Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

… almost starts with a disaster when I arrive at the school without my locker key! This is because, as I’m signed up for Gastronomicom’s wine course, I have classes until 7:30pm and so went by car—and took the wrong set of bike keys. Fortunately I’m there in good time and it’s less than a 10 minute drive so I manage to make the return trip and be ready just in time for class.

Today’s pastry recipes are a chocolate cake and a green apple tartelette. We prepare the pastry for the tartelette then work on the cake. Pro tip: when adding things like chocolate chips to a cake, coat them in flour so they don’t all end up at the bottom. And pipe a line of fat (melted butter for us, but it could be oil) along the middle of the top of the cake for a better final appearance. But school being school, we are also taught how to line a cake tin with the minimum of parchment paper. Remember, some folks (not me!) will be working in restaurants and the need to avoid waste is emphasised.

No picture of the cake (too busy…), but we coated it with a rum and cocoa syrup for better preservation and left it in the fridge overnight. Whilst it was cooking we prepared an apple mousse insert for our tartelette, cutting up the apples finely, and embedding them in an apple flavoured mousse. This was nearly disaster two for me as chef called us over just as we needed to add gelatine to hot apple purée. Fortunately chef rescued things for us. Phew.

In the afternoon we made two risottos, one with tomato water and a creamy one with asparagus. Keeping up the economy theme, the tomato water was made with the pulp and seeds of the tomatoes we used last week for the dried tomatoes and tomato powder (some of which was in turn used to garnish the risotto). I had time to take a picture of the tomato one which I cooked, but was too busy with the tidying up process (I’m responsible to fill all the pepper mills, salt dishes and olive oil squeezy bottles this week) to snap my plating of the asparagus one cooked by my new partner.

It wasn´t supposed to look quite like that but our parmesan tuiles were too stiff to bend. There was some confusion about the weight of parmesan to use; we shared the quantity given between two but O. opposite used that amount for each tuile and theirs turned out OK.

Then to the wine course…

Much of the basics about French wine classifications and wine labels I knew (as well I ought having lived here for nearly 40 years), but there was an interesting presentation of the Languedoc Roussillon region followed by a tasting of two wines. This is the main reason I signed up for this course: to learn the real meanings of the various terms used and to better describe what I’m tasting—and smelling. We have vials of pure scents (cherry, blackcurrant, blackberry, raspberry…) and have to recognise (or not) these in the wines. It was easy to say that our second wine had more aromas so was more intense (intense rather than open on a scale that also has discreet and aromatic) but not to say what the aromas were. So then we have a game where the scent bottles are passed around and we have to say what they are. Here it turns out that A. has worked in the perfume industry so comes top of the class!

As a side note, there were some interesting lessons in team dynamics today. A new week means new pairings. I was really happy with last week’s pairings—R. for pastry and A. for cooking—as we seemed to be teams of equals. And I don’t mean in terms of skill levels but in terms of how we shared out the work—the mise en place, the actual cooking and the setting up, tidying and cleaning of our station. The same is true for me this week in pastry with E. but neither A. nor I have quite the same comfortable partnership this week for cooking. It is true our partners have more experience than we do, but E. has more pastry experience than me and I’ve watched O. opposite who clearly has loads of experience helping his partners learn rather than just doing the cooking because he can.