Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

The main pastry task today was to make macaroons. A simple recipe—basically a French meringue with added almond powder—but tricky to get right and very sensitive to humidity. The first key step is to “macaroner” the meringue and almond powder mix. A serious-sounding French verb, but it just means to overwork the mixture until it is a little liquid! Ours was a little over-macaroné so our first piped circles were a little wider than they should have been. Chef also considered them a little too red… I have to say, though, that I don’t think ours were the deepest red nor were they the only runny ones. And, talking of colour, the colouring we used was a powder—since humidity is the enemy of macaroons you don’t want to be adding drops of liquid colouring!

We left them in the stream of air from the air-conditioning unit to remove humidity and dry a little; apparently you bake them when they are a little firm on top. And, to manage humidity again, you open the oven door to release any pent-up humidity about half way through the ~16 minute cooking time. Ours then went back under the cold air stream to cool while we prepared the raspberry ganache filling. Chef was pretty adamant we should stick to a ganache based filling; custardy ones contain egg which isn’t good as macaroons are kept at room temperature. But only after a night in the fridge, apparently, which is where ours are now. Unfortunately they are on a tray shared with our colleagues on the bench opposite so I didn’t manage to get a picture before they were thoroughly (I hope!) wrapped to protect them from humidity. Tomorrow…

Between the various macaroon steps we were tasked with preparing candied lemon peel like that we used to decorate the lemon meringue tarts yesterday—apparently we’ll be using it again in future. This turned out to be nothing other than yesterday’s MOF masterclass intensely lemony lemon zest but cooked with sugar at the end. Our pastry chef was a little more insistent on the julienning of our lemon peel, however!

In parallel, chef had demonstrated preparing a baked cheesecake filling and made a raspberry jam. The filling was baked in half dome moulds, then a scoop taken out of the middle with a melon-baller filled with the jam. We were supposed to add a sablé base but there was some problem with the batch pre-made yesterday so six of us were set to rustle up a whole load more pastry which chef will bake and add to the cheesecakes tomorrow. It seems like chef is doing all the work here, but these need to be finished with a tempered white chocolate glaze so it looks like he’s leaving the hardest part for us…

In the afternoon our Meilleur Ouvrier de France chef demonstrates a low-salt dish made with oysters, leeks and samphire. The low-salt aspect, like the low-fat / vegan recipe yesterday is partly because he works in a clinic where people are treated for food intolerance, but also to demonstrate how to work in flavour in other ways—today’s recipe, for example, uses oysters and samphire for an iodine-y taste to make up for the lower salt content. Another mantra is that chef’s have to adapt to the ingredients they have (e.g. the French rather than Italian artichokes yesterday) and how ripe or otherwise they are—so he and chef remark that cooking is not like pastry work, you can´t give precise timings or amounts…

One thing I learnt was the utility of briefly cooking oysters before opening them if you are going to cook the oysters anyway. I’ve never really wanted to cook oysters before as I believe if I’ve spent the effort opening them then cooking them is a waste. A four minute stay in a hot oven, though, makes them pretty easy to open and halfway to being poached. Maybe something to try at home.

But not the plating… I might have wanted to learn how to produce well-presented plates of food, but today’s flower-like presentation is a step too far for doing at home. And, interestingly, our guest chef did show us steps to making work simpler in a restaurant setting—how, for example, to make leek bases for 20 flowers with the same effort we spent making the base for just one.

Then back to the residence for a lemon meringue tart goûter and to make another batch of yoghurt.