Welcome to Stella Culinary's How to Cook Video Index. To get started, select one of the video categories from above, or browse by most recent below.
To get the most from these videos, it is highly recommended you listen to the Stella Culinary School Podcast, which many of these videos are produced to supplement. If you have any questions while working your way through the Stella Culinary content, you can Ask Chef Jacob or post it to our friendly community forum.
In this video, you will learn a couple different techniques for seeding, slicing and dicing an English Cucumber.
In this video, learn how to slice and dice celery.
Blanching and peeling fava beans is a spring "right of passage" for many cooks. Labor intensive and somewhat time consuming, when prepped properly you're rewarded with meaty little green morsels that are well worth the work.
Blanching can mean a few different things depending on who’s using the word and what application you’re talking about. In the most basic use of the term, blanching refers to very briefly par cooking an item for later use, usually using boiling water or hot fat as a cooking medium.
Blanched garlic is a great way to remove the harsh, bitter bite of raw garlic while still keeping the floral, garlic aroma and flavor. In Thomas Keller's The French Laundry Cookbook, his technique calls for the use of milk instead of water. I've found that for most purposes, water can achieve fairly comparable results and it's more cost effective.
Clarified butter, (aka drawn butter), is whole, unsalted butter that is melted down and allowed to separate so that the milk solids can be removed. This clarification process raises the smoke point and makes it great for cooking.
The easiest way to clarify butter is over a water bath or double boiler. This allows you to gently heat the butter to the boiling point (212°F/100°C at sea level). What happens next is the water bubbles up out of the butter and evaporates, and the whey proteins form a "foam" on top.
This video will demonstrate the classic approach to dicing an onion.
In this video, you'll learn how to quickly and efficiently break down a beef tenderloin, resulting in the fabrication of beef filets. These filets are commonly referred to as "Filet Mignon," but technically speaking, the "Mingnon" only comes from the bottom tail portion and is normally cut 1-2" thick. When fabricating larger steaks, "filet of beef" is the more appropriate term. For more information about the beef tenderloin itself, please see below.
This video will take you through the process of making a roasted chicken stock as discussed in SCS 3| Stocks Part 2.
In SCS 2| Stocks Part 1, we went through the science and technique of making a veal stock. This video will take you through the step by step process of how to make a classic, roasted veal stock. If you're like most people and don't have a wood-fire oven, worry not. This technique can easily be accomplished with any oven that can reach 500°F/260°C.
