Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

The main task this morning was to turn Friday’s choux pastry logs into Paris-Brest style eclairs. The first step was to prepare craquelin covering (for taste and appearance), cut this to shape, put it onto our logs and bake them. This was my task while F., my partner this week, prepared a dough for tomorrow’s lemon meringue tarts. Then we prepared and baked a joconde sponge mix, again as preparation for tomorrow, this time for a rhubarb and lychee dessert.

Back with the eclairs, we had to coat almonds in caramel and prepare a praliné, cream and mascarpone mix to pipe into the eclairs (the proper Paris-Brest filling would be a crème mousseline, but our mix is a little lighter). To pipe the mix in we needed, of course, to cut open the eclairs but also to neaten up the tops. My piping wasn’t as neat as chef’s, but I blame the fact that the cream mix was a little warm and runny when it was my turn to do the piping ( I worked from right to left on the ones below and you can see the difference). Still, I think the eclairs looked OK and they were more than acceptable for my afternoon goûter.

The afternoon’s recipe was for a prawn tartare to be served in a crispy pillow with beetroot tartare and a prawn bisque. The crispy pillow was made by treating a pasta dough like puff pastry—giving it three double turns to add layers. Then, once I’d rolled it out in the machine, it had to be cut into 7cm squares and transferred by knife onto the baking sheet; any handling by fingers being guaranteed to prevent the dough from puffing up in the oven. Not a problem for mine: 10 dough squares prepared and 10 pillows produced even though we only needed two!

We then filled these with the prawn tartare mix, placed a pillow on a bed of beetroot tartare and fried rocket and poured round the prawn bisque. Chef would have preferred my presentation to have had more height but I needed a wideish ring for the size of the pillow and we didn’t have enough beetroot and rocket to make a deeper disk. Chef was happy with our bisque, though; just the right consistency—C., my partner again this week, having been smart enough to loosen it a little before our plating.