Joining a CSA or shopping at the farmers markets will get you great, fresh produce from your local farmers, but how do you make the most out of these ingredients?  Building your cooking techniques can help transform your CSA bounty into beautiful and creative dishes.  To help you enhance your culinary skills, we’ve teamed up with Chef Will Griffin of I8NY to curate this series of cooking classes.
*All our classes are capped at 10 students to ensure a hands-on experience and interaction with the instructor*

Pictures from our previous classes can be found at our flickr page

March 26th, 2012, 3pm or 7pm
Fish Butchery Essentials
This class is sold out!  Please check back for added classes in the near future.

Dive into the wonderful world of fish butchery in this interactive class.  The skills you’ll learn will allow you to buy whole fish from the market instead of pre-cut fillets and portions.  Cooking with whole fish is not only fresher and better tasting, but is also more sustainable.

Students will have the opportunity to learn and practice fish butchery on high-quality fish that we will provide from Pierless Fish, a Brooklyn based fish provider which many of the top NYC restaurants source from.  Participants will be able to bring home their cut fish fillets to show off to friends.

We will be butchering round fish from start to finish.  These serve as a useful template for most of the fish found at markets.
Each student will have 2 fish to practice with; this is a hands on class.  This class will entail:
- Gutting, cleaning, and de-scaling
- Filleting
- Removing the skin
- Removing bones and forming appropriate portions

We will also discuss how to select fish at the market, cooking techniques, brining, utilizing heads and skeletons for stock, and more.  The instructor will demonstrate how to butcher flat fish, as well.

About our instructor: Will Griffin is a cook who has worked at numerous restaurants in New York, most recently at Lincoln Ristorante for chef Jonathan Benno.  Will is one of our rotating chefs at our Supper Clubs and is the co-founder of I8NY, a brooklyn-based sandwich and catering company with a home at the Brooklyn Flea and Smorgasburg.  He has worked on a pig farm in the southwest of France and studies wine in his spare time. He is originally from Seattle, Washington and is committed to the goal of making local, seasonal food a reality for New Yorkers.

Past Classes:
February 27th, 2012, 3pm or 7pm
Knife Skills: Theory and Practice
7pm class sold out!

The knife is your most important tool in the kitchen.  Getting comfortable using your knives will make you a faster and more efficient cook, have your food look and taste better, and will make cooking at home more fun!

These are tips and skills that professional cooks learn in restaurant kitchen basements around the world and here is your chance to obtain these skills in a relaxed environment.  If time allows, we will cover topics such as knife maintenance, safety, honing, and sharpening, as well as discuss the different types of knives and their uses.  Students are welcome to bring their own knives for discussion.

In this hands-on class, we will explore the knife techniques that form the basis of modern cooking.  These are the cuts that inevitably come up in the preparation of a meal:
- Peeling and dicing onions, shallots, and garlic
- Working with oblongs and cylinders: potatoes, carrots, etc.
- Dealing with unusual fruits and vegetables
- How to approach herbs