Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

Holiday over, it’s back to a busy week for pastry, at least. No pictures today as there was just lots of preparation for things we’ll be baking tomorrow—pain au raisins, cumin & parmesan flavoured pain feuilleté and, horror of horrors, “Flan Parisien”—a shortcrust tart filled with crème pat. I’m going to enjoy giving that away! I put a large hole in the pastry as I was fitting it to the ring and was sorely tempted to take that as a sign the gods are with me but, as a diligent student, I re-roll my pastry and start again. S., my partner this week is a little worried our flan cases won’t have long enough in the blast chiller but everything seems to work out OK in the end.

At the end of the lesson, chef warns us we’ll be even busier tomorrow and Wednesday as we’ll have just as much prep work but will be baking as well. He also tells us the hardest things in pastry are croissants, choux pastry and macaroons. For everything else you just follow the recipe (he says), but for these you need knowledge and experience. This week we’ll be making croissants and choux pastry… And I’m signed up for the choux pastry workshop. Hmm…

Cooking class in the afternoon similarly starts off with preparation work: cooking foie gras (mi cuit) in preparation for a recipe later in the week. It’s a cooking course in France; what did you expect? Deveining our foie gras is an interesting challenge but I think G. and I manage OK in the end. There’s then an exercise in maths to figure out the amount of salt, pepper and cognac to use. G. is concerned there’s too much salt and pepper but I point out chef’s comment that you always need 1.2% of salt and 0.5-0.6% of pepper when preparing pâtés so we use all we’ve weighed in the end. I roll it up in cling film, we fit this into a vacuum bag (a bit of a struggle), firm it up in the chiller for a while and cook it at 60°C for just 16 minutes. It’s then cooled in an ice bath and put in the fridge to mature.

Meanwhile, eggs have been put to cook at 64°C in a steam oven for the “perfect egg” part of the recipe of the day. We prepare a bavaroise of peas, a lemon yuzu gel, some pickled radishes and chef up some cherry tomatoes. Once all that has been done, we need to firm up the white of our eggs before we plate them. I’m a little worried about this step given my poached egg experience in the first week, but all goes well enough and chef is happy with my plating. Unfortunately, the delicate perfect egg didn’t survive the bike trip back to the residence, but I’m sure everything will taste good anyway.