I’ll go out on a limb and say a good knife – and it’s my belief that to start with you really only need one – is the only essential piece of kitchen equipment you need. OK, you need a frying pan and pots and an ice-cream machine (I love ice-cream machines) and if you’re Heston Blumenthal you MUST have a low temperature cooking bath. But none of those are really essential. A knife however is.  

Stay sharp

If there’s one thing that can improve your cooking immediately it’s getting a sharp knife. Most home cooks seem to battle away with knives so blunt they can barely cut through butter and then wonder why they can’t do all that fancy chopping like TV chefs.

Do this simple test – try and chop a tomato without tearing the skin. Your knife should glide through the tomato with very little pressure. If it doesn’t your knife is too blunt.

Before you even bother learning to sharpen your knife properly, you need to take a look at your knives. Are they even worth sharpening?

What to look for in a knife

A good knife will last you a lifetime – it’s an investment that will pay for itself over and over and over and with careful treatment it will be the best friend in the kitchen that you can ever have.

Firstly, there are lots of different types of knife to choose from, with different styles for different jobs. However, there are six main types of knife to choose from:

Chef’s Knife – available in different lengths, usually between 6 – 12 inches. This is the  workhorse of the kitchen and the traditional knife of choice of the professional chef.  

However, many chefs now favour the Santoku style – essentially a Japanese chef’s knife,  which offers a versatile (though less heavy-duty) alternative to the traditional chef’s  knife.

Paring Knife/Utility Knife – short, usually 3 – 4 inches. Lots of people seem to use this knife as their only knife in the home kitchen. They’re great for small, fine work such as peeling garlic, paring apples and so on but if you’re using a short knife like this to chop cabbage, root vegetables or slice meat then you’re making life very difficult for yourself.

Boning Knife – hard, solid blade with a thin point, very sharp edge. Great for getting inside a joint of meat, slicing through sinew and even bone; lousy for chopping veg or pretty much anything other than dealing with meat.

Flexible Filleting Knife – long, thin flexible blade for getting underneath a fish fillet. This is a great addition to the chef’s arsenal, but my no means essential to any home cook. Like the boning knife this is designed for a specific task: it’s not good for chopping hard veg – it lacks the power and weight of a chef’s knife.

Carving Knife – another specialist knife for carving joints of meat. To be honest, I’ve never owned a carving knife – my Santoku style knife can virtually take care of anything (except bone)

Bread Knife – this is a specialist knife which does one thing and one thing only, but that one thing it does very well and it can not really be replaced by another other style of knife ie if you’re ever going to cut bread you need a bread knife.

When starting out you only really THREE of these knives – a chef’s knife, a paring knife and a bread knife. The rest can wait until you’ve mastered your knife technique and until you want to learn how to do fiddly stuff like tunnel boning a leg of lamb or filleting place.

I’ve been really impressed with I.O. Shen knives www.ioshenonline.co.uk but you can also see the other knives I favour next to each category.

Minestrone is a very simple soup that provides a good basic introduction to knife technique, balancing simple, robust flavours and both dried and fresh ingredients cooked well. As long as you concentrate on cooking – particularly on the pasta – it’s practically impossible to mess up. That’s what makes it such a great dish to start with on any cookery course!

There’s no set recipe for minestrone. In Italy, where Minestrone is eaten throughout the country, what goes in the pot varies both regionally and seasonally. It’s a dish that is as delicious as it is versatile and you can expect everything from peas and pesto to courgettes and pumpkin.

However, there are some common factors including beans, carrot, onion, stock, tomatoes and pasta. The foundation of the dish – and that of several other slow-cooked dishes – is known as the soffritto. Roughly translated, this means “sauté” and would in its most basic form mean gently fried onions and garlic. 

In this case I sauté onions, carrots and celery then add bacon (pancetta when I can get it, smoked streaky if I can’t) and garlic slightly later.

I like the mouthfeel of this version – small macaroni, small beans (haricot) and small slices of vegetable. Everything is cut to virtually the same size and it really makes a difference to the texture of the dish. 

Short cuts

This is such an easy dish there’s very little you can do to make it easier, but if you want to save time:

1. Use canned beans – I prefer not to as they don’t have the same toothsomeness as properly cooked dried beans

2. Buy stock – please don’t use a stock cube. They’re rubbish. 

If you only learn one thing… knife techniques

First up is the technique with the onion – see separate article here. This is the most efficient way to chop an onion. And when you get it down you can start to practice getting the dice smaller and smaller… until the pieces are so small they virtually disappear into the dish.

Secondly, use the opportunity of so much veg preparation to hone your knife technique. 

Ingredients

Tablespoon olive oil

2 medium carrots

2 celery sticks

1 large onion

4 slices smoked back bacon/pancetta

4 cloves garlic, sliced finely

125g haricot or cannellini beans, soaked overnight and cooked until tender but al dente

250g small shape pasta (gomitini, macaroni)

225 ml canned tomatoes

500 ml chicken stock

1 large courgette, diced

fresh basil

sea salt

black pepper 

Method

1. Chop the onions, carrot and celery (see picture)
2. Slice the bacon (or pancetta) into matchsticks
3. Cook these over a low to medium heat in the olive oil until soft
4. Add the tomatoes, chicken stock and garlic and cook slowly for around 5 – 10 mins, just to allow the tomatoes to break down
5. Add the pasta and cook as per instructions on the packet
6. Add the beans and courgettes 3 minutes before the pasta is ready
7. Remove the soup form the heat
8. Add fresh basil leaves – torn, not cut – and season to taste with salt and pepper

Serve with fresh parmesan cheese 

Troubleshooting

The sauté should be done on a fairly low heat so you hear the barest sizzle. Keep it slow and steady – you will want to cook the soffritto for around 10 – 15 minutes. If your pan is very noisy then it’s on too high; if the vegetables start to colour then it’s on too high.

Concentrate on getting both the beans and the pasta cooked just right – that means, al dente (which literally translates as “to the teeth”). The beans should be tender but still have some bite left in them while the pasta should be firm but cooked and resist when bitten into, without being too hard.

To get the cooking time just right you need to not only watch the recommended cooking times on the beans or pasta but also check regularly as to how the cooking is progressing.  

Alternatives

You can use almost anything in here – experiment with different types of pasta, different types of beans (canellini and borlotti are both good), and seasonal vegetables. That could be anything from creating a three-carb Atkins nightmare with potatoes to a light spring soup with peas, courgettes and green beans. 

Leftovers

This doesn’t go so well as leftovers or for freezing as the pasta and beans tend to go mushy. What you can do is make the basic soup (soffrito, tomatoes, stock) and then add beans and pasta to order. 

I’m jumping ahead a little here as the next dish after chicken stock was going to be Minestrone. It’s a great dish for practising knife skills, chopping veg etc and of course creating a simple and delicious soup with that sensational chicken stock. However, I’ve made Minestrone about 500 times in the last month and I’m sick of it. I’ll add this recipe with the different techniques involved soon. So next on the list is…

Prawn Stir Fry

Why did I choose this dish so early on for this cookery course? Well, it’s incredibly straightforward but gives you a chance to experiment with flavours and a few easy techniques. I wasn’t really sure which type of Prawn Stir Fry to use so I’ve plumped for a simplified version of a Thai dish called Mii Grop. It’s basically a sweet & sour style dish which can you make mild or ultra-hot depending on your tastes. This is a standard lunchtime dish for me, along with Gong Bao chicken, Phad Thai noodles, Chicken noodle soup and Chicken with Holy Basil – perhaps I should be less surprised at my every expanding gut. 

Ingredients: 

Cooked noodles (you can use any kind – the full version of Mii Grop uses rice vermicelli noodles deep fried. I used plain old wheat noodles. I reckon it would be pretty good with fresh rice noodles too)

16 uncooked prawns 

200g fresh tofu cut into sticks (see picture below)

5 cloves garlic sliced

1 onion sliced 

1 red pepper sliced

3 spring onions sliced diagonally into “ears”

handful fresh coriander roughly chopped

For the sauce: 

2 tablespoons fish sauce

2 tablespoons chicken stock

1 tablespoon plum sauce

1 tablespoon sweet chilli sauce 

Method

1. Fill the bottom of a wok to a depth of around 1 inch. Heat on a medium heat and deep fry the tofu sticks until golden brown and crispy. Drain on a paper towel.

2. Pour most of the oil away leaving around a tablespoon.

3. On a medium heat, fry the garlic and onions and then add the prawns until they are coloured all over

4. Add the sauce and turn the heat up until the sauce bubbles and thickens slightly. Add the thinly sliced pepper and tofu and cook through for a minute or so.

5. Remove from the heat and add the spring onions and coriander

6. Serve with noodles or rice

The great thing is it’s an absolute doddle to make – and you can basically let it take care of itself why you go off and make the kids’ tea, comb the dog or shoot a frame of pool – whatever you fancy.

I had an appointment this morning and picked up some chicken carcasses from the butcher on the way home. These were frozen and had been eviscerated – the breasts, wings and legs taken off for the butcher to sell separately.

Dem Bones

It always strikes me as vaguely criminal that the remaining carcass, with its reservoir of flavour stored up in bone, meat and fat, should be discarded so wantonly so I’m always happy to pick up a bag to use for my stock.

If you ever throw away the bones of a roast chicken then now is the time to stop – never, ever throw roast chicken bones away again! You’re missing out on a delicious soup, a world-class risotto or a sensational sauce.

It takes around five minutes tops to chuck the carcass (raw or cooked) into a stockpot (that’s just a large sauce pan for anyone unfamiliar with kitchen lingo). I timed myself this morning with this missive in mind and it was pretty much bang on five minutes. I’m upstairs writing this now and the stockpot is simmering away nicely downstairs.

Garnish

You’ll find lots of recipes calling for white peppercorns, bouquet garni, Chinese cabbage, bay leaves, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme and other whatnots. These do all impact on the flavour but my general feeling is that they just make life more difficult.

A good stock relies on the flavour of the bones you put in first and foremost (unless you’re making a vegetable stock but that’s for another time) so just make sure the bones you’re using are fresh and preferably from an organically raised animal, and in the case of chicken I always go for free range.

Free range rant – skip if averse to food evangelism

Anyone with half an interest in cooking and a soul couldn’t deny the misery that goes in to mass-producing cheap chicken in battery conditions. And if you’ve got working taste buds you should be able to taste the difference – decent chicken tastes about fifteen million times better than the bland, flaccid, water-filled muck that lines the supermarket shelves.

Good ingredients are always going to underpin good cooking – and all the technique in the world isn’t going to disguise poor produce. (More on that another time)

So back to the stock…

For this time, I’m looking at a white chicken stock. Any white stock just uses raw bones with mirepoix (mirepoix is the name given to chopped up vegetables – usually carrots, leeks, celery and onion). A brown stock would require roasting the bones before boiling – this causes the bones and vegetables to caramelise creating a deep brown colour and arguably a richer flavour.

To make my chicken stock I dispense with bouquet garni or any other herbs – I cook a lot of Indian, Chinese and Thai and the addition of herbs like sage or parsley would impart an inauthentic flavour; vice versa I don’t add Chinese cabbage, lemon grass or other such fragrants because I want my stock to be as versatile as possible – you can add those flavours in later in your finished dish.

Some people put some crazy stuff into their stocks – a guy I worked with once put onion skins into the stock. Now to me that just seems wrong. In my opinion, a stock isn’t just a reservoir for leftovers, it’s a product that deserves to be treated with care and made with good ingredients. That said, if you have good quality vegetable trimmings then you should use these.

Chicken stock recipe:

1 – 2 raw or roast chicken carcasses

1 large carrot

1 small leek

1 onion

2 -3 sticks of celery

Put the carcasses in the pan. Chop the vegetables into large chunks and add to the pan.

Add water until the carcasses are covered. Bring to the boil.

Scum

Some people suggest skimming the scum from the surface once it has boiled – to be honest I’ve never really noticed much in the way of scum but if there is any discoloured foamy stuff on the surface you can skim it off with a spoon.

Heston

I usually let the stock simmer for around an hour and a half. Heston Blumenthal, I think, has claimed that you don’t really get much extra flavour after around half an hour – this may well be true but I tend to be off doing something else while the stock simmers so an hour and half gives me ample opportunity to get other things done.

Strain

How do you know when your stock is ready? There’s no obvious “done” point. The stock tends to look a little bit oily on the surface, a bit cloudy, and will taste – you hope – deliciously chicken-y. At this point Heston would probably going into paroxysms of umami-ism and he’s right – I think a good chicken stock is the epitome of what is meant by savoury and is unmistakable.

So, one you’ve left it for an hour and a half or so, strain off the stock through a sieve and discard the carcass and veg.

Reducing

You can leave the stock to cool now and then freeze or pop it in the fridge. When you come to use it there will probably be a layer of yellowy-white fat solidified on the surface – that’s normal. Unless you have some particular penchant for chicken fat you would normally scrape this off and bin it before using the stock.

At this stage you probably have quite a thin stock and what many chefs do is to reduce the stock. This has the dual purpose of concentrating the flavour and reducing the volume so it doesn’t take up so much space.

Reducing is easy – all it means is that you put the stock onto a fairly vigorous heat and boil rapidly, this has the effect of driving off the water in the liquid as steam and leaving you a richer, tastier stock.

One piece of advice, if you’re using gas make sure the flame doesn’t lick up the side of the pan – it can cause the stock to burn to the side of your pan and this can taint the flavour.

How much you reduce is up to you – I frequently reduce down to one third of the original volume. This leaves me with a greeny-brown coloured liquid that I then allow to cool and put in the fridge.

Once the stock has been the fridge for a while you’ll probably notice it’s gone into a nice jelly-like state – the gelatine in the bones causes the stock to solidify when it’s cold. When you heat the stock again it will melt and become liquid.

I always feel a strange sense of deep satisfaction when my stock has jellified – I’m not sure quite what this says about me, but feel free to speculate in Freudian or Jungian terms.