Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

Classes in both pastry and cooking today and tomorrow are devoted to preparations for the graduation cocktail on Thursday evening. And there is even more to do than usual as Gastronomicom is celebrating its 20th anniversary so there are a bunch of special guests in addition to the staff, students and partners.

And for both pastry and cooking I have partners with initial S. and a choux based delicacy to prepare.

The pastry preparation is fairly straightforward; we make the craquelin and then the choux pastry. The only oddity is that this is piped into half-sphere moulds—to guarantee, I guess, an even result rather than relying on our piping skills. Anyway, a tray of 24 craquelin coated half-spheres is sitting in the freezer by the end of the class. S. and I are also preparing a rice pudding based delicacy: a cube of rice pudding mousse will be sitting on a sablé biscuit with a topping of fig jelly. The mousse and jelly are also in the freezer with the sable pre-cut and in the fridge waiting to be baked.

Things don’t go quite so smoothly in cooking class. Our first step is to put a side of salmon to cure overnight in a salt, sugar and beetroot mix. Not so hard. We are supposed then to make the choux pastry but chef agrees we can do things in the order I’m used to from pastry class so we make the hazelnut and squid ink craquelin and leave this in the blast chiller. Definitely a good move, not least as the blast chiller is soon packed with other things. S. hasn’t made choux pastry before so I guide him through the steps we’ve learnt in pastry class and mark out guide lines on parchment paper for our 5cm long eclairs.

Again, our cooking chef is a little surprised that S. is piping the proto-eclairs to extend beyond the lines but I explain that this is as I asked and that I plan to trim the ends to shape as we do in pastry class. That’s OK but chef is not happy with the piping nozzle I chose so we switch to a smaller one. There’s a dearth of baking sheets, though, as other teams are all baking things. I take some from the pastry class but that creates a difficulty as the cooking and pastry sheets aren’t the same dimension… Cooking class uses gastronorm (GN) sizes which, I think, are chosen so that ovens, fridges and the like will fit in a standard 60x60cm unit. Pastry sheets, on the other hand, are 40x60cm so the ovens and fridges there will be wider than normal. Anyway, we’re using pastry sheets and there’s no room in the pastry class freezer or blast chiller and I can’t use the cooking blast chiller (which is anyway full…). Fortunately I can move things around in the cooking freezer and fit in two trays; the third just has to sit in a pastry class fridge.

S. has been valiantly piping away whilst I juggle eclair trays and mark out the two trays of craquelin into 2x5cm strips. It really was worth having these in the blast chiller early as they soften quickly in the heat of the cooking kitchen. S. wonders if we could work in the cooler pastry kitchen but there are no spare benches. As we have two craquelin trays, though, we can work with one whilst the other cools back down in the chiller. We make progress, even if it’s slow progress, and have our eclairs wrapped and in the freezer overnight by the end of the class.

No pictures, I’m afraid, but there should be some tomorrow if I have time to write up the day’s adventures before the cocktail…