Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

Although we start quickly in pastry as there’s a lot to bake. And a minor problem early on as we are softening butter in the microwave and A. puts in a container with foil on. Sparks start to fly and there are burnt bits all over my butter so I start again. And, just as chef gathers us round to demonstrate how to shape the cheese bread (think largish cheese straws), S. reminds me I need to prepare two… I valiantly weigh and soften a third batch of butter which is spread on the rolled out dough, topped with cheese, the dough folded over, strips cut and twisted and all baked. No picture of these, but I did have a warm one from the oven and it was good.

Then to add the fillings to our PLF shapes. The raspberry cream filling is placed on the disk shape and crumble added. Fairly simple. For the square basket shape, we pipe a chocolate “cream” into the base, add chocolate chips, top with chopped banana and then add more chocolate chips. After baking we brush with syrup and add a raspberry and coconut decoration, respectively. Chef says the coconut powder is important so people understand there is coconut in the mix, but I’m not sure I’d recognise the white powder in the corners as coconut. Anyway, here they are:

Then it’s time to prepare and bake our cookies. The most complicated part here is dividing the dough into fourteen portions, for 53g of dough per cookie. Actually, probably not. S. had to hunt down the colleagues who had taken our cookies from the oven—one of the D and DJ pair had managed to mistake the S and T on our silpat for their initials. That was a little annoying as we needed to add chocolate pieces when the cookies had cooled enough that the chocolate wouldn’t melt too much but not so much that they wouldn’t melt at all. Ours were a little on the cool side by the time we got to this step but they tasted good anyway.

And here’s an overview of all we (chef…) produced during the week. My neighbours at the residence were very grateful to receive an offering of cheese twists, cookies and even left over gateau basque; they were very appreciative of the walnut bread and the danish pastry I gave them on Wednesday…

After an extended lunch break (chef signed off on a clean kitchen at 12:15, well before the bell!), it’s time for the last cold starter preparation in cooking class. As previously this week, the complication is in the precision and the number of elements, there is nothing intrinsically very hard. We have to produce foie gras cherries—spheres of foie gras with a cherry chutney centre and coated in an agar agar set cherry gel—to be served with a microwaved tomato sponge cake (as A. and I made during the molecular workshop), “earth”, parmesan tuiles and an “oriental” vinaigrette (with rice vinegar, mirin and soy sauce). H. concentrates on the early stages of the foie gras cherries whilst I make the chutney and deal with the mise en place for the coating and the “earth” (blitzed toasted walnuts, hazelnuts and sunflower seeds). There’s (quite) some confusion over the parmesan tuiles which ends up with me scraping green and red tuile mix out of part of the moulds and adding red and green respectively. Our multi-coloured tuiles don’t look much like those anyone else has prepared but H says he likes them!

And chef likes my plate! I don’t have the picture that was taken of the collective offering, but mine was one of just two to use a rectangular plate, the other ten or so plates were all round. And mine had the least embellishment, but the “simple but elegant” style is growing on me… I’ll have to see if I’m influencing chef before the month is out!

Back to the residence where J. is waiting having dealt with the bedding exchange and tasted a few of the goodies on offer. No outing planned this weekend, just trips to the beach and the odd restaurant. So that’s it until Monday, folks.