Cobram Estate Blog - Cooking With Olive Oil
Thought From Gabriel #1
Date: 28/11/2008
To become a very good cook you need to learn to cook new dishes regularly and to practise them three or four times within a month in order to master them. Each time I learn a new dish I become familiar with new ingredients, new seasonings and new techniques.
Some dishes have an incredible influence in your life as a cook. One such dish for me was preparing my first salade Niçoise when I was just nineteen and working as a young chef in the famous Paris seafood restaurant called ‘Prunier’. It was 1974 and the restaurant had been operating for more than one hundred years.
A salade Niçoise is quite a sophisticated salad composed of poached tuna, small green beans, potatoes, young green salad leaves, hard-boiled egg, olives, tomato, red onion and more. What was so special for me about preparing this lovely summer salad was that for the first time in my life I used extra virgin olive oil. In the dressing with red wine vinegar and lemon juice, the oil marries all the ingredients together and it’s a real classic. I thought to myself, ‘Wow! What an ingredient!’
Nowadays, extra virgin olive oil is one of my top ten favourite ingredients. I could easily give up potatoes, but not olive oil! What would you give up for olive oil? Let me know.
Gabriel Gate
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