Wok, bread, and cherry tarts

I've missed posting a few things, so I'll have to catch you up. Last week, I assisted a cooking class for a teacher at the New School of Cooking who I've never worked with before. It turned out to be great. He was teaching a class on how to use a wok. I've never really cooked with a wok before and I learned a lot.

First, everything should be cut to a similar size so it cooks in a similar amount of time. This even includes not chopping the garlic up into microscopic peices (cus they'll burn).

Second, there is a specific order in which you add ingredients.

Fat (high burning...like peanut oil or lard)
Aromatics (garlic, onions, lemongrass, etc)
Protein (meat, fish, or tofu)
Vegetables
flavorings (soy sauce, fish sauce, sesame oil...)

The teacher also happens to belong to the family that owns the Bangkok Market, so part of the class was that everyone got to take home a wok. He had one left over for me. I didn't have any Asian ingredients at home (must fix this seeing as I live in Korea town) so I decided to try the method with my own ingredients.

I couldn't decide if pancetta was a "fat" or the "protein" or the "flavoring." I finally put it in as fat.

You should heat the wok until it is smoking, but only white smoke. As Jet said, "Black smoke means start over."



Next I added some aromatics (leeks), and then my vegatable (since my protein and fat were one in the same). These are sugar snap peas cut diagonally as we learned in the class.

Last, I put in my flavoring...uh, salt and pepper.

I ate this mixture on top of a bowl of farro. It was delicious. But you really can't go wrong with pancetta.


Later in the week, I had some left over pizza dough that needed either to be frozen or cooked. Since I was too lazy to wrap the little balls for the freezer, I combined them all into one and made focaccia. It really was amazing. The outside was super crusty, the inside super chewy.

And check out those air bubbles!

Last night I decided my cherries were getting a bit sad for eating fresh and I baked them in tarts. I was imagining a corn-meal sort of crust so I added some semolina to my flour when I made the crust. I don't recommend it. I think for the grany cornmeal crust you need more of a short-bread style crust, which you need a mold for. I had to add too much water to hold the dough together, so it came out a bit cracker-like. However, make these with my recipe from a few weeks back (blackberry pie) and they would be heavenly. The cherries were really sweet and tasty with just a little sugar mixed in.