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 I will be demonstrating how to make fresh pasta from scratch. Once this technique is mastered, there is literally no end to the infinite variations you create upon this simple theme.
Pancetta in its simplest form is salted and cured pork belly that is native to Italian Cuisine and loved throughout the world. Commonly referred to as "Italian Bacon," pancetta's major difference from it's American counterpart is its lack of smoke. Pancetta is commonly flavored with different seasonings and spices, with each region of Italy, (and chef for that matter), having their own preferential spice blend.
This video demonstrates the prep process for making oil poached and pressed potatoes. Fingerling potatoes are first slowly poached in flavored oil until tender, slightly cooled and then pressed with the skin still on. These potatoes can then be fried in olive oil or clarified butter until the exterior is crispy, finished with fresh herbs and sea salt and served as is or as an accompaniment to a meat course.
Here's a quick video that will teach you how to properly clean a kitchen work surface. No, it's not the sexiest food video I've ever released, but if you ever wanted to work in a professional kitchen, this is the technique they would want you to use. Not to mention, this will make your kitchen clean-up at home much more efficient.
Here's a quick video demonstrating how to clean and blanch green beans. After the green beans are prepared, their ready to be finished using a high-heat, secondary cooking technique such as sauteing, frying and roasting.
In a previous Stella Bread Video, I demonstrated how to make a sourdough starter that could later be used to naturally levin any type of bread you desire. In this video, we take that starter and bake our first sourdough loaf, a 70% hydration boule that uses a large percentage of poolish starter for a quick rise, a small amount or whole wheat for a complex flavor, and a cast iron dutch oven to replicate a traditional hearth.
In this video I use an extremely simple method that calls for mixing flour with warm water, allowing it to sit for 48-72 hours until yeast activity begins, and then refresh/feed at set intervals for about five days, or until the starter is strong enough to levin a loaf of bread. If you've been around since the Free Culinary School Podcast days, you'll remember that in our sourdough series I recommended using fruit peels (apples/grapes) to inoculate your water and flour mixture with natural yeast.
This video will demonstrate how to prep tomato concasse, a technique that can be utilized anytime you want to serve just the tomato flesh without the skin (which can be tough and catch in your teeth) and the seeds, which contain a high amount of water content.
This video will demonstrate how to concentrate a stock by reducing and reinforcing its flavors. This concentrated stock can then be used to make "a la minute" sauces, such as a pan reduction sauce. Although this process is demonstrated with chicken stock, it is the exact same method used when working with other meat based stocks such as veal, pork and lamb.
This video will teach you how to make a cauliflower soup base that can be served as is or doctored with different components and garnishes. I will also release a completed dish video that will demonstrate how we plate and serve this soup at Stella.
