April 2010

posted by AnnieP – Keeper Collection Team

Title Translation: Making fancy French cooking techniques less scary.

Have you ever been skimming through recipes, trying to find something to “inspire” you to tie on the apron, roll up your sleeves, and start creating a world of mess in the kitchen?  You find something mouthwatering, and just as you’re approaching your “I got this…Here we go!” moment, you read the recipe a little more closely and find some fancy French technique that you’ve never even heard of, let alone attempted, which completely deflates you of any kitchen confidence you may have had.  As if those snooty chefs behind that recipe are sticking their noses up at you, smirking at the fact you even entertained the idea of doing their recipes justice.  Well Chef David Bull (who does not fall into the “snooty chef” category), is a master at making these fancy techniques approachable, one term at a time.  Training, shcmaining!  You should be able to open a cookbook (or login to a cookbook, in Chef Bull’s case) and cook whatever you want, whenever you want, without a culinary degree. 

In this particular case, we’re talking about the term concassé.  You’ll see it in numerous recipes referring to tomatoes primarily.  The direct French translation is “to crush”, but as a culinary technique, it’s a little more detailed than that.  Some may say that it adds an element of precision and sophistication to a recipe, but the bottom line, according to Chef Bull, is that it’s a fancy way of saying “blanched, peeled, seeded, then diced.” Well now that’s not so hard – I can do that in my sleep!  Well, maybe that’s a stretch, but still – very doable.  I may not execute it with the same grace and accuracy as someone with a degree under their belt, but by gosh I’ll get it done! (Re-inflate the confidence here.)   In this video, Chef Bull demonstrates his technique for a tomato concassé, even offering a “mess free” way to seed your tomatoes.