Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

Today was even busier than yesterday in pastry class. Much baking as foreseen, but we’re still preparing things for baking later in the week. We start by preparing the final proofing for our rye bread (in a banneton) and walnut bread (one in a mould, one just on the baking tray). Then we start kneading a pain de mie (milk bread) that is being prepared, a little surprisingly for me, with our sourdough starter. I had imagined we’d be making a sourdough loaf but the pain de mie preparation has some technical steps… Whilst S. looks after most of that, I ready the ingredients for a pâte levée feuilletée (PLF); I’m not sure exactly what this is besides being a sort of puff stuff made using risen dough—there’s beurre de tourage in store for being added tomorrow.

I start this just after helping S. with one of the twists on the milk bread preparation: we have to divide the dough in two, knead matcha powder into one using the mixer (S.) and work black sesame seed into the other by hand (me). And to fill in the two minutes between finishing that and seeing to the second stage of kneading the PLF I have to nip over to coat our danish pastries with sugar syrup; these were put in the proofing oven overnight (which came up to temperature early in the morning after keeping them at 4°C for much of the time) and in to bake as class started.

Then it’s time to prepare the filling for our apple turnovers (cook finely chopped apples with cinnamon in a butter and caramel sauce until all the water is driven off ), put our rye and walnut breads into bake, briefly shape our two milk breads, put one on top of the other, roll them out to a nice rectangle, roll this up into a cylinder, cut that in half, twist the ends round and place in a mould. Phew. But no time to rest as we need to prepare a poolish for tomorrow’s cheese torsade, roll out the puff pastry for our apple turnovers, cut out turnover shapes and fill them, take our rye and walnut breads out of the oven and clean up. As one of the chefs-of-the-week I’m a little worried about finishing the cleaning before 13:00, especially when chef proposes making plaits out of left over danish pastry dough, a far more interesting task that washing up or drying! But even with three people devoted to bagging our goodies we are finished by 12:40; only 10 minutes late so still enough time for me to have the fruit portion of my lunch. Not quite indigestion day all over again!

It’s definitely technique time in cooking class as we make yet another sort of tuile and yet another gel for a squeezy bottle. These tuiles are formed of baked sweet potato that we’ve mixed with isomalt and spread in thin strips on silpat using a mould. Chef says that we should have enough of the mix to make a second batch if needed, but H. and I clearly haven’t. It turns out we haven’t spread the mix thinly enough as we’ve been hampered by the raised edge of the baking sheet. Often chef tells us to prepare things on a sheet or grill as they’ll be hard to carry around otherwise. This is one of the exceptions to that rule… And it’s lucky we ask as the re-smoothed strips turn out just fine; the thicker ones wouldn’t have set. We form the tuiles into wavy shapes using a high-tech tool:

Before we got there, though, we prepared tapenade and guacamole mixes in piping bags, a mimosa egg, a tiger prawn tartare, chopped cucumber and goat cheese, a chopped cucumber garnish and a lemon gel. And trimmed down carrots with a peeler as preparation for some dish tomorrow. H. and I share the tasks out and work pretty well, fortunately. And chef has no complaints with our trimmed carrots.

Chef is creating a savoury version of an Anne-Sophie Pic chocolate dessert where different chocolate elements are served between wavy chocolate tuiles. So we have to deliver something like that using our tuiles and the various other preparations. This is fiddly. And not for the first time I place my plate on an upturned saucepan as otherwise I’m bending over too much. I’m not sure I’d like this starter if presented with it in a restaurant, but chef is reasonably happy with my offering (the gel dots are an improvement on yesterday and I’ve brought a squeezy bottle back to the residence to practice…). The problem is with the dill fronds. I chose dill over the default pea shoot greenery (as a nod to the tartare element) and a placing I thought improved the look of the plate. Chef commented, though, that a diner wouldn’t know what had been in my thoughts, they would more likely just think the dill had been plonked on as an afterthought. Cue a discussion on fashions in plating and an instruction to make sure I have some elements (see the dill fronds in the guacamole here, stolen from the right hand one) that have clearly been precisely placed.

No errands tonight so plenty of time for a goûter of Gateau basque and danish pastry (and to gift some danish pastry and walnut bread to eager neighbours).