Learning to Cook, With Fun...The Ritz, Paris.
I need to improve my cooking skills and thought the kitchens of the Ritz, Place Vendôme in Paris, might be be a cool place for that. There, in the basement of the 5-star luxury hotel, you can join a small group of culinary students and aspiring home-chefs for a top-notch cooking course and demo where you'll do all the thing by yourself under the guidance of a renowned chef...Our workshop was about Seafood Risotto with Truffle Shawings...
We had arrived in advance and looked at the salons and hallways of the Ritz, had a glimpse on the indoor bar Vendôme and on the dining room of L'Espadon, the indoor restaurant where Chefs Michel Roth and Arnaud Faye are at the wheel. The Mohamed Al Fayed-owned Ritz will be fully renovated in 2008 and this was an occasion to see it before the changes.
We were guided from the lobby to the mysterious undergrounds of the hotel, where the Ritz's kitchens and their technical facilities stay out of the public eye. Just this labyrinthic walk along passages through the belly of the Ritz was thrilling. The usual access door for these Ecole-Ritz-Escoffier workshops is on the rue Cambon side (a side street), which is sometimes also used as a discreet exit option by famous guests of the Ritz.
Learning how to Chop ShallotsOnce in the kitchen, we each dress ourselves with a cook apron, the chef being of course

the only one with a tall hat here. We first gather with him around the long, massive professional
La Cornue cookstove to listen how the risotto will be prepared. As a cookstove lover, I can't but say a word about these
amazing cookstoves which are the direct heirs of the ones you could find in the 18th-century's Chateaus all over France. The only difference is that these modern La Cornue stoves use gas and electricity instead of wood (but I still stick to my preference for wood-cookstoves).
A few words about David Goulaze, the cook : He is running this workshop in a manner that it is a lot of fun all along. He has a light South-Western-France accent, as he is a
Landes native, and for us Northerners it means sun and good mood. He is the main Chef of the Ritz-Escoffier Cooking School and has taught cooking skills to thousands of French and Foreign students from all backgrounds, using english or japanese translators

when needed. He even runs
special workshops for kids, where the very young learn the pleasure to cook a real dish that they will be proud to duplicate for their parents. That's unjust, we have a double standard here, as you may have noticed on the page I linked to, these kids are allowed to wear tall cook-hats while we aren't... Among our group, some aspiring chefs were really passionated about cooking and the recipe, and men were not the least active.
The Chef underlines the importance of the ingredients and of their individual quality for the final product. The ideal rice is short italian rice, it is the one which gives this particular firmness that you have in a good risotto. The rice must not be washed or rinsed because it could remove the starch which plays an important role here. He explains how to begin the different parts of the dish, and has one of us pour the rice into a thick pot to cook with butter and olive oil and some onions for a while. We cook the mussels in white wine and shalots and then shell them along with the prawns on the nearby work-table, before cutting the prawns into small pieces and cook them lightly with onions and olive oil in a frying pan. The Chef even finds the time to show to a couple of us exactly how to swiftly chop onions, shalots or garlic. It seems always amazing how kitchen professionals can chop thinly and extremely fast with a big razor-like knife and not loose fingers in the process. It's all a matter of controlling the blade with some fingers and making a regular but fast circular motion ending into the onion, like
this page explains it..
This Man Loves his JobThe prawns must be fryied in the pan with olive oil alone, then with the onions which must sweat, and only afterthen is the round rice added, along with chicken stock and salt, and the whole thing is stirred from time to time, as additional olive oil, white wine and chicken stock are being added. The point is to keep tasting the rice until it's nearly al dente, stopping at underdone because it will nonetheless still evolve by itself a few minutes untill you serve it in the plates. These workshops are useful in the sense that you really understand what cuisine is about : efficiency, timing and synchronisation. Cooks always seem to be in a state of emergency and run in the kitchens of the best restaurants and you begin to understand why, especially that in the real world, maybe 2 kitchen staff would have done what our whole group painstakingly did.
Keeping the Chicken Stock SimmeringWhen the rice

has absorbed the right volume of chicken stock and the white wine addings, that's the time to add the Parmesan cheese and the liquid cream. Then comes an important step, the preparation of the plate : the dish must be visually attractive and all good restaurants (and not-good ones too) are known to make sure that there is no visual mistake in the final display, because the first glance on the arriving plate can do a lot in the client's mind and palate. The rice is molded in each plate before receiving the seafood in the center, with basil at the top to add a green note. Well cooked, the rice has a creamy touch that must be almost visual. The truffle shawings were actually replaced by
truffle butter, which was added during the preparation of the rice. The risotto must be served rapidly, as it is, like pasta, a first-course dish. To help keep it warm, serve it on warm plates. The whole time to cook the risotto is a bit more than 20 minutes, considering that several tasks can be done at the same time (but the rice must be stirred almost all the time).
Chefs David Goulaze and Kanako Looking at UsThis mid-day course lasts only one hour and a half, but we spend a sizeable part of this time to enjoy what we've cooked, and David and Kanako, after checking that everything is properly served including the wine, sit down with us to eat this first try. Here also, lots of fun. But we can be serious at times : David Goulaze has also been working on the diet and obesity issues concerning children and teenagers (a growing problem in France also) and he stresses that respecting the rhythms of meals is essential, which means not eating all day long and taking the time to relax and eat together, which split families and modern-life schedules don't always encourage. There are of course other rules, like not mix certain foods and choose healthy, simple, quality foods and ingredients.
Let's Eat...and Drink...As you see, we may eat in the kitchen like the staff, but this the Ritz, and we are treated with table linen, silver ware, fine Limoges porcelain and tutti quanti.
The wine, now. I'll trust David Goulaze and the Ritz : This Sancerre Paul Prieur 2006 seems to be a perfect match for the risotto with seafood. The creamy rice finds a good balance in this aromatic and fresh Sauvignon Blanc. There are quite a number of white wines that could also match this risotto with seafood, like a Cheverny or a Valencay white. Both are Loire white wines, and blends of Chardonnay/Sauvignon, plus they are more affordable that a Sancerre (the retail price for this Paul Prieur 2006 is 15 Euro in France). A quincy, which is a Sauvignon from the Loire would also be good here. Anyway, each time you cook a risotto, the wine choice will also depend of what comes with the rice, as it can be as diverse as artichoke, asparagus, mushrooms or meat, and some reds can do a better job in some cases.<
Ecole Ritz Escoffier15 Place Vendôme75001 ParisMetro Concorde/Tuileries (line 1)Phone +33 (0)1 43 16 30 50Workshops ListEcole Ritz Escoffier Website
It would be great to learn cooking by professional chefs.
I've heard of that There is a Ritz workshop in Aoyama, Tokyo. A woman I know is a student of Ritz for years. She said that she's taken a lesson in Paris once or twice.
Posted by: hikalu | December 17, 2007 at 04:37 AM