Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

It’s Monday so, as usual, there’s a lot of preparation for things we’ll make in coming days—plated desserts, this week. To start, my partner this week, B., makes a shortcrust pastry and I make a yoghurt cream (essentially a white chocolate ganache with added greek yoghurt), both for an apricot “cannelloni” (I guess more will be revealed later). All of our plated desserts feature sorbet or ice cream so the next task is to make one of these for the whole class. We prepare apricot sorbet, as does the table opposite. There’s also a pecan ice cream and a ginger sorbet. Chef then demonstrates the making of a Swiss meringue—similar to a French but whisking twice the weight of flour with the egg whites, leaving out the addition of icing sugar at the end, and, as there’s so much sugar to be whisked in, the egg whites need to be warmed before the whisking.

The difference this week is that something else is prepared—us for the coming written and practical exams… Chef spends nearly 90 minutes going through all the different sorts of sponges, meringues, creams and mousses, explaining their preparation and the key dishes for which they are used (Lady Fingers for tiramisu, joconde for Opèra, …). Apparently ~40% of the marks for the theoretical test will depend on how well we know all these by Thursday morning!

Cooking class is similarly adapted to the impending end of the course and the graduation cocktail—an event made more important on this occasion as the school will also be celebrating its 20^th anniversary. In previous months, the third week was devoted to fish preparation and the fourth to meat. This week we’ll be doing fish some days with meat on others so we can devote time to the cocktail preparations next week. Also, we’ll have the same partner for both weeks although my assigned partner, S., is away today.

For most of the time it’s not a problem; the dish is sea bass with clam marinière, potato and beetroot crisps and a sauce maltaise. The large sea bass are portioned out by chef and the preparation of the clam marinière is not too difficult. The tricky bit is the potato and beetroot crisps… These are made by cutting thin ribbons from potatoes and beetroot using a device to rotate them against a blade to shave off the strip. It sounds simple, but holding the potato/beetroot against the blade with an even pressure whilst turning the handle is definitely not as easy as it looks. All goes reasonably well for the first potato but the next one and the two beetroot are smaller and I end up with short strips rather than continuous ribbons. I do have one long potato ribbon to cut into a triangle and roll into a croissant shape plus another two that I can put together, though, so all is not lost for the crispy potato element (the croissants are steamed for 15 minutes then deep fried). Rolling beetroot and potato ribbons into a tight roll to fit into a 7cm ring is harder as I keep needing to join in new ribbons, but I just about manage; the roll is trimmed to the 3cm height of the ring then baked for 20 minutes. Working without a partner means I haven’t yet done the mise en place for the maltaise sauce but chef helps out there and also keeps an eye on my brown(ing) butter as I deep fry the potato croissants.

With the sauce maltaise prepared, it’s time to cook the fish and plate. There’s not much to say here as we were supposed to copy chef’s plating. I did OK and, most importantly, cooked the fish perfectly. Just as well as I’ll be eating it for dinner tonight…