Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

No picture of a whole load of macaroons, I’m afraid, but you will see some since I was not wrong when I said yesterday that chef had some hard work in store for us with the cheesecakes.

First, though, a step back to the joconde sponge mix we made on Monday. I forgot to mention, in the excitement over the lemon meringue tart on Tuesday, that we put a rhubarb and lychee puree between two disks and left that assembly in the freezer. The first task today was to coat that with a vanilla mousse. This we did by half filling a slightly larger circular mould (with a heat shrunk layer of cling film on the bottom) with the mousse, positioning in the sponge and jelly puck and ensuring everything was level at the top (the future bottom…). This is now sitting in the fridge waiting for glazing and decoration tomorrow. If past experience is anything to go by, tomorrow’s chocolate work will be harder than today’s…

But before we get to that, we had to coat our cheesecake domes (three for me) with a red glaze. Whilst that set we (so me for my team) had to temper white chocolate to which we added red coloured cocoa butter—colouring chocolate is hard, apparently, so the easiest way is to melt in some coloured cocoa butter. What is also hard is tempering white chocolate as the target temperatures are 20°C lower than for dark chocolate: heat to 40-45°C, cool to 25-26°C by swirling about on the bench then warm to 28-29°C to work. Our chocolate got overheated at one stage so I had to retemper it to make my 3rd decoration.

And the decorations were chocolate spirals which we made by spreading the chocolate on a piece of acetate, leaving it to cool for a while, marking a diagonal from the top left corner to the bottom right (for me, at least), shaping these round a 7cm diameter ring and leaving them to cool in the fridge.

Whilst these were firming up we had to balance a small sablé disk on top of our cheesecake, balance a macaroon on that, add a smaller sablé disk and top that with a raspberry! Yes, we had some raspberry jelly in a parchment cornet piping bag (remember those from week 1?) to pipe dots to hold things together, but still… Finally, we surrounded these towers with the chocolate spirals. And mine survived the trip to the photo room. Minus the raspberry (the towers were too tall for our take-home boxes otherwise), I hope at least one will survive until J. arrives tomorrow evening.

The task for the afternoon was almost as fiddly: make a black and yellow striped pasta, fill this with a goat cheese, prosciuttio and watercress stuffing, create tetrahedral ravioli and serve with a watercress sauce. A recipe based on an Anne-Sophie Pic creation, apparently. C. and I didn’t quite follow chef’s instructions on assembling our yellow and black pasta—were we supposed to each be making stripy pasta for five ravioli or making stripy pasta for ten ravioli as a team? I started off doing the latter and C. the former which meant I had to work fast at the end. Fortunately, as I had to create a narrower strip, my stripy sheet was then easier to re-roll through the machine. Time pressure, however, meant I was less careful with my plating than I should have been; things would have looked better with just four of the ravioli.

I have to say, though, that I was pretty pleased with the tuiles; I made these while C. worked on the sauce and all twelve I made came out fine—just two or three each would have been enough.

The time pressure was also because chef is running a special class on sauces today and tomorrow, a class I signed up for. We started by preparing a veal stock from masses of bones which we roasted in the oven whilst the vegetable mirepoix was caramelised in multiple saucepans. A well filled tray of langoustine, prawn and lobster shells was also provided as the base for our bisque. Chef agreed that it isn’t easy to buy these things in such quantities from your local butcher or fishmonger… The stock for our chicken velouté, on the other hand, needed just a chicken; much more reasonable. The velouté was the one sauce we made starting from a stock base this evening; tomorrow we’ll be making more sauces from the left over chicken stock and the veal stock which was left to bubble overnight.