Being Kurt with chickens
Well having got that off my chest, so to speak, let's get around to talking about chicken because in Poland you have to talk about chicken. Since I have been here, the quality of chickens has not improved. The Polish chickens are good in taste, but the real problem begins in the chicken slaughter houses where feathers are removed in water that is much too hot, so that the chicken starts to already get cooked from the outside. Then you take it home, and into the fridge it goes. What happens then is that you have a chicken which is already slightly cooked on the outside, so when you're getting down to finishing the job, you end up with a chicken that tastes like rubber. So, please, look carefully when you buy that uncooked chicken to check it that it has not already been cooked before you were introduced to it.
The cleaning of the chicken is also not so nice a task, but only when you buy a whole one. It is important to start this bit of surgery in the right way. You usually have the neck still on with the Polish chicken, so my professional advice is to slit up this chicken neck on the back side so that you can end up with a nice roast chicken and not one where your nice stuffed chicken begins to have all the stuffing falling out the moment you start to roast it.
What about the eggs, since everything starts there?
Yes it is not unknown that they have some problems with salmonella here, but in my experience the incidences are declining. Old ways in the Polish kitchen die hard though because of past experience. It means that the Polish cook often likes to precook the eggs in hot water for a few seconds to kill all the bacteria. But I am against this method. I learned through experience that this procedure closes all the pores in the shells of the eggs, which then means that things go on the outside of the eggs which should go on inside there, so you get nowhere. The best thing is to get your eggs from farmers where you know how they are keeping the hens. That's not all about eggs, which are a very interesting subject in my opinion.
Here is a question. Why are there differences in the colours of eggshells? Well, I am going to share my secret with you. Not many people know it, so far. The colour of the egg is decided like this: a chicken with a white ear will give you white eggs and chicken with a red ear gives you brown eggs. Now you know!
So, I have never had an unhappy customer when I am cooking chickens and eggs, but here at the academy I have opened to teach cooking, I try to show all my students that a big part of a good meal is that it is really good-looking too. That is what gets the lips smacking, as we say. I teach my students to use great imagination in how they decorate their plates, so there is creativity. But even with things which seem simple, there is a need for skill and understanding. So, I also show how to cut a chicken in different parts from the whole roasted chicken down to the wings, how to do it properly, how to debone a chicken - what I call making a chicken striptease - so that at the end of the performance you have only the bones left. Which of course you never, ever throw away so you can make soup from them or even a sauce by roasting them in the oven and then adding the vegetables. But it's easier to use one chicken to make chicken soup - either a cream soup or just an bouillon with some vegetables in it.
You see my friends, chickens can be really exciting!
Kurt Scheller, as you may have guessed, is a Swiss-born chef who was until recently in command of the kitchens at Warsaw's Sheraton. He's clattered the pans around the world, from Kuwait to Jamaica to Germany. He recently opened his own gastronomic academy at ul. Piękna 48, tel. 626 8092.
