Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

The pastry lesson today was pretty much all about puff pastry. The purpose of the flavoured pain feuilleté was to teach us the basic method of incorporating butter into the pastry (pastry exactly as wide as the slab of butter and twice as long) and the simple fold—folding the pastry in thirds once it has been rolled out. S. tries her hand at this whilst I prepare the dough for our croissants.

Then it’s my turn to work the puff magic for the pain au raisins. This is a bit less forgiving than the simple feuilleté: we have a harder butter (84% fat) and we have to roll the butter in and the pastry out in short bursts so it doesn’t become too soft. There’s also the double fold—rolling out the dough to the depth of the bench, folding the ends into the middle and then folding the result in half. But there’s the professional step: the ends aren’t perfectly square, but slightly rounded, even for chef. So we cut one end square and use the trimmings to fill in the gaps. As chef points out, if we cut both ends square we lose pastry which means fewer pains au raisins for the bakery.

The simple feuilleté gives another practice: turning it into a log which we then cut in slices and bake. Again, doing this for the pain au raisins pastry is a little harder and I’m glad I don’t have a picture of my pastry rectangle (covered with crème pat and raisins) before it was rolled. Let’s just say it wasn’t an ideal rectangle (but I think only chef managed that). Fortunately, this isn’t too important for the pains au raisins, but perfection is important for the croissants tomorrow!

Oh, we also baked and glazed our flans. I tasted mine, confirming my opinion that crème pat filled tarts are not my favourite, then made some passing fellow residents of our holiday camp a present of the rest; they seemed pretty pleased.

Cooking in the afternoon was another opportunity to practice pastry as the task was to prepare pâté en croute. G. presumably figures it’s best to leave the pastry to the person taking pastry lessons so he helps prepare gelatine from scratch (there were lots of pigs trotters on the ingredients bench) while I sand the butter into the flour and then bring everything together with milk and egg yolks. Then he prepares a log of duck breast and chicken breast strips in a nori wrapping and minces the rest of the duck and chicken with pork whilst I roll out the dough and cut pieces to line the mould. G. is in this for a career, though, and has a more artistic bent, so he decorates the lid.

There’s a bit of a panic as we fill the mould since the pastry crust isn’t quite central so we’re a little worried about the sealing on one side. Fortunately chef comes over and gives us a private demonstration of how to do this properly. And our baked pâté seems not to have leaked—from the side, at least! Tomorrow we fill them up with the gelatine…

And so there’s nothing to take home to eat for a change! But there is some left over pâté mix. I take ours and that from the bench opposite to stuff a pepper—which is baking in the oven as I write and as a tomato sauce simmers gently on the hob.