Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

Today starts badly. It’s the pastry written test, advanced a day because tomorrow we start at 8:30 as it’s the Ascension holiday in France. A. was moaning about this lunchtime yesterday as he is also attending the choux workshop and so worried about lack of revision time. I said I expected the exam to be on things we’d learnt this month such as the making of Italian meringue and the different puff pastry folds. I’m sure you can guess that it wasn’t at all. I don’t remember now, but I think all the questions were on last month’s recipes.

A. grumbles at lunch today, but I’m philosophical: I made a bet and lost. And, as for having to know basic recipes off by heart, I certainly don’t and nor does A. in his own restaurant. But I can certainly imagine high end-bakeries and upmarket restaurants will want chefs who know the basics well enough to rustle something up to cope with an emergency or a special occasion. Also, I think Chef is smart: he probably guesses we’ve boned up on this months topics so he wants to see who can remember what we’ve learnt before…

Anyway, we learnt last month to prepare chocolates in a mould but today’s challenge takes that to a new level. And, just as with the pain aux raisins being an “easy” exercise before the croissants, Chef warns us that mistakes today can be hidden, but not those tomorrow. The first step is to line the moulds with a thin layer of chocolate (dark today, white tomorrow), so, as it’s E.’s turn, she starts tempering 500g of dark chocolate. The twist this month is that the tops of the chocolates will be decorated. I do this by the high-tech method of flicking cocoa butter specks into the mould from a toothbrush and then using a cotton bud to swirl gold powder around in each indent. The unforgivable-tomorrow error is to leave any spatters of cocoa butter on the mould; these will be covered up today but they will be coloured tomorrow and so leave streaks in the white chocolate coating.

E. fills the mould as I prepare a raspberry flavoured ganache which we pipe into the little spaces on top of a small amount of hazelnut praliné. This is left to set in the fridge (along with some pre-prepared truffle shells we filled with the left-over ganache) while E. cleans and I temper what’s left of the dark chocolate. This I use to close the chocolates: ladling the molten chocolate onto the mould, scraping off the excess roughly and then precisely—all of which should be done in 30s or so; it probably takes me more like 60, but the result looks OK.

OK, I cheated; you can´t see the bottoms (but they looked OK, honest). And, yes, some are over decorated, but the range of goldness is because I was trying to see what the right amount would be. That’s the whole point of being here!

Another advantage of being at school is you can talk to other students. J. and I discuss our successes and failures and he comments that I could have solved my sauce disaster yesterday by adding a bit of veal stock to the (to me) over reduced sauce prepared by my partner. A good tip; I wonder if I’ll need to use it…

But R.’s sins of yesterday are forgiven as his Michelin star skills come to the fore in today’s exercise which is to coat a lamb rack in an orange and green chequerboard coating. We both work on cutting strips from blast-chilled squares of the different colours, with R. giving me a tip on how to cut them in identical precise widths. When it comes to turning the strips into the chequerboard pattern, though, I sensibly leave things to him whilst I finish cooking the vegetables. And, of course, I’ve taken the chine bone off a 3-rib lamb rack, french-trimmed it and cooked it along the way. Chef is complimentary about my plate but he knows full well who I’m working with! I can’t help feeling pleased, though, when R. comments at the end that I’m a good partner.

Then the second half of the choux workshop where we bake our eclairs and choux buns and turn them into patisserie wonders. It’s not so much a choux workshop as a piping workshop! Three of our preparations from yesterday—chocolate and pistachio creams and the cherry confit are coaxed from cold into a pipeable consistency and piped into the base of our eclairs. The chocolate ones are dipped in a chocolate glaze; we prepare a green and red marzipan topping for the others.

We then whip (carefully!) the ganache montée, pipe this into the bottom of upside-down choux buns and decorate these with raspberries and (cheffy touch…) cress.

Then our swans. We cut the tops of more choux buns (our better ones), fill them with diced mango, pipe swirls of chantilly cream and decorate. Chef insists on the need for two full turns when piping which I take to mean 720°. This I achieve but chef really means that each turn should be the same diameter; my second one is smaller. It is important, he says, to look vertically down as you pipe to make sure you don´t short change people. On cream this time, but a point chef made about the mango filling. Charge people
€5 for a half-filled choux and they won’t come back. Give them a well filled one for €6 and they will.

The wings are simple shapes cut from tempered white chocolate. The necks and heads are made by piping an ‘S’ shape with a parchment cornet and then adding a blob and a thread at one end. The wings, of course, could be made by cutting the top of the choux bun in half…

Put together, the night’s (or, rather, workshop’s) offerings are more than any of us can eat ourselves. It’s a holiday tomorrow, remember, and families are arriving at the residency for the long weekend. At least one is delighted to receive two boxes of freshly prepared delicacies…