds are healthy, and it's impossible to control what they eat to ensure hygiene and consistency. Of conventionally battery caged hens (in a large coop with walls that get opened in the summer) they say that although it’s easier to keep the droppings away from the eggs, it gets too hot for the birds in the summer and the droppings ferment quickly causing other health risks. They suggest the regulated temperature of the windowless battery solution they use allows for the most consistent and hygienic product - as long as there are no power outages. Animal welfare isn't discussed as being a primary concern for them.

To combat the wild animal contamination risk with some free range situations, one of the farms from the links below has implemented a HACCP-compliant system including a netted area for the chickens to roam in.

The images below are of more conventionally farmed domestic eggs, not free range but with various features such as the feed used, meeting ZA zennou standards of hygiene and quality, and displaying the "face of the farmer" in front of what looks like a windowless poultry system.

Something else you might see on egg packages is 有精卵 / yuuseiran / fertilized eggs, or 無精卵 / museiran / unfertilized eggs. When a Japanese farm describes the benefits of fertilized eggs over unfertilized, they often emphasise the stress-free, close-to-natural social system created by having a cockerel with his own harem of hens, with the idea that this results in a better tasting egg.

Some sites go as far as to say that the 'spark of life' in fertilised eggs make them taste better, but I've also seen it stated (pdf) that unfertilized and fertilised have precisely the same nutritional profile. Perhaps the marker of fertilized egg is most useful at giving an indication of the likely to be more humane type of free range condition in which the chickens are kept. The down side would be that you have to ensure the eggs are kept refrigerated at all times, to avoid them becoming chicks!

Numerous industry sites emphasise the impact on the flavour and quality of the egg that comes from the food and water given to the hens (some go as far as saying that these are the only things that impact the flavour, with animal welfare irrelevant to taste) – so for the best tasting egg, look out for details on the package about the nutritional profile of the feed, and perhaps the fact the farm makes their own blend.

Another interesting character in the world of Japanese poultry is the jidori / 地鶏. In Japan this is a legally defined type of chicken, used mainly for meat, which must have a genealogy of over 50% of Japanese "indigenous" breed of chicken (defined as from at least before the Meiji period, that's an interesting link by the way), be over 80 days old, and be reared with fewer than 10 birds per 1m² from 28 days old. It's an offense to market something as jidori which doesn't meet JAS specifications. There are some places selling eggs from jidori birds.

The main types of jidori chicken are Nagoya cochin / 名古屋コーチン, Satsuma jidori / 薩摩地鶏 and Hinaidori / 比内地鶏, along with the gamecock Okukuji shamo. I was interested to learn that the term jidori is now trademarked... in the US! An enterprising US businessman Dennis Mao, started producing chickens in California in the jidori-style, and his business now supplies many of the famous restaurants who want "jidori" on their menu.

Here are just a few places to try ordering free range eggs in Japan, if you don't find them at your local super.
http://www.shurinosato.com/product/index.html
https://www.nakamuranojo.com/index.html
http://www.friendsfarm.net/
http://a-k-farm.com/egg/env
http://www.i-tamago.jp/namatamago/
http://www.bocca-farm.jp/index.html
http://www.nihonnoen.com/Nihon%20Noen/English%20Home.html
http://www.arkfarm.net/s.nl/it.A/id.2277/.f

I'd very much like to pay a visit to one or two of these farms and learn a bit more about how humane egg production works in Japan and what the legal definitions of more of the terms are.
If I get the chance to do a field trip, I'll report back!

UCC coffee seminar - espresso and cappuccino intensive class, Ikegami

Last week I attended an intensive coffee seminar run by UCC academy at Lucky Coffee Machine's showroom in Ikegami, Tokyo. The workshop was from their specialist course selection and was called ‘espresso and cappuccino fundamentals’ (エスプレッソ・カプチーノの基礎講座). It is intended for baristas, but is also good for people interested in coffee or business owners wanting to learn more.

Welcome to coffee school!

Since there may be a small café element to my business at some point I wanted to start to learn what kinds of things are important for good coffee and work out whether it would be prohibitively expensive to include it in my plan – semi automatic espresso machines seem to start from just under 300,000 JPY and go as high as you like. I’m also just a big geek for any opportunity to learn and this sounded like a fun afternoon.

Classroom funiki

Any trepidation about being a swot back in a classroom setting vanished upon being asked by a friendly gentleman if I’d like a cappuccino, latte or espresso while waiting for the class to start – there was no coffee at my school! It arrived decorated with a tulip, and I wondered if we might have time to touch on that unimportant but delightful part of the current business of coffee – latte art.

The gentleman was our teacher and the 4-hour class began with an espresso history lesson. The espresso maker was invented in France and refined in Italy. We were told how the fairly fixed methods of Italian coffee making evolved somewhat more freely in 3rd and 4th wave American coffee businesses and then came to Japan as a mix of the two countries' styles, often including a fair amount of guess-work and imitation. Here he sighted the Japanese early カフェカプチーノ/cafe cappuccino which looks like an Italian cappuccino but is often made with siphoned coffee and whipped cream rather than espresso and milk.

The courses at UCC aim to bring the fundamentals of good espresso (and espresso-based beverage) making back to a defined set of standards that once understood can be employed or not as the business owner sees fit for their purposes. Italy has the 4 Ms of proper espresso making, which are:

• miscela / the blend of coffee beans
• macinato / the correct grind
• macchina / the machine
• mano / the person making the coffee
• To these UCC adds a 5th which is 'maintenance' of the machines.

We were also given definitions of various standard coffee drinks, their milk-to-espresso ratio as dictated by use of the proper sized cup and in the case of a cappuccino, filling it to the brim.

Effect on flavour of roasting

Next came the coffee chemistry lesson. Roasting the beans was likened to making caramel with the temperature and length of roasting taking the flavour from sour (green beans) to sweet (light brown) through to bitter (dark brown beans). Once roasted the beans are ground, and for espresso it needs to be a very fine grind.

A fine grind

The key here, we were informed, is that the beans are particularly perishable once ground. The flavour compounds, the oil and the volatile aromatic gasses in the grounds dissipate over time and so for the most flavourful espresso the ground coffee needs to be used soon after grinding. (And I would always buy ready-ground coffee in an Illy tin and keep it for months at home, oops. Although, David Lebovitz's post from visiting Illy indicates that their pre-ground coffee might be best one to choose if you do buy ready-ground stuff.)

Interestingly our teacher described espresso an emulsion, with the oil and flavour compounds being forced into the water through steam pressure, whereas brewed and drip coffees are more like infusions where much of the oil etc. will stay on the filter paper and gasses evaporate. A French press or cafetière will press out some of the oil into the coffee but it will not be an emulsion.

Marbled crema, a sign of a good espresso

I also asked about the stove-top espresso moka pots with the water canister that screws into the jug and also uses steam, but was told that it’s unlikely to produce a good ‘crema’ layer of foam or much of a complex flavour. These moka pots use 1.5 bars of pressure whereas espresso machines use 9 bars. Espresso machines also extract coffee at a slightly lower temperature 92-96°C vs. a stove-top pot's 100°C which also impacts flavour.

Next followed a demonstration and a couple of hands-on practices each at making espresso. We were taught about the importance of evenly packing the grounds and tamping with sufficient pressure in order to make sure the hot steam wont just escape through one weak spot but be forced through the entire cake of coffee, which will give you the most and most balanced flavour from your blend.

My espressos!

We then learned a little about milk. We were told that foods are more flavourful when slightly warm rather than ice cold (English beer!), and that the optimal temperature for milk is around 60°C, at which point it will taste slightly sweet. Dutifully, we tasted a little of the steamed milk handed out and by George he was right.

Milk, sweeter at 60°C

The pleasure of a cappuccino comes in the creamy mouth-feel of finely frothed milk, sweet from being at the right temperature, bringing out the sweetness of a medium-roasted coffee. You want a cappuccino now don’t you? I did, by the time we’d had all this explanation, and fortunately there was going to be chance to get tired of them as the latte art section was up next!

I guess this should be called cappuccino art really as the proportions of milk to coffee and cup size made it a cappuccino. It’s usually called latte art because bigger latte drinks have more scope for detail which must be useful in competitions, but we were just here to practice the basics.

Demonstrations (in order of difficulty) were of a heart, a bear, a rabbit, a tulip and a fern. It’s quite tricky! One or two people got it straight away, and I wonder if they weren't first-timers, but most of us needed (still need) lots of practice. Here are my 1st, 2nd and 3rd attempts:

The milk needs to be smooth enough (pour off the first bit of foam, then bang out the large bubbles by tapping the jug on the table top and swirling), then the general idea seems to be pour from a slight distance into the middle of the cup (speed, milk drives under the surface of the coffee?), then bring the jug down close to the cup and tilt the jug forwards to create a white circle (slower pour, more foamy milk from the back of the jug, rests on surface of the coffee?), and finish by dragging a final thin drip of milk through the circle to make a heart. Other images are variations of this basic technique, and it’s probably going to be best to watch a video to see how it’s done and then practice.

It was supposed to be a heart.. I poured from too high up

Latte or cappuccino art is a whimsy, even a bit silly maybe as it doesn't effect the quality of the drink (unless you take forever and the coffee gets cold), but it can produce a delightful effect that might make someone happy and since you have to pour the milk in anyway and it doesn't cost any extra.. yes I think that I’ll have to have another go at this :)

Here are some of the other student's slightly more successful attempts at hearts:

The course is delivered in Japanese and this particular one was 10,000 JPY. UCC offer longer courses for various purposes, details of which you can find on their site.

I understand their head office and main school is in Kobe, but that they may be opening up an academy in Tokyo.