Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

We’re still working on two ‘entremets’ in pastry, a pistachio and coconut tart (for which we’ve made the pastry, a coconut and pistachio cream, nougatine and pistachio chantilly) and a peanut, banana and passion fruit creation (for which we’ve baked pain de genes and prepared caramelised bananas, a passion fruit ganache montée and a yellow glaze). E. starts the day by preparing a banana cream for the latter whilst I bake the nougatine for the former.

Things then start to take shape. The banana cream and caramelised bananas are put on top of the pain de genes to form a 14cm circular puck which is put in the blast chiller while we roll out the pastry for the tart and use it to line an oval mould. Lining cake moulds with pastry has not been my forté. The first, a simple round one, was a bit of a mess and I needed two goes to line the square mould for the lemon meringue tart. And both needed patching up with bits of the cut off pastry. So I’m pleased enough with my lined oval mould that I take a picture:

This is half-filled with the coconut and pistachio cream and then baked. I’m lucky here as I recover well from not softening the cream enough—I zapped it in the microwave for the prescribed time but didn’t check the consistency. This means I need to use a bent metal spatula to smooth it out actively rather than giving it a simple nudge with a rubber one. A sensible choice given the circumstances, says chef, but a dangerous one as there’s a high risk of damaging the pastry with the sharp edge of the metal.

As this bakes, E. prepares a peanut praliné bavaroise and I put cling film on the base of two 16cm moulds (secured with a quick blast of a heat gun) and line them with acetate. These are half filled with the bavaroise and the banana pucks pressed in, banana side down. Back into the blast chiller…

Half of our pistachio nougatine is broken up and put on top of the cooling pistachio almond cream in the tarts and then topped with a coconut “jam” I’ve just made. This too goes into the blast chiller. Then we whip our pistachio chantilly and pipe this on top with a “flower” nozzle: a thin rounded rectangle with one end wider than the other. As usual, our piping is not as elegant as chef’s—neither E. nor I manage to smoothly change the angle at which we pipe as we are making random lengths—but there are toppings with which to hide the most egregious flaws. I’m not unhappy with my finished result until chef tells me that I should have used the nougatine and coconut shavings to achieve a greater height (but not so high the finished creation would be squashed in the box…). Still, it’s not too bad and, wonder of wonders, it survives the bike trip back to the residence.

At the end of the class, chef cuts his in half and shows the different layers—layers with different textures of the two components—and suggests how the components can change with the seasons so using a basic recipe to create many different offerings in a pastry shop. Chef also says we’ll be glazing and decorating the banana and peanut entremet tomorrow. If that’s all we’ll be doing, there will be some complicated elements, I’m sure!

More immediately, though, there was the complicated task of producing a multi-coloured pasta cube filled with a chicken and langoustine mousse. The chicken and langoustine mousse part was fairly easy—blitz chicken and cream, pass through a tamis, use to half-fill an oblong mould, add finely chopped langoustine with basil and lime zest, top with the chicken mousse and freeze. Making the red pasta dough (our assigned colour) wasn’t too hard either, even if both L. and I thought it looked more orange than red.

The complication was producing the stripy rolled out dough with which to coat cubes of the mousse… We started off by rolling hand-sized pieces of dough and, brushing them with water, producing a multi-coloured stack. After a brief stay in the blast chiller, chef showed us how to cut three thin slices, stick them to each other to make an 3×6 colour ribbon, roll this out, cut a cross-shaped net of a cube and fix this around the mousse cube. As you can guess, not so easy to do yourself. I’ve a feeling we were over-generous with the water when sticking our layers together so they weren’t stuck firmly enough. Whatever, our sheets had a tendency to split as they were being rolled out. Still, I ended up with three cubes, even if they were a bit misshapen.

Plating was free, although we were expected to make a feature of a yoga-practising langoustine as well as the rainbow cubes. To me, this dish called for a fair amount of the bisque we had made so I chose a bowl-shaped plate. Most people, though, put the cubes on flat plates decorated with lines or blobs of the lime, soy sauce and chilli gel we’d also made. Given the generally unpresentable state of my cubes, I went for the whimsical approach of turning the cubes into dice (the top face at least) and balancing on my langoustine (actually chef’s in the picture as mine had only one claw…). Apart from the poor state of the cubes, chef was pleased with my plating, agreeing with my view that this is a dish best served with a generous helping of sauce and a spoon with which to eat it.

Oh, there was also the green oil in the sauce… I’d seen the squeezy bottle of the oil in the fridge and tested how it looked in a small container of the sauce. I figured it worked well and added it, then saw my Michelin-recognised partner from a couple of weeks ago reach over to take the bottle. I jokingly accused him of stealing my ideas only to be told by chef that the oil had been made by R. but that he was no longer allowed to use it as chef thought it had become an over-used signature decoration!

Back to the residence then out to shop with the appointed chefs in preparation for the weekend wine tour. Blog entries may be a little delayed in the coming days…