Cooking school top tips to use in your own kitchen

The lasting value of any cooking school comes from the tips and techniques you pick up while there. Every recipe you could desire is free; just an internet search away.  Getting tips from experts and specific coaching on how your cooking style could be better, however, is a rare and wonderful thing.

Here's an overview of the top things we took away from our days in the kitchen with David and Bernard.

Knives and knife skills are at the heart of all cooking.  Get better at these, and everything else will improve.  I make the common mistake of extending my index finger along the top of the knife, rather than wrapping it securely around the handle.  It slows me down and limits my control.  I'm working on that.  And on the technique of holding whatever I'm cutting with a half-clenched fist, bent-in fingers anchoring the food and protruding knuckles forming a safety guard.  David spotted these issues early on, and corrected me each time I slipped into my old ways, which helped enormously.

Keep your knife steel ready and sharpen up your edges before each cooking session.  Ours lived in a drawer, only used when things started to feel dull.  Wrong!  This simple habit ensures that your blades are always in top shape.

Dread dicing onions because they make you cry?  It's because you're crunching rather than gliding.  Onions release their eye-watering chemical when you bruise their skin.  Which you'll do if you bang or crunch your knife down on them.  Forget that scene in Julie and Julia.  A smooth, gentle glide through the vegetable with a very sharp knife doesn't bruise anything, thus will keep your eyes clear.

When boning out meat, let gravity do half the work for you.  Hold the bone so the meat is falling down and away, then use your knife in swift, small cuts to assist the natural process of the unsupported flesh falling away from the bone.

Stocks are the flavour backbone of so many dishes, and this course confirmed something I already do.  Keep bags in your freezer for scraps and bones.  I always have one for poultry, but need to start one for fish and another for beef.  When the bag fills up, take it out and make stock.  In general, it's always better to buy your meat on the bone.  Not only is it better value for money, but everything you cut off goes into your stock, which then becomes your sauce.

Use kitchen roll (paper towel) to absorb fats from the top of cooling stocks.  I generally put the stock in the fridge and skim the chilled fats off the top, but this inevitably includes stock in the fat.  Fold the paper into a cartouche to cover the surface of your container, and dab.  The rising fat naturally latches on to the paper, leaving you with clear broth.

All those dire warnings about touching pastry as little as possible can be ignored.  David had us treating our shortcrust like bread, kneading it until the glutens formed and the dough felt stretchy.  The result was the crispest pastry I've ever made.

Of course, it also could have been because of this top tip:  When starting out the pastry by cutting your butter and flour together, take lumps between your fingers and raise your hand into the air as you  work the ingredients into crumbs, letting them fall back into the bowl from a height.  This ads air and makes your crumbs finer.

Keep an old wire sieve around for steaming large veg.  Invert it, squash it into the appropriate shape, pop it in a pan of simmering water and put your veg on top.  Particularly ideal for artichoke.

Keep a mix of good quality sea salt and pepper, rough ground, mixed in a container for constant and easy access.  You almost always use the two together in recipes, so why keep going for two separate containers?

Use only light brown sugar on the top of your creme brûlée.  White will never crystallise properly to form the crunchy top you want, and you'll spend much more time on the attempt, warming the cream.  below that's supposed to be cold and dense.  Dark brown, on the other hand, will burn too easily.

Gingerbread isn't just for Christmas.  Play around with using it as a sweet and spicy counterpoint for savoury dishes.  We learned that it's an excellent accompaniment for foie gras.  More surprising was Bernard's technique for warming goat's cheese to put atop salads.  Place your goat's cheese on a thin slice of gingerbread.  Wrap like a parcel in bric pastry.  (This is a North African sheet pastry similar to phyllo.  In the UK, carried by Waitrose or available for order online.  You can use phyllo as an alternative.)  Fry in a pan to crisp the pastry and melt the cheese.  The gingerbread is hardly noticeable as a separate element, but provides a subtle flavour punch that really kicks this basic up a notch.

Finally ... every cooking programme points this out, but most people ignore it.  Read the recipe first, then do your mise en place.  That is, your set up ... measure your ingredients, put everything out and ready for use.  Even under supervision, in an advanced course, a fair few preparations went to the bin because someone had mis-read a step, or mis-measured an ingredient.  Prepare properly for smooth results.