Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

… caramelising onions takes even longer! An hour or so of sweating them down when you’re practically chained to the hob as you have to give them a stir every couple of minutes so they don’t burn. Fortunately my order of work was well enough planned—I didn’t need to leave my station much during that hour. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Today was the first session in the Fermentation HQ after the introductory lecture on Wednesday. That started at 7:30 so I was in the kitchen at 6:50 for my mise-en-place. It really is important. MB from the cottage was on salad duty this morning and couldn’t do her mise-en-place before cooking proper started and her morning went downhill from there. It wasn’t really her fault. Compared to Gastronomicom, there’s a woeful shortage of containers for the MEPs, just around 20 or so metal bowls in the weigh-up area common to Kitchens 1 & 2 where there are some 40 students overall. Using the bowls and pans on our stations is sometimes an option but at Gastronomicom we had many, many plastic containers and you could always find something even if it might have been a bit larger than you really wanted. Perhaps Ballymaloe doesn’t like plastic, but things arrive in plastic anyway and the Gastronomicom containers were all containers from things such as yoghurt, cream and fruit sorbets which were being reused to the death.

Anyway, if I hadn’t had my mise ready before fermentation then my morning would also have gone badly. I was down to make French Onion Soup with the caramelised onions and a chicken and couscous salad (we were using left-over chicken from yesterday in various ways today) and I’d added a scone recipe—we’re encouraged to add recipes we haven’t cooked yet to practice the different skills we’re supposed to be learning.

But back to the Fermentation HQ. After a quick tour, we started on the easy stuff—Water Kefir—and Maria pretty much did things for us: weighed out our grains, water & sugar and gave us a dried apricot and a lemon slice. All we really had to do was to put a label on our jars and close them. But we’ll be expected to look after our ferments now; I have to go back on Sunday to check on mine.

Back in the kitchen I start on my additional scone recipe even though I’m not sure if the teacher will be happy—remember my mad but not frazzled day. Perhaps fortunately, it’s the same teacher today, Maggie, who is happy I’ve added the scones and even approves of my decision to start the scones first. They’re quickly made and the baking takes less than 15 minutes so I’m only part way through peeling my onions when they’re ready.

The one thing Maggie didn’t like about my order of work was my plan to use a mandolin to slice the onions. She thought it was a good idea, but wanted to check on my chopping technique. Which wasn’t up to her standards! I wasn’t using the full length of the knife blade and she showed me how to do this. I can see that it could be more efficient but my slices weren’t as thin with her method, at least initially. But she was happy with the trade off and I’ll have to remember the new technique in the coming weeks.

Then came the hour chained to the hob! But, as I said, I didn’t need to move much as almost everything I needed for the salad was right in front of me. Dirty bowls piled up but my station was tidy enough so Maggie had no complaints. Actually, she did have one: I got pomegranate juice everywhere! We were shown how to get seeds from a pomegranate by cutting one around the equator and bashing it with a wooden spoon. We never used the seeds from a whole pomegranate at Gastronomicom, though, so there I was taught to cut a segment vertically and take a few seeds from that. I knew I’d made a mistake after the first segment came out but there wasn’t much I could do.

In the end, though, Maggie was very happy with the dishes I presented—and, fortunately for this blog, reminded me to take pictures before things were tasted.