hello everyone and welcome to the French cooking Academy if you are new joiner to the channel welcome and if you are a regular also welcome to you and it's the perfect time that you join because today we are starting our episode number one on how journey on trying to understand how to prepare and cook fish in French cooking so there are the the next few videos we're going to look at a very basic techniques that you need to know on how to prepare fish and we will advance slowly from a basic level to an advanced level but today we'll start with the you know very basic or video now I'm not going to go in details but all the ins and outs of fishes and what all the types and the name but let's say that in French cooking when you start to learn about cooking when you come to that chapter which is really two main things you need to know two types of fish and they're going to tell you that there is the round fish such as this and which is a trout it's that shape and then you got the flat types of fish like the flounder the soul and this kind of thing so this is all you need to know there's really many these two types the flatfish is a bit more difficult to work with and then the very easy one is the round fish now the trout that you can see here is actually the one of the preferred fish when it comes to culinary school training because it's very easy to work fish and it's good that nice shape it's not too big it's not too small it's very easy to clean and repair and it also has a flesh that can it holds pretty well so you can actually poach it unlike what we're gonna see today and also pan fry it and some other scenarios and like we'll see in our next video not today we're gonna start our lesson with how to cook fish or how to poach fish in French cuisine so in French cuisine to cut the long story short basically when you want to poach a fish you don't just take your fish like that and throw it in salty water and figure out that's it I'm gonna you know cook that fish and then I serve it with a sauce now there is a BAE's element that is called a cool boom which is a clear broth that you have to make before you can cook your fish this is the medium you're going to be using to cook your fish with and that broth is made with these ingredients and so you've got some water some white wine different types of onions some carrots bouquet garni and this is the parsley the bay leaves the time and juniper berries and some peppercorn and that's it so the first thing we're going to do here is to create our broth and when it's done we're gonna have to let it cool down and then I'll show you how to basically poach the fish and how we can serve it otherwise we're going to be starting with the food preparation so when you art school in French corn in schools always the same thing I asked you to first wash your hands and then the action of washing the vegetables peeling them and cutting them this is the order in which things have to be done in this case as you can see I've washed my vegetables I've peeled them and I've finished slice my carrots finish slice the onions measure some water some wine I've made a bouquet garni I've got a video on this I'll put it in the video description and we're not going to cover it now put some salt to show you and juniper berries and pepper I like to remind you guys that what you see here is not gonna be the exact same as what I usually post in the recipe because here I'm just doing this for the demonstration and it's based on what I'm using I mean I'm only doing one fish in a certain pan so yes what you will get in the video description will be different but what you'll get in the video description is the source of truth for you and in French cooking the measurements for coal booyah broth is based on the liter and then it's up to you to multiply or divide depending on your own use and so don't get hang up with what you see right here source of truth on the video description okay let's move on to the stove and now let's make disco boom we're gonna start by adding the water so if you want to know by the way from what I've said before in this instance I'm using one and a half liter of liquid luxury of water for my preparation so you put the water in and you put the wine you put the bouquet garni you're gonna add juniper berries with the pepper is about a teaspoon of juniper berries a tablespoon of pepper and then the salt look at this plenty of salt the salt is 12 grams of salt per liter of water so you've got the ingredients and it's just a matter of adding in this your onions and your carrots so you sprinkle everything and there's no heat under the pan here I like to remind you so you just put all your ingredients like that yeah before you start the heat on so when this is done you're gonna turn the heat on high and we're gonna bring this to the boil now as soon as the water boils you will see here that that foam cool like the scum and so you gonna have to discard that take a little container and try to clean as much as you can and remove all the impurities these are the kind of the impurities sometime that form at the surface now one thing I want to mention as well guys about this the coolness to schools about making it and the first one the old methods I would have you first cook the carrot with the bouquet garni and assault on a vigorous boil for 15 minutes and make you add the onions at the end in the last five minutes for me I'm doing modern more modern technique where instead of doing that massive hard boil you see as soon as my water boils a little bit here and you know when it's clean there's no foam what I'm gonna do basically like now is reduced heat totally to a simmer and I'm gonna now count 15 minutes on the clock here and leave this which you to simmer on a very very low simmer for 15 minutes rather than a raging boil because the modern cuisine is kind of tend to prefer this kind of very slow cooking and is very simmering so you don't want to you know it's like a big aggression the ingredients don't like much big boil so simmering I kind of prefer that so 15 minutes on a simmer and we turn the heat off 1 or 15 minutes have passed you turn your heat off totally and you're now going to be able to reserve this into another container to make it really cool down as fast as possible because before you can use a cool boo-yan it always have to be cold first and you will start with the cold cold blue one so it's what we're gonna do this is the first step it's done and we're gonna let it cool down before we use it in the demonstration of how to use it to poach a fish microbiome is now called the so-called broth and as you can see here the koi did a little bit to make it look a little bit better but basically this is it you see how clear that broth is for the fish and that's with the simmering it doesn't cloud much and that's what I like and if you look at this you can see if I take in a spoon it is written if I tasted quite salty to be expected because when you cook fish need some salt and then yeah carrots and onion in the background but it's not overpowering it's a nice balance between the wine the water and the aromatics so now we're going to be using this and poach how trout now how to poach a trout or another piece of fish with that kombu you very simple and you start with the cold we own the kombu you and you take your fish so I have cleaned my trout and don't worry about how to clean it because this is something we're going to see in our next video so we'll cover this in more details but for now I'm just placing my trout in here and it's just fits in my pan and I'm gonna bring this komui on to a simmer and when the simmer star we're going to count roughly kind of eight minutes so it's like 10 minutes in total and two minutes to get that heat going and when you reach that simmer it's about eight minutes so when you reach that point I'll show you what I'll do next my boo Yong has now reached the the right temperature as you can see and I'm going to reduce do it really to assume it should not boil and we're going to cook this for eight minutes now what I usually do to avoid the drawing and he's not totally covered you see we're gonna try to steam so I'm just putting on my trout a little bit of parchment paper like that and I'm gonna put my timer to 810 minutes it depends on the size of your Ephesian but roughly speaking usually it's eight minutes but it could be ten depending on the size okay and we leave it like this until it's cooked alright so as soon as it's cooked and you're going to try to be very careful and take the the trout out of the water and we're using a spatula or let me grab some tools here like these things and you can try to basically carry it ideally you want to do it that way and carry it on the plate so something like this like a clean plate so I'm going to do this off camera because it might be messy while I'm filming and I'll present the fish now managed to take out my trout huh and now it's on the plate so typically in France you will have the trout being served usually on a white cloth like a white tea table made out of cotton so a very clean one I didn't have anything to simulate that just to show you and absorb some of the liquid here I'll remove it afterwards and that's to simulate that towel also when you're about to serve that fish obviously doesn't look good no one wants to see your head so what you usually do and before you serve it when you bring it a table you tend to decorate or hide the head with something like you know a piece of lemon or something like that okay the next thing you can do also is to try to add some kind of decoration as you don't have to go over the top but you know what I mean you know this is gonna be served for your guests so you try to put some parsley here some lemon and you get some kind of decoration the next step after that is gonna be to remove the skin and now for the skin of course when you poach a fish I usually the fish serve on its own and next to it will come some kind of sauce we'll talk about in a second so of course you can have to try to remove some of that skin just but as you can you take a knife and you try to basically cut and the skin on the side like that so I'm doing one hand it is very difficult and same here so you make some little incisions and then with a fork or something like this you're gonna be basically trying to roll that that skin off as much as you can and making sure you don't damage the body of the trout and this is to expose the good bit so you remove everything like that and you're gonna clean everything and discard all the this black skin so that your guests get something else so I'll do this off camera but you get the idea and I'll keep on going and I'll show you after we all done I managed to remove the skin I did some little presentation and remember that usually is a white cloth behind and and the last thing for your guests is ready to expose the meats and try to present with me try little pieces you can see here it's cooked it's nice it's really tender now obviously most of the time you won't be serving the fish just like this with nothing it's usually served with a sauce and this is what we've seen the last time on the blonde video and this is why I did that video before because now you've got all the tools and all the recipes you need to actually make a poached fish and make a beurre blanc and you can serve it with both and this was the intention and you can also serve by the way another sauce which is the hollandaise sauce goes very well with this post vision and that's Kobe own technique the poaching can be used with salman with trout with hake with cod with all kinds of so it's really good to know and it's really versatile but that's it that's the end guys of the first lesson of how to poach fish with the kombu young very simple next week join me again actually it's nothing Chris this weekend on Friday we're gonna see how to make another trout but this time pan fry it and I'm not telling you it's going to be is going to be the surprise I hope you enjoyed the video I hope you've learned something too then as always please comment ask question if you can support me on patreon or tv.com much appreciated as you will soon