Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

An early start today so we can finish early to give us time to change before the cocktail. Chef has put our choux buns on to bake so “all” S. & I have to do is to fill these with a mango, passion fruit and lime salad, pipe on whipped cream/mascarpone top with a square of mango and passion fruit gel and add gold leaf. The first step is simple: weigh the cream and mascarpone and put in the fridge to chill before whipping. The next step is equally obvious: prepare the fruit filling. S. opts to do this as we also have to finish our rice pudding mousse delicacies and this requires the 16x16cm square of frozen mousse to be cut up and placed on the shortcrust squares. S. considers I’m better at the cutting up side of things so starts on the peeling and chopping of the mango as I put the shortcrust squares in to bake.

I probably over-concentrate on achieving perfect 3x3cm squares of the mousse but chef has, after all, emphasised that he wants perfection. After trimming two sides to have neat edges from which to measure, cutting five 3×15.5cm isn’t too hard but, even so, chef spots that my knife hasn’t been perfectly vertical for one cut so one strip narrows from top to bottom and the adjacent one widens… The difficult bit is keeping the strips perfectly square to cut five of the 3x3cm pieces in one go. I suggest to chef that cutting them one at a time might be better but he thinks otherwise… I figure the job might be easier if the strips spend some time in the blast chiller while I poke holes in the choux buns so S. can fill them with the salad. Working with more solid mousse strips is indeed easier, but it’s still a pain and, trying to keep the strips aligned after the first couple of cuts I manage to flip one onto the floor—with, of course, chef watching from the opposite bench…

Eventually, though, we have 22 rice pudding mousse cubes sitting on their shortcrust bases and S. is filling the choux buns. Chef then demonstrates how he wants the mousse squares topped with three small pieces of fig and three pomegranate grains; a fiddly task but at least I learn the easy way to extract grains from a pomegranate (cut a wedge and pick them out for those that also have never done this…). There’s then a brief hiatus as chef hasn’t yet told us of the piping and gel topping steps for our choux buns but he is busy spray painting various other offerings with coloured cocoa butter. This gives me a chance to work on the afternoon’s savoury offering by cooking the choux eclairs. I’ve already moved them from the cooking class freezer to one of the pastry class fridges but one tray still needs the eclair edges trimmed…

Back to the mango-stuffed choux and S. has a bit of a dilemma: we need to pipe on the whipped mascarpone cream and top these with cut out squares of the gel—and neither piping not square cutting are her favourite tasks. She opts for the latter so I pipe away and then add the gold leaf decoration after S. has added the gel square. We and the rest of the class are all done with our various delicacies on presentation trays before the scheduled end of the class—a first in his eight years of teaching at the school!

I’m still not quite done as my eclairs are baking in the oven and things are not looking good. The two chefs have differing ideas on piping eclairs and I’ve been stuck in the middle. Pastry chef tells me that what we should have done yesterday was to pipe long lengths of dough, freeze these then cut them to length and top with craquelin. A pity I didn’t know this beforehand! He also thinks (and I agree) that the eclairs we did pipe are too close together. Which means they don’t dry out well enough in the oven. But by now the craquelin has overbaked and is all crumbly…

But first things first and S. and I wash the salt/sugar/beetroot cure off our salmon, chef cuts off a choice piece and we cut the rest up finely (the pieces have to fit through a piping nozzle…) and S. folds them into whipped cream/mascarpone whilst I collect the eclairs from the pastry racks. The disaster is then evident: there is no way we can slice the top off the eclairs, pipe salmon mousse into the bottom and put on a craquelin-topped eclair lid. Chef thinks rapidly and decides to cut delicate slices from the reserved choice piece of salmon and use these to top the mousse. It’s an elegant solution, but much more effort. We barely have time to finish them, with the addition of a dill frond, about which S. is very dubious but I insist, before the end of class. On the positive side, though, we miss out on most of the cleaning chores!

After a celebratory glass of wine, it’s back to the residence for a shower, a rest (brief, but much needed), packing, loading a car, fitting the bike rack and bike, another shower and dressing for dinner.

There’s a graduation ceremony just after we arrive then the assembled guests start to try our various offerings. I’m pleased to see our salmon boats are snapped up and particularly appreciate two offerings from L. (one of the chef’s on the Valréas trip), a langoustine based mix in a delicate butterfly tuile and a foie gras & pain d’épice ensemble. The hot offerings appear only after a speech, but the burgers are good as are A.’s arancini.