Sunshine and smiles, Hivers! I'm back again for another new blog for this week. In this blog, I'm going to share with you all how we participated and joined the masterclass in our department. Let's get started!
This month, we celebrated the departmental day, where we showcase our skills in our courses, and our department conducts a master class in which they invite an international chef all the way from the United Kingdom. This chef has expertise in cooking, and he has plenty of achievements and awards from being a chef. Meet Chef Martin Bower, an executive chef from a famous 5-star hotel in Manila. He has a mission where he wants to showcase and share his skills with every student here in the Philippines. We are grateful that he has a chance to teach and share his incredible skills in cooking that will help us to be the best chef in the future.
In this day, we are very happy and excited to experience watching a chef prepare food in a restaurant. As you can see, a lot of students are waiting for the masterclass to start. Some of them are still not here at the student activity center since they still have classes. In the morning, we started to clean and prepare all the things needed for this demonstration. We start to scrub the kitchen equipment as well as putting it inside of the venue. I also clean the water jug for the water in the sink.
When the chef arrived at the venue, they started the program, and before the chef started the demonstration, the host started the prayer, followed by the national anthem. Chef Bower tells his timeline of how he ended up being a great chef in his place and also here in the Philippines. I was very attentive to every detail that he said because it is quite interesting to hear, and aside from that, he will have a short game about him, which I'm very active in listening to that day.
After he introduced himself, he introduced the dish he would be demonstrating. He said that he will demonstrate how to cook a restaurant-style adobo. This adobo is very famous in every restaurant, and this is also one of the dishes that chefs love to cook. At first, he demonstrates which parts of the chicken have the better meat. He said the chicken breast is a good part of the chicken that is very quick to cook. He also teaches us how to debone and how to cut chicken in an easy way. The way he only pulls the breast part and cuts those cartilages at every end of the bone makes it easier to cut a chicken. He says a lot of interesting tips and information about the chicken, and I was like, Damn, I have plenty of information about chicken that I haven't discovered yet. This is the first time that usually they cut the cartilage part of the chicken thigh or drumsticks and leave it as bone because whenever I cook, I don't cut that part, I include that in the dish.
He got an assistant from the audience to help him cut those vegetables to be added to his adobo. When I cook adobo, I don't put vegetables like cabbage and carrots, instead, I only add potatoes. He also teaches us how to make a sauce for his adobo; he uses soy sauce, vinegar, peppercorn, salt, sugar, chicken stock, and thyme. I was shocked because he didn't even stir the sauce; he left it in the hot pan and waited until it boiled.
He marinate the chicken by putting all the spices and then frying it to the hot pan. He didn't even mix the spices to the chicken, instead, he just put them on top of the chicken and then put i t in the pan, which is new to me since whenever I cook, I usually mix all together and then rest for a minute. After the chicken is fried a little bit, he added a chicken stock to the pan, and he let it simmer together with the chicken without stirring. While waiting, he talks plenty of information about the dish and also how it looks when it cooks.
I didn't understand well what he said because he has a low voice, and some of the staff inside of the facility offer a mic standee so his voice will be loud and clear. His voice is loud a bit, but sometimes it is not clear. He also talks about what plate he will use for the plating and why that plate he will use. He said that if the food is plated on a big plate, it will make it more attractive to look at. He even said that in a fine dining restaurant he worked at before, the service per plate is very expensive. Like in a full meal course, in each course it costs around 3000 to 5000 pesos, and the portion is very small. After that, he tastes the sauce for his adobo, and he adjusts it, maybe because it is bland because he added more spices and some chicken stock. He even showed us what the color of sauce, which is a good color for adobo.
After that, he shows us the chicken thigh that he cooked. It is brown in color and very juicy to look at. I don't think it is very tasty since the spices that he added to the chicken are not well distributed to the other chicken. He added the vegetables to the stock that he cooked, and after some minutes, he placed the chicken on the plate together with sauce on it.
As you can see, this is how he plated the restaurant-style adobo. It is far from how the Philippine adobo looks. The chicken looks like a fish because it has a bland color. The plating is so beautiful that anyone here inside of the event doesn't want to destroy the plating. Some of us went to the kitchen area where she demonstrated and gave us a chance to taste his adobo. The taste is good but a little bit bland, and some of my friends tell me that it is quite good and perfect.
After he cooks, he has a short game for us, and whoever gets the exact answer will get a shirt from Chef Bower. My friends are very excited to join the game that ended, they won the prize. As you can see in the picture, this is them putting on the shirt, and I took a picture with them. They are happy because they won, but the shirt is very big for them.
After Chef Bower's demonstration, it is time for some students to try remaking his adobo. It has two groups that they will compete who is going to have the same taste of adobo that Chef Bower makes.
While waiting for the two groups to finish cooking, we took some pictures with my friends, and we also had a chance to have a picture with Chef Bower. I was thankful that Chef Bower is so kind that he gave us an opportunity to have a group picture with him.
When the group finished cooking their adobo, Chef Martin Bower tasted their own creation of adobo, and the crowd was cheering for each group. At last, the group from the right left side won the competition, and Chef Martin Bower gave them money as their prize.
And that's the end of my blog, Hivers! This experience of being an audience in a demonstration of a great chef is truly a good experience. I was rooting to become a chef, and this opportunity, being taught by a certified chef, is truly awesome and fun. I will never forget this moment, and I am thankful to Chef Bower that he chose our school to have a cooking demonstration.
Thank you for reading my blog, and see you in my next blog post! Ciao!