Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

As I predicted, most of the pastry class today was dedicated to decorating the crumble/hazelnut ensemble we prepared yesterday. There was a quick half hour or so when we prepared marshmallow for use later in the week and refreshed the sourdough starter (a daily ritual now). Then… E. tempers the dark chocolate left over from yesterday while I cut squares out of decorative transfer sheets—both for us and for M. next to us as his partner is away today. When the chocolate is ready, we first chablonner our crumble/hazelnut square—i.e. put on a thin coat of chocolate to provide a solid base for when we dip the mix (now cut up into little rectangular pieces) into the chocolate for coating. This is quite a relaxing exercise, you pick up a proto-chocolate with a special fork, dip in in the molten chocolate, use the fork to ensure it is covered, lift it out, wipe off excess chocolate on the side of the bowl, place the chocolate on parchment paper and apply the transfer. E. and I talk about her long-held passion for baking and her future business plans.

Then we switch; I temper milk chocolate and E. cuts up the different transfer sheets. This time I dip the first twelve little rectangles with E. applying the sheets and I apply the sheets when E. dips her twelve. Then, of course, there’s a mountain of washing and cleaning (lots of hot water is needed in chocolate week!) before we take off the transfer sheets to see the finished result. There’s time along the way, though, to turn our left over milk chocolate into two 100g bars.

E. takes off the first transfer sheet. No pattern… I suggest this is because she took it off the very last chocolate we dipped. After taking twenty four sheets off the dark chocolates, we take twelve off the milk chocolate ones. All are beautifully decorated. The thirteenth, though, has no pattern… It turns out I had put the sheets on upside down! I’m ready to just take the patternless ones, but E. has a brainwave, wondering if we could put the transfers on the right way round and use a heat gun to melt the chocolate so the pattern would stick. I encourage her to go ahead. E. tells me it works but I gather during our evening workshop that, really, it only half-worked. Maybe, though, it could have worked had she’d had more time… Having a partner that didn’t assume the sheets were the same way up as when he’d prepared them would have been better still, though!

The pending evening workshop on choux pastry also kept me busy throughout the morning. Before class, chef asked me to prepare a batch of choolate craquelin (easy enough) and then roll this out to a perfect rectangle between two sheets of plastic (much, much harder). Then, during the class I needed to pre-cut discs out of sheets of plain craquelin he’d prepared.

Having messed things up for E. in the morning, it was my turn to be stoic in the afternoon. Our task was to bone the rabbit thigh, beat it flat, roll it round a stuffing made with the shoulder meat, the liver and kidneys and serve it with pucks of potato cooked in duck fat and a gently cooked cabbage accompaniment. I am proud to say that I boned my rabbit leg and shoulder as well as my starred colleague. I can’t pretend, though, that my crepinette secured cylinder of rabbit leg rolled around the stuffing looked quite as neat and elegant as his. But I was happy enough and all went well as we cooked our potato pucks, the cabbage and an orange-based sauce.

But… this was another free plating exercise with chef stressing his expectation of Michelin standard plates. My plating idea was born of the realisation that my stuffed rabbit leg cylinder happened to be the same diameter as my potato pucks. And height is good, no? So I cut the cylinder into eight (we don’t serve the ends…) and made little bases for three of them with the cabbage mixture. More height was added with sprigs of rosemary. Then I went to the pastry classroom for a nice jug to serve the sauce on the side. Arriving back, I find my partner has now much reduced the sauce as he needed a thicker concoction for his plating idea… The dish needed sauce (sauce is always needed…) and I wanted to have some on the rabbit slices but the end result wasn’t good. I knew chef would say that the plating should have shown the stuffing inside the thigh meat but I couldn’t get that result and I should maybe have thought of another plan. Still, I was pleased that chef liked my original idea.

On to the choux pastry workshop for another three hours of class… Chef intends for us to make two different sorts of eclair and two offerings based on round choux buns, one apparently to be shaped as a swan. Plus chouquettes from the left over choux pastry.

The first half of the course was devoted to preparation of the various creams and fillings. There were five of these and five teams so we each did the mise en place for one five times. My partner P. and I lucking out with the relatively simple task of assembling the ingredients for a cherry confit. Then, team by team, we prepare our creams and fillings. The most interesting were for ganache montée; a ganache base blended with cream which we’ll whip tomorrow.

Then a mega batch of choux pastry. The obligatory minute of vigorous stirring in the pan after the flour had been added took quite some effort, but the mixer did the hard work as we cooled the panade then beat in the eggs. Meanwhile I cut yet more craquelin disks as P. marked out parchment sheets for the piping of our eclairs and choux buns. All were given a craquelin topping (there seems nothing wrong with the one I prepared for the eclairs) and we head home with these in the freezer and our creams and fillings in the fridge.