Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

Well, not really, but thinking up a title for these entries can sometimes be the hardest part…

Anyway, we did start off with the religieuses this morning: the baking of our choux buns. This was a bit complicated as the small buns cooked faster than the larger ones but the only set time was for baking the small ones: 25 minutes (assuming they were well baked then, which ours were); for the larger ones we needed to bake them until they were the same general colour as the small ones—and all over, not just on the top: chef wanted them well baked and dry as otherwise the liquid fillings would make them go soggy too quickly.

But before we got to do anything about the filling, there were more preparations for things to be finished later in the week. I made a crunchy ganache and layered this on our dacquoise sponge then E. made a yellow glaze for a banana passion fruit and peanut cake for which I made a passion fruit flavoured ganache montée. Another recipe we were given today is for a pistachio and coconut tart for which E. made a pistachio flavoured chantilly and I made a pistachio nougatine.

After all that, it was finally time to half-fill our choux buns with strawberry cream, add some strawberry jam and fill them full with the strawberry cream. We decorated the buns with marzipan and positioned the smaller one on top of the larger, naturally, with piped buttercream around the join. There were two ways of doing this, position the small choux bun and then pipe little strips vertically with a small star-shaped nozzle or use a large ‘sultan’ piping tip to produce a buttercream ring into which the small bun was positioned. Most of us did two each way. I’ll leave you to decide which is which in the following picture.

In the afternoon we prepared a dish of lobster tail presented in a crown of duxelles-stuffed macaroni with a salmon mousse and with a foam of lobster bisque with wasabi. I dispatched the lobster in the approved way and then separated the tail, claws and legs. These need different times to cook (6, 4 and 1 minute respectively) and chef was insistent that we cook the pieces in 6 minutes not 11. He said we should put all the pieces in and take them out after the appropriate times. I ventured the opinion that it might be easier to put them in the water in the right order and take them all out at the same time; less fiddling around looking for pieces to tweezer out… Fortunately, chef was happy with any solution that took no longer than 6 minutes. The preparing and cooking was as easy as it looked watching chef. Taking the meat from the claws and legs, though, was not! That meat (together with the legs) will be used tomorrow. L., my partner this week, made a stock with the shell and various vegtables whilst I made a salmon mousse and cooked macaroni. Along the way we chopped up mushrooms and prepared the duxelles.

The hardest part of the dish was stuffing the macaroni with the duxelles; these were then placed in a ring anchored together with the salmon mousse and cooked for 6 minutes in a steam oven. Plating was pretty straightforward: the macaroni crown was filled with the remaining duxelles, the pan-fried lobster tail placed on top with a mushroom “flower” made from slices cut finely with a mandolin and the bisque/wasabi foam placed around.

Back to the residence to try the religieuses for goûter (somewhat the worse for wear after the trip back by bike, but tasty nonetheless) and to try to arrange some outings for a trip to Valréas with my wine course colleagues this coming weekend.