Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

It’s the Pentecôte (Whit Monday) holiday in France so our classes start an hour earlier again to cater for the Sunday/holiday bus schedule. Luckily this is the last of the four French holidays in May/June (May 1st & 8th, Ascension & Pentecôte)…

The pastry course theme this week is cakes and pastries. We start off much like last week, with a lot of preparation for things to bake later and not much to photograph. We’re making strawberry religieuses (choux buns with a smaller one on top, both filled), so prepare the two fillings—strawberry cream and strawberry jam—and the choux buns topped with craquelin. There’s more than enough choux dough so we make chouquettes to bring home, but I didn’t bother photographing those. We also bake a hazelnut dacquois and a gianduja ganache montée for a crispy hazelnut cake. We made ganache montée during the choux workshop, but I haven’t found the English term; it’s a ganache blended into cream which, after being left in the fridge for at least four hours, is whipped. And something chef considers is the ideal filling for eclairs and such like.

The cooking theme is hot starters and today we’re preparing frog legs. But, of course, not with butter, garlic and parsley! The legs are turned into “lollipops” by removing the calf from the lower leg and scraping the bone clean then stuffing the calf meat into the deboned thigh. Just before plating we dip these in a tempura batter and deep fry. Before, of course, there are all the accompaniments to prepare and these mostly feature chickpeas in some way—roast chickpeas, a chickpea and beetroot hoummos, and panisse (chickpea flour fritters, a Nice speciality)—although there’s also two variations on chorizo cream: a pipeable liquid and the non-pipeable bits we quenelle.

The hoummos is spread onto the plate as a decoration using a mould and then we are left to plate the other components as we please. I’m a bit stuck as I cut my panisse into chips, thinking these would look good with the lollipops. But that idea went out of the window… So I cut my chips in half and, having plated them, decide to drizzle over the pipeable cream. Not a good move. What I should have done was to use a parchment paper cornet (with a much smaller nozzle than the piping bag), drizzle over the cream with the (half-)chips on the bench and then plate them. But I wouldn’t have learnt that if I hadn’t done it the wrong way: good idea, bad execution…

Home very early, of course, but that’s good as I need to make another batch of yoghurt. And I can have a goûter at a more reasonable time: coffee, a couple of chouquettes and the last of last week’s cookies.