You know how much I love popping over to Bratislava. I always try to have a legitimate reason to go: IKEA usually.
I’m about to tell you a secret:
Shhhh….
I go to Bratislava for the food.
More precisely, the food at the Kempinski River Park Hotel.
You’re probably tired of hearing me go on about the wonderful food I always find there, whether it’s a couple of delectable tapas in the Arte Bar and Tapas, an informal but classy noshing spot…
or the River Bank Café, where the food is just a little bit more elegant.
The world-class food is served by world-class waiters. One in particular, Jakub, I think must have started his career out of middle school, he looks so young. But his knowledge of wines and his ability to talk with animation about what I am about to be served is infectious and only adds to the pleasure I always get eating in the restaurant.
Jakub, btw, is the one who introduced me to the special Slovak distillates available very few places other than the Kempinski River Park Hotel.
One of my recent visits occurred after I had been trying to cook a new Thai Basil Chicken recipe. It calls for hot Thai basil (hot as in ‘spicy’). I don’t imagine there are that many places in the world – outside Thailand – where one can easily find fresh hot Thai basil (New York? L.A.? London?)
Jakub was telling me about the secret garden the hotel maintains up on the first floor (second floor in “U.S.-speak”) for spices and herbs. I was bemoaning my frustration about not being able to find spicy Thai basil.
His face lit up and he said, “Well, Mrs. Zumberge, it just so happens that my mother lives in Thailand and she will visit me soon. I will ask her to bring some spicy Thai basil seeds for you.”
And she did.
I think they kind of like me there because they know how much I love food. One look at me…. well….let’s not go there.
Anyway, Executive Chef Björn Juhnke has taken to stopping by my table, once we’d been introduced during that incredible dinner Jakub served.
During one of those chats, I mustered up the courage to ask the Chef if he would, by any chance, consider giving a cooking class to my friend Annabel and me sometime. He was very positive and we talked about getting in touch to make it happen.
It happened this past weekend.
Annabel flew over from London and we met at the hotel on Saturday.
After a leisurely lunch in Arte Bar & Tapas, with a little champagne, we met with Chef Junke for a brief discussion on the agenda for Sunday, then onto more outstanding dining in River Bank Café. Jakub served us wonderful courses including an onion velouté (fancy cream of soup), pirohy with Bryndza cheese, bacon, crispy onion and crème frèche; fresh smoked sturgeon (they have a local supplier of fresh fish they scoop up in nets), saddle of rabbit; and a foot-long chocolate éclair (!).
Sunday at 12:30, we met Chef Juhnke at the front desk and began our journey through food heaven. He took us immediately through a door to ‘back of house’ and into a staff-only elevator down to The Kitchens.
I’m going to pause in the retelling of our cooking class to describe a little about this particular floor in the hotel:
I asked Chef what he thought of the cooking facilities in the hotel.
He told me that Bratislava’s Kempinski is a rare breed of hotel where the kitchen and catering facilities are actually purpose-built rather than slotted into a pre-existing building.
In fact, Chef told us, Kempinski’s original business philosophy was to start first with excellent wine and food. Then build a hotel to accommodate the dining guests.
Kempinski started in Berlin and I quote from the hotel’s website:
The Kempinski family was already successfully active in the wine trade from 1862. In 1872 it extended its company to Berlin, where Berthold Kempinski opened a wine-merchant’s business under his name in the Friedrichstrasse. This proved to have excellent prospects for the future, and became the parent firm of the group, which ultimately made the name Kempinski world-famous. Very soon it was possible to extend the Berlin business by adding a restaurant with several rooms. The ambitious entrepreneur Kempinski continued to pursue his plans for expansion with determination. In 1889 he opened a restaurant in the Leipziger Strasse which was the biggest in the whole of Berlin...
The philosophy to begin with food and build out from there is evident in the deliberate layout of the hotel’s vast kitchens. Chef Juhnke is proud enough to give us a tour of it all.
Now we move back to the lesson at hand.
First – to Housekeeping to don our chef’s whites.
See those buttons on the shirts? You have to punch each one of the 12 buttons into the correct slots, then button yourself up, before putting on the ankle-length white apron.
(We are out of focus in the photo but very focused on the tasks at hand)
As Chef leads us through the white-tiled walls to the kitchen we’ll use today, we see that Jakub has been here: bottles of wine and glasses are on the pass counter; champagne to begin; a tasty, dry Slovak Riesling for the slice-, dice- and whisk-work; a nicely aged Slovak pinot noir for when we sit down to dine on our results.
First up: slicing mushrooms: king, Portobello, shitake, chanterelles. For the chanterelles, we gently scrape the top layer off the stems to make them look pretty. For the shitake, we take the stems off.
Then comes the consommé: two kinds, one with two ways of doing it.
Tomato consommé begins with tomatoes, fresh basil, garlic, shallots a little salt and pepper. It all goes into a blender. The puree goes into a big square of cheesecloth that hangs above a sieved bowl in the fridge overnight.
That’s the long way.
We also do the short way: All of the above in a puree. Then you add 6 whisked egg whites and put it all in a pot to a slow boil.
Make sure you keep a flat-bottomed spoon in the pot. Every once in a while, you need it to gently scrape the bottom for any egg whites that might stick. Be careful not to disturb the growing egg ‘raft’ or ‘cake’ that’s forming on top of the liquid. If it breaks, you’re screwed.
What Chef is showing us is pure alchemy, as far as I’m concerned. The egg whites act as a kind of magnet to all the ‘bits’ floating around in the liquid. They cling to the cake as the pot continues on a slow boil.
When you gently take a spoonful of the liquid under the 'raft', you can see how it becomes clearer and clearer. Once the liquid is totally clear, g e n t l y ladle it into a sieve covered with cheesecloth and into a clean bowl.
This concentrated elixir can then be reduced by half at a slow boil.
Chef also demonstrates a chicken consommé, using the same method, adding a base of chicken stock and ice cubes for the raw ingredients (chicken bits no bones, finely diced celeriac, onion, celery, carrot, leek).
Once the elixir has been separated from the dross and reduced, it’s a pale golden color with a concentrated flavor that makes a wonderful first course.
Next up:
sauces Hollandaise and Béarnaise.
Clarify the butter – it’s so much easier with a chinois that Annabel and I each bought our own chinois the very next day!
If you don’t work out regularly, especially for upper arm strength, you will fail at whisking the egg yolks (remember all those egg whites we used for the consommés?)
You must whisk fast and furiously making figure eights, not just ‘round and ‘round.
Then you have to whisk furiously to combine the butter into the frothy yolks to make an emulsion. Too slow and it’ll split.
Chef demonstrated how to sauté those shrooms
How to sauté a rib-eye steak to perfection and turn that tomato consommé into a white velouté of tomato (serve it with basil croutons – whoa).
Then we get to eat it all.
I will try not to gush too much about what an experience this afternoon was for Annabel and me.
It is very clear that Chef Juhnke really loves what he does.
It shows in his cooking.
It shows in the way he talks about cooking.
He is a great teacher.
Go eat his food.
You are also invited, btw, to Chata Diviak for my humble attempts at what I learned from the Chef.