Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

Given I was starting in Valréas, I needed to be up at 5:30 for a morning cup of tea before heading to Gastronomicom; I get there around 8:45…

It’s bread week again in Pastry and we spend the morning preparing for things we’ll make later in the week: puff pastry for apple turnovers, shortcrust and cherry confit for a gateau basque, dough and a cinnamon filling for danish pastries (a chocolate flavoured danish dough is made by chef, but three of us have to do the mise en place for five batches…), a thick version of the sourdough starter, a refreshed standard sourdough and a starter mixture for rye bread. The morning seems to go very quickly, but everyone is organised for the cleaning up, thankfully, as S. and I are the chefs of the week. Chef warns us things will be more hectic tomorrow and on Wednesday when we have to bake and prepare; things then calm down on Thursday and Friday as there is just baking.

For cooking, chef has said there will be less actual cooking this month, the focus will rather be on techniques. It’s cold starter week and our task is to make cubes of asparagus gel with a crab meat stuffing and serve these on an asparagus stalk lattice with a crispy tuile and a Noilly Prat based sabayon. The first step is to use a vegetable peeler to cut thin strips from the asparagus stalks which are then blanched. The trimmings are boiled with milk then blended with gelatin and, after a short spell in the blast chiller, the strained liquid is put into molds with the crab meat and frozen again. Today’s tuile preparation (there’s a different one tomorrow) has us spreading the mix on silpat, baking it for a few minutes, making a fancy shape and finally baking it a bit more to set. H., my partner this week and I are next to my partner of last week and I see him putting the mix on parchment paper out of the corner of my eye. This gives me an idea, so I do likewise and drape the parchment strip over some rings on the silpat hoping to create a shape from the beginning. I also, though, make another on silpat just in case, using spoons underneath to create a wavy shape.

Weaving the asparagus strips isn’t so hard, but ours are a little too short which leads me to lose track of the over-and-under status when I have to add extra bits making sure the join is on what will be the underside of the finished circle. There’s one blemish, but I know I can hide that when plating everything else. And for the plating, it is my first tuile that comes out best; I think the oven was opened too much for my second to set properly—I should, of course, have left it in longer rather than just going by the timer but that was when chef was demonstrating the sabayon preparation.

The plating was actually pretty simple and chef was happy with my offering: the lattice work was good and he even commented favourably about the tuile although, as this was when he mentioned we’d be doing them a different way tomorrow, it perhaps wasn’t the best he’d seen!