Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

Pastry class starts at a rapid pace this morning as my new partner E. makes and bakes a chocolate crumble mix while I assemble the ingredients for a caramel with peanuts—we’ll be making something inspired by the Snickers bar or, for those of my generation in the UK, the Marathon bar. E. and I are lucky with our first caramel as there is still unmelted sugar even if other bits are becoming very brown. Chef says we need to whisk in the cream and all should be OK. The crucial part is then heating this mix to 118°C and keeping it there for a while; if this isn’t done the caramel won’t set enough to be dipped in chocolate later. We add in the peanuts and hope as the spread out mix cools in the fridge.

The next caramel we make reverses the ratio of cream/butter to sugar and glucose as it needs to be soft for piping. We can’t tell initially as it needs to be cooled in the blast chiller, but we do end up with a well-made pipeable mix. Whilst this is cooling, E. tempers some dark chocolate and I cut up the now-cold peanut caramel square into bars. These are dipped into the chocolate and seem to survive, although a couple need to be fished out with forks after they drop off the toothpicks. Then we pipe on the soft caramel and decorate.

Along the way, the crumble has been chopped finely, mixed with melted chocolate and hazelnut paste, been spread into a square mould and topped with a hazelnut praliné mix. The difficult bit for this recipe comes tomorrow!

For cooking this week, I’m paired with an actual Michelin starred chef, not just an aspiring one. He’s based in Taiwan and is here to learn more about French cuisine. But he’s happy for me to cook the mushrooms we need to line a mould and to make the mustard sauce to go with our olive and mustard stuffed rabbit saddle. He does, though, use the diced carrots that were flavouring the stock for the sauce to make a carrot purée which he uses for his plating—something much more elegant than the one we are tasked with copying. Copying R.’s, though, would have taken some effort. Still, I’ll have to ask him for some hints when we have to come up with our own plating ideas…

We are, of course, making a classic rabbit with mustard dish, but a fancy version. The stuffed saddles are cooked rolled in foil which keeps them moist and the potato accompaniment is made by blending a potato gratin flavoured with smoked paprika and plating this from a siphon. It tasted good, the rabbit was tender, the sauce was suitably mustardy: I’m sure I’m going to enjoy this for my dinner tonight.