Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

Well, there was some baking in pastry class today, but, with the way the preparations are going, I’m wondering if I will have to go by car tomorrow to bring everything back…

We’re still working on our puff pastry for apple turnovers and the base for the danish pastries. The puff pastry is a little hard after a night in the fridge so it is left to warm up a little whilst I batter 250g of beurre de tourage into a squarish shape, fix this in the rolled out danish pastry dough and give it a simple fold. Then S. works on the softened puff pastry while I bring together the multiple components for our rye bread—the flours, hard sourdough, fermented rye dough, salt and hot water (hot because there is very little gluten in the rye flour, says chef). The resulting dough is very sticky but I manage to follow what I learnt last month about handling such doughs and end up with a nice shape in our plastic tray.

As I’m doing the shaping, S. starts off the kneading for a walnut loaf (which uses most of the rest of the hard sourdough starter we made yesterday). I finish this off as it’s S.’s turn to work on the danish pastry dough: a double turn and then roll out and fix on a piece of the chocolate dough that chef prepared for us.

And… something to bake! We roll out a large circle of the basque shortcrust and put this in a foil cake tin. Mine isn’t too neat as I was busy weighing out chef’s cherry confit when he showed us how to swirl the dough around in a large ring to shape it; luckily it doesn’t matter for the first, but my disk for the top is neat and covers up the misshapen edge that is folded over the cherry filling. The top is egg-washed and decorated with a fork and then into the oven.

Then it’s my turn with the danish pastries. A complicated turn! The dough has to be rolled out to a large rectangle, cut to shape, cut into quarters, decorated with a scalpel on the chocolate side and the cinnamon filling spread on the plain side, then rolled into a cylinder and trimmed to fit aluminium barquettes. This latter step is very welcome; my rolling out wasn’t up to chef’s standard so my trimmed rectangle was a little short in a couple of corners. Rather than trimming each end of the cylinders (chef’s way of making sure the cinnamon filling is everywhere), I made sure the cinnamon filling was all the way to the good end and trimmed the substandard ones… (Chef later showed us another way to deal with this problem: fill in the corners with a little of the dough from trimming down the large rectangle; these outside corners end up on the inside of the rolled up cylinder.)

I should have taken a picture as these are being left to rise overnight. I do, though, have a picture of the gateau basque:

In the afternoon, we make steak tartare. But, of course, with a few cheffy additions. The first is a parmesan based tuile. The mixture is spread out into a triangle shape on silpat using masking tape to get the neat triangles. This hardly sticks to the silpat at all, but there are two of us, so H. and I manage working together. To help with the baking, we’re all supposed to put our trays in the oven at the same time and we’ve finished first at our end of the kitchen so I hastily prepare another set of two. This turns out to be a wise move: one of our first two is too thick and hasn´t set enough to roll into shape around a cylinder. The other likewise, but the two on the second tray are perfect for shaping. I also put the second one on the first tray back in the oven to set a little more so we end up with two and a half tuiles. Other people have to try again in series rather than in parallel but H. and I can get on with making a (burnt) toast ice cream, a red pepper and ginger gel and the base for a tarragon foam. Then we chop up the usual non-beef components of a tartare (shallot, capers, cornichons) plus a few less common (ginger, miso). I’m supposed to be doing this while H. cuts up the beef (his knife skills are better; he trained with R., my partner of last week…). But there is a minor problem with our tarragon foam base: we should have pressurised the siphon when we made the base but didn’t. I whisk the partially gelled mixture round with a long pair of tweezers, hunt down the gas cartridges and pressurise the siphon; foam comes out so we’re not completely lost. However, I manage to cut a finger on a sharp edge of the siphon lid so have to hunt down a plaster as well, by which time H. has pretty much finished the chopping.

Apart from having to use the tuile as a focus element, plating is essentially free. A good number of people opt to put the tartare in the circular bit of the tuile (this is a starter, not a main course, so there doesn’t need to be a lot of the tartare), but I wouldn’t like that as a customer. Others look for circular moulds, but there’s a flat section of my tuile that cries out for a rectangular shape to the tartare. After some searching, I find a short stubby rectangle of just the shape I want. And chef likes it. Apart, that is, from the fact that I still can’t get nice round dots of gel from a squeezy bottle. The cue for another lesson on how I should be doing it; holding the nozzle further from the plate and the bottle perfectly vertically, it seems. I think nailing this will be harder than improving my quenelle forming skills…

After a quick shower back at the residence I have a few errands to run, so it’s a late goûter but I can confirm the tastiness and freshness of the Gateau basque. Keeping to the order, I’m about to try the steak tartare with a glass of Corbières…