Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

… and a late blog as J. and I have made it to Narbonne before the heavens open—and eaten well at Le Petit Perché; the receptionist at our hotel, La Residence, spotted my accent and asked where we were coming from. “Agde”, I replied, which led to a discussion of why I was there and then to restaurants. She thought we’d made a good choice (later confirmed) and recommended Chez Lulu and O’Juste. We have a reservation at the first tomorrow so we’ll see.

Anyway, school. As usual we start with patisserie. S. and I manage to make almost 10 burger buns from our dough, sacrificing 55g to our colleagues opposite. We are just 25g short so I’m pretty pleased with this given my concerns about dealing with sticky doughs—unlike the ciabatta, I hardly lost anything to my fingers. No pictures of these baked, though. They looked good but I gave them all away to people who will be holding a burger party at the residence whilst J. and I have our rainy touristic weekend.

The main task of the day is to prepare a choux dough. As I’m signed up for the choux workshop in a couple of week’s time I take the lead on this and, to my surprise, produce an acceptable and pipeable dough. My proto-eclairs are a little short as I missed the full explanation of the parchment lines as I was preparing the piping bag for chef. He considers them otherwise acceptable, though, so I don´t try again but instead pipe some blobs for chouquettes.

Interspersed with this, S. has been finishing our focaccia (shape, prove, coat with oil, dimple, recoat with oil, bake…) and I have been a member of the team coating our kouglofs with syrup then rum then melted butter then icing sugar. We understood chef to say there would be less time pressure on Friday than on Wednesday but I’m not so sure.

We have a brief discussion in front of chef’s production for the week during which he says it’s perfectly possible to make croissants etc with ordinary butter (and, apparently, many bakeries do to save money), but I’m not sure I want J., D. & N. to get their hopes up.

The cooking challenge is to turn a green tomato into a red one stuffed with a crab meat filling and accompanied with a pesto sorbet. G. and I work with our colleagues across from us to prepare the sorbet base and to re-peel our green tomatoes after they’ve been left too long in boiling water to loosen the skin. G. and I have a couple of other close shaves as we follow the recipe, but what happens in cooking class stays in cooking class.

G. does, though, have to decorate my green tomato with a red tomato coating as I’ve been clumsy enough to break a plate. A clanger that was almost way beaten by someone causing the pacojet to have a fit preparing a 3rd batch of sorbet. Fortunately things are rescued so there’s no need for a €400 callout to the service centre in Switzerland.

G. may have decorated my tomato, but I have prepared the feta and cream decorations we cover with a thin voile and I’m also responsible for my plating with which chef is again pretty happy. Another good end to another intensive week as I head off to meet J. at the residence.