Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

Looking around as we prepped our station for pastry this morning I realised my partner as chef-of-the-week was absent, presumably ill as others were (and have been; luckily I’m surviving although sometimes I wonder how…). Fortunately chef does half of the joint mise-en-place, obviously watching what I’m doing so he can complement my preparations.

The first task is to prepare a crème anglaise so: boil milk with vanilla and pour on to egg yolks whisked with sugar. Have I mentioned you should put some of the sugar in the milk to stop it burning at the bottom as it boils? Anyway, this goes OK. Then we have to prepare the mise-en-place for a cocoa sablé so we beat together butter, icing sugar, flour, chocolate powder and a touch of salt (all provided for me by chef…). Mine seems to take ages but it finally comes together and I roll it into an 18cm circle, score it at 3cm intervals and put it in the oven to bake. Actually, it had to go in the blast chiller for 3 minutes before the scoring during which time I prepared four piping cornets…

… with which whilst the sablé was baking and for 20 minutes more we had to practice piping chocolate decorations on to plates and parchment paper onto which we were also to pipe text. In addition to a seasonal “Happy Easter” I piped “This is hard”! Somewhat to my surprise, I found I could remember my cursive script.

Then we had a demonstration of how to pipe the fondant mix into moulds and prepare the plate for service whilst the fondant is in the oven. Eight minutes to decorate the plate, pour the crème anglaise, prepare and add a bar of cocoa sablé, then plate the fondant. Remember, customers, like chef, won´t wait and everyone knows a fondant must ooze.

Lacking a partner I prepped well, making sure the compound coating for the decoration was at the right temperature and that I had all to hand before piping and baking the fondant mix. All went to time, and whilst my decoration is a little rustic, it’s better than anything I produced in practice and chef was pleased with both my crème and the fondant.

In the afternoon we prepare a recipe using a bunch of ingredients—morilles, asparagus and wild garlic—that are all in season together just now: morilles farcie, asperge blanche, velouté d’ail d’ours. K. and I work well as a team to prepare the prawn-based stuffing for the morilles then she does the stuffing whilst I prepare a stock as the base for the velouté. When I actually prepare the velouté chef seems a little annoyed that I still have scales on the bench; we have to reduce liquids to 50ml and 100ml amounts and I plan to weigh things as I do at home. Chef, though, expects me to know when I have 100ml left in the pan. Towards then end K. says, conspiratorially, that she’s putting the scales away in case chef gets annoyed but will bring them back if needed. By then, though, I’m reducing the velouté after cream has been added so we’re looking for texture rather than volumes. Fortunately, chef seems to approve of the result both initially and after we’ve whizzed in the wild garlic.

K. meanwhile has prepared a ballotine with the remaining stuffing and, as I’ve been on an errand sieving chicken stock in preparation for tomorrow, I need to ask for a private explanation of how to wrap and unwrap these. This leads into an extended conversation with chef about learning skills, about learning from people who are competent and about managing a kitchen as a team, expecting and encouraging ideas from even junior members who may have learnt things working elsewhere. Much of what he says is equally applicable to my pre-retirement role…

Anyway, this time I do rather better at emulating chef’s plating:

And so to the wine course where we cover champagne. We go through the traditional production process—with a second, in-bottle, fermentation—but also learn of the ancestral method where a single fermentation is stopped half way through and then allowed to complete in the bottle.

So to the tasting for which we have three champagnes; some crémants were also supposed to feature but didn’t arrive.

I’m not keen on the first; it is light and initially acceptable but there’s an unpleasant aftertaste. And it would be overpriced in any case. The second is much more acceptable but, unfortunately, what was supposed to be the third and best, a rosé brut nature (i.e. no added sugar) is slightly corked. But we learn something anyway… I score 8.5/12 in the ¨name the aroma game” with sommelier throwing in some random aromas and Andie meeting her match as someone who followed the course in January joins us to take notes on behalf of another colleague absent ill.

Meanwhile it has started to rain. Heavily. This doesn´t bode well for a first yoga class tomorrow (I cried off on Tuesday already) but, fortunately, I’d removed the battery from my bike this morning so it’s just completing a charge now, although I have doubts as to whether it will be needed in the morning any more than my yoga mat.