Friday, January 22, 2010

Sydney Seafood School

Our cooking class in Singapore centered around Malaysian cooking and when we arrived in Sydney we signed up for the Sydney Seafood School's Singapore Chili Crab Class. To be honest it was the most interesting class offered during our time in Sydney and after eating the chili crabs in Singapore we were excited to find out how we could make it for ourselves. We arrived at the Sydney Fish Market too late in the day to enjoy the little shops selling fresh seafood and the much talked about fish & chips. We weren't too disappointed because we know in our hearts we will be return to Sydney soon, we simply fell in love with this city and can seriously see ourselves spending a lot of time here. Out of all our cooking courses the Sydney Seafood School was by far the most professionally organized and structured. At the end of the course we were all given a seafood grocery bag that is insulated so you can carry home from the store beer, seafood, meat and cold items. The course started with an introduction to the many varieties of craps.We learned about the difference tastes and textures between the varieties, how to humanely kill crabs, and how to clean and handle crabs and numerous different kinds of seafood.The class taught us two kinds of crab recipes and introduced us to the virtues of an electric wok.With all good seafood recipes simplicity is key. And our instructor quickly whipped through the crab recipes and soon it was our turn. We moved into another room where cooking stations were set up and we were given our own recipe books and off we were! We were using mud crabs and shared the station with two girls from Sydney. After preparing our crab dishes we moved to a dining area where we ate with our cooking partners. One of the girls had just returned from a trip to LA and we had a very interesting conversation about American coffee. Coming from the NW we quickly had to correct her on the Australian concept of "coffee" which is all espresso in Sydney. If you want a cup of coffee as we know it in the USA it's called a long pull, as in a long pulled espresso. What you do get is a proper 4.5 ounces of coffee, not this bogus 16-ounce Venti/Grande crap, but a properly pulled coffee. They complained American drip coffee was crap, but the concept of drip coffee is simply not available in Sydney, so to each is own. We enjoyed the conversation and the delicious crab meal, served traditionally with rice, something we hadn't had in a while and gobbled up quickly.We still get emails from the Sydney Seafood School making us yearn to go back and take more classes.

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