This is a sponsored post, all thoughts and opinions are my own
Veal, some people will flat out refuse to cook with it or eat it. As gruesome as it sounds, and most likely is, veal is a part of the culinary world. And it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
Veal is typically a male baby calf of a dairy cow, it’s typically an expensive cut of meat. There are two types of veal meat, grass fed or milk fed. Milk fed is typically lighter in color and more expensive than grass fed veal.
The folks at the Beef Check Off are working together with the Culinary institute of America to develop new veal recipes that will win the hearts and minds of the new “on-the-go” Millennials.
I was lucky enough to attend a Veal Workshop at ChefConnect: Baltimore, yes Veal workshops exist and they are as fun as you’d think.
Chef Dan D’Angelo from the Philadelphia Art Institute led the workshop and walked us through several new veal dishes. My nickname for him is Chef “Bottom Line”, he had all these great tips for the chefs in attendance for making the dishes tasty and fiscally profitable.
It was really insightful to hear about the financial side of dish development. For instance, he highlighted how you can turn one egg roll into four, consequently increasing the appearance of how much food the diner is getting.
He also gave great quotes like, “chefs do not make mistakes they make creations” and “flour acts like a jacket, keeping moisture in for meat.”
The whole workshop itself was really fun and eye opening. The first dish he showed us how to prepare was a veal egg roll, he then followed that up with a VLT, and he finished with a veal slider. Here were some useful professional chef tips that he offered:
- Cook Veal, medium rare, you don’t want to overcook it.
- Sesame oil and olive oils are finishing oils and should not be used in the actual cooking process, but rather at the end of the cooking process to season the dish.
- When you’re making a sandwich cut the vegetables thin, and cut all the sandwich components in such a fashion that they fit inside of the bread, you don’t want anything hanging outside of the bread.
- And when you are making a ground beef patty or in this case it was veal, don’t overwork your meat, it’ll get tough.
