Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

And mostly my work; I’ll have to give my partner this week credit for the croissants and pains aux chocolat tomorrow as she did the hard rolling work for those; I just did some shaping. But that’s getting a little ahead of myself. The first task this morning was to shape our country bread dough and put it to prove in a banneton. Then chef explained about making doughs with a poolish—we’ll be making ciabatta and focaccia this way this week. We prepare the ciabatta dough with a poolish chef made yesterday and put our poolish in the fridge to ferment overnight for the tomorrow’s focaccia.

There’s the rolling and folding of the pastry for the croissants, of course. (And I have a vital contribution to all the production—even that for the afternoon: I cut up the 2kg beurre de tourage sheets into 250g pieces!) This, though, is interspersed with glazing and eating the pains aux raisins. Glazing them isn’t essential, apparently, but it adds a nice sheen even if, as chef points out, it makes the bags sticky. But sticky or not, warm from the oven they are delicious! It might be morning and there might be no coffee, but I eat two, they are so good. And so many: 120 or so between 15 of us, so cooking colleagues who aren’t also taking pastry classes have a lunchtime treat.

But other work beckons: we slash and bake our pain de campagne and follow a complicated pattern to cut and then shape 5 croissants and 6 pains aux chocolat. We shape these by placing two chocolate sticks close to one end and rolling them up to the other. I ask chef why we don’t shape these as I’m so used to buying them—which would be by putting a chocolate stick at each end and rolling both to the middle. His answer is a little deflating: he doesn’t trust us to roll the dough perfectly evenly and wants to avoid that we have a result with one half bigger than the other! I think he’s probably got the measure of (most of) us…

The cooking task this afternoon was to make a presentable dish from the foie gras we prepared on Monday and a brioche “bun” to accompany it. As I did the pastry work yesterday, G. works on the brioche dough whilst I make a port wine reduction and prepare a port and pistachio jelly. Whilst that is being prepared I also add the gelatin/jelly that was prepared yesterday into our pâté en croute. There’s a worrying moment when the liquid looks to be leaking out of the side but a full pâté is put back in the fridge so fingers crossed for tomorrow when I guess we’ll be plating a slice of that.

We can’t, of course, simply plate a slice or two of the foie gras; we have to shape thin slices brushed with the port wine reduction into a mould and top these with the pistachio jelly and add rasperries (I’ll come back to that later…). This goes back into the fridge whilst we prepare a pineapple chutney and our brioche—for which we have to place six brioche dough balls into a small rectangular mould so there is a nice shaped top (no picture, I’m afraid); I also make a plait from the left over dough.

We are given no guidance on plating other than the “remember this is a course for potential interns at Michelin * restaurants, not bistros”. I’m a little disappointed with chef’s reaction to mine (I wish I’d added a brushing of the port reduction to my plate as G. did), but his real objection was to the raspberries on top: these were supposed to have been pushed down into the jelly. Ironically, I’d been worried that ours wasn’t setting only to find that it almost was when we were doing the moulding… Anyway, I already know that the foie gras tastes good so I’ll try to forget that criticism when I tuck in after finishing this blog post.

And, guess what? Pains aux raisins for goûter. There’s another one left for breakfast tomorrow when we have an early start (as May 8th, V.E. day, is a holiday in France). I still had enough, though, to give a couple to an unsuspecting dutch holidayer who didn’t quite understand why I was giving them away at first but seemed impressed when I explained the provenance.