Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

Today we turned the baguette dough from yesterday into a real product! And a product I just enjoyed eating for dinner, too! We each shaped two baguettes and learnt how to place these onto the “carpets” used by boulangers. Then, after a second proving, how to move them from the carpets onto trays ready for baking—and, of course, how to slash them:

And after half-an-hour or so…

Well, that was more than half-an-hour later as we also advanced our brioche making (and also wiped, washed, acrubbed, soaped, brushed, rinsed and squeegeed…).

We divided our brioche dough into a 250g piece which became a boule shape with pralines, a 200g piece in an 18cm disk and three 50g pieces in foil cups. No pictures of these, but working with this buttery dough was hard. And I learnt how you really do that snazzy rolling technique with a ball of dough under a cupped hand: you need to push your fingers down much harder than I’ve been doing in the past. The prepared dough is being left in a proving oven overnight set initially to fridge temperature but then to prove them to be ready for us to bake them tomorrow.

The task for the afternoon was to prepare a Tarte au confit d’oignon et tapenade, légumes croquants.

I learnt how to ¨fraiser” dough to better incorporate butter (push small chunks up the bench with the heel of your hand), how to shape, bake and finish a tart base and had a first go at plate decorating…

Returning to the residence was then an adventure as A. had been lent a bike so I offered to show her the mud free route home. Unfortunately, the first 1km or so is not car free and A.’s bike was stuck in top gear. Rush hour drivers were not best pleased to be in turn stuck behind slow cyclists. Impatience was shown and safe passing distances were not maintained. Life was better once on the cycle lane and A. seems to be up to go by bike tomorrow morning, especially as she now has a helmet. We also found a place that can fix bikes but haven´t yet worked out the logistics of getting hers to the shop whilst we are at the school. A Saturday outing is probably needed. A suivre…