Close your eyes for a moment and imagine the glorious smells that fill your home when you cook with aromatics. Don’t you wish you could capture that aroma in a concentrated form? En papillote (in parchment paper) cooking is a technique not often used by home cooks, but it is one of the easiest ways to create deep, complex flavor and achieve this blast of smell-good. This method of cooking simultaneously steams and roasts the contents within a convenient parchment paper pouch, trapping most of the magnificent aroma that normally escapes and disperses into the air as it wafts through your home. By the time it’s done cooking, that aroma is locked, loaded, and waiting for you to slice the pouch open and breathe it all in with a big smile on your face. Hungry yet? No? Check out this picture of the finished product...

Yep, that’s what I thought. Let’s get started then!

This is the first of a series of knife skills basics blog posts, so we’ll talk about how to hold a knife, the most common chopping techniques, and how to cut a carrot/leek/fennel bulb (all are used in the en papillote recipe). There is also a how-to video for the creation of a parchment paper pouch for the en papillote fish recipe that was literally my first recipe invention back in college. In other words, there is a ton of great information, there are several informational videos, some mouth-watering pictures, and a dynamite recipe to cap it all off. It keeps getting more exciting by the moment, doesn’t it?

After teaching you how to sharpen your knives for maximum effectiveness in my previous post, it seemed like the obvious natural progression would be to show you the best ways to hold a knife (and how not to hold a knife) so that you don’t cut yourself with that razor-sharp knife, as well as a couple of the more common chopping techniques that you’ll regularly utilize when wielding a chef’s knife. The chef’s knife can be used for about 95% of all tasks requiring a knife in the kitchen, so it’s important that you feel comfortable with it in your hand and know exactly what you’re doing with it. The following video discusses how to handle a knife and a couple techniques for chopping that will be of great use to you.

Once you’ve got the grip and method down, we can start cutting up vegetables for our en papillote recipe. The most important thing to remember when chopping is that you want to keep all your fingers intact...definitely a priority. Some other things to remember include:

1. Always work on a stable surface. A cutting board with a wet paper towel underneath it is a solid         option and what I’d recommend.

2. You also want to work on a surface that is large enough so that you don’t feel like you’re crowding it. If you start trying to maneuver around a pile of vegetables, the likelihood of slipping and cutting yourself is increased significantly.

3. Always try to work with flat surfaces when chopping anything. That means the cutting board underneath, but also the items you are chopping as well. A carrot is round, but you’ll see in the video that the first thing I did was give myself a flat surface to work with on the carrot itself.

4. Always be aware of where your fingers (and especially your thumb) are in relation to the blade. Use your knuckles to guide the blade, never lifting your blade above your knuckles...if you do that, there is no longer any guiding going on and you are in danger of cutting yourself.

5. Go at a steady, comfortable pace when you chop. Your cuts will be more consistent, meaning your cooking will be more consistent (same size, same cook time). The main thing again is that you lower your risk of cutting yourself.

6. Use a sharp knife...it’s much safer than a dull one because it is much less likely to deflect off of whatever it is you’re chopping, directly into the vicinity of your fingers/hands/rest of your body.

On to the fun part! Your knife is sharp, cutting board is clean and stabilized, and you’re armed with the knowledge of how to hold a knife properly...and now it’s time to cut up some vegetables for the en papillote recipe. Today we’ll cover carrots, fennel bulb, and leeks since those are the vegetables we’re using in our fish en papillote recipe.

Piece of cake, right? Now all you do is toss the julienned vegetables with a couple tablespoons of olive oil, a little kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, and some ground coriander. Make sure to mix them up well so that they’re coated and the spices are evenly distributed. When the pouch cooks, the olive oil, lemon juice, salt/pepper, and coriander will create a sauce in the bottom of your parchment paper and, trust me, you’ll want to sop all of that up with the fish and veggies for maximum flavor.

Sorry, thinking about all that made me hungry and I got ahead of myself. Before you can sop up any of this delightful sauce, you will need to assemble the en papillote cooking vessel, and I’ll show you how to do that in this video:

Basically all you do is take an 18 inch long piece of parchment paper, fold it in half, and cut the half into a half-heart. When you unfold it, you place the veggies, fish, and lemons on one side of the heart-shaped parchment and start folding over from the top of the heart. Once you get almost to the bottom, you twist the bottom to enclose the fish/vegetables and, depending on the freshness of your ingredients, can last up to a couple days in your fridge. After it’s all wrapped up, it’s just waiting for you to toss it in the oven for 16-18 minutes at 350 degrees and eat it.

Once it is fully cooked, you slice open the top of the parchment paper package and....oh my gawd....take a whiff of that. Adding to the wonderfulness of it all is the fact that you can eat it straight out of the pouch for a no-mess cleanup. You can add rice or cous cous (which will also help with the aforementioned sopping up of the sauce in the bottom of the pouch) or stick with what you’ve got. I also add an extra squeeze of lemon at the end, just because I love that flavor with this combination of ingredients.

It’s pretty easy to recognize why this was one of my go-to meals in college. Sure beats packaged ramen noodles (ugh). It’s healthy, convenient, economical, simple, and it tastes and smells phenomenal. You can create what is really a gourmet dinner for a tiny price and with only a few ingredients. It is sure to impress your significant other and your guests, and if you remove the fish/vegetables from the pouch and serve on a plate with rice or cous cous, nobody will have to know how easy it really was...you can tell them you slaved over a hot stove all day to create this masterpiece and they’ll probably believe you!

The fish en papillote recipe can be found on the recipe page of this site (click this). This recipe can also easily be printed by clicking on any of the pictures above or by clicking this hyperlink (will open a PDF version of the recipe).