Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

I’m only down to cook a pepper salad and a blackcurrant leaf sorbet today so I add a new bread, cheese biscuits and tapenade to my order of work. The bread because we’ll be assigned a random one to cook for our 6-week exam so we need to have done them all, the cheese biscuits because, similarly, biscuit making is a technique we have to have learnt and tapenade because I like it.

The bread is “bastible bread”—soda bread but cooked in a bastible, which is essentially the Irish equivalent of a dutch oven—a pot that could be suspended over a fire or placed in a fire on its three legs. The advantage for bread cooking is that it keeps in the steam so keeping the crumb moist. The equivalent today is a Le Creuset casserole and my first problem is that there aren’t any round casseroles in my kitchen this week, Kitchen 3. But I’m told it works just as well in an oval casserole dish so this is what I end up with:

and Donal, my teacher today, is pretty happy with it. He also gives me a tip we’re not allowed to use at the school: the bread is cooked if the internal temperature reaches 92°C; we’re supposed to judge by the weight (essentially judging whether the middle has cooked enough) and whether it sounds hollow enough.

Donal is also helpful with the cheese biscuits. Rory rolled his biscuit dough out on his worktop and transferred the cut proto-biscuits to a baking tray. It’s much easier to part-roll out the dough on the worktop then roll it out to the 1mm thickness on an upturned baking tray, then cut and bake the biscuits on the upturned tray. I need two trays for all my dough so the batch that was lower in the oven needs a few more minutes but, again, a reasonably successful outcome.

My blackcurrant leaf sorbet is also pretty good (although I preferred the taste of the lemon balm sorbet made by others). I do get, though, some tips on better presentation which I’ll need to bear in mind. I forgot that doilies are a thing here. But for practical reasons: if you put, as I did, a stemmed glass bowl on a plate then the doily will stop the bowl moving around as the waiter carries it from the kitchen to the diner.

My salad presentation is OK, but the taste less good. It lacked salt—and Maldon salt added both taste and texture. I’d tasted individual elements of the dish but not all together…

After the afternoon demonstrations it was time for a class on sausage making, fortunately something I’m well used to doing. We made chorizo sausage to cure, fennel sausages and Laura, our teacher for this class, made sausage rolls with the fennel sausage meat we couldn’t squeeze out of the sausage stuffers. Not sure when I’ll be hungry enough to eat these, though!

Back at the cottage I had a chance to try my water kefir after the second fermentation and it was pretty good: a definite mandarin taste but the addition of the ginger was definitely a plus.

Some fermented grape juice was also on the menu for the evening. As it’s a lecture day tomorrow we don’t have to prepare any orders of work so a bunch of us sat around discussing our experiences so far and swapping tales of what we’d heard about the exams. We also had information today about the option to discuss “career advice” with Darina, Rachel or Rory so there was some discussion about whether we’d take this (I probably won’t but most of the others around the table will) and who we’d choose—the consensus was that being able to talk to a couple of them could be useful as they’d have different perspectives. On a related point, MB had us all saying what single item we’d propose if we had a) a small bricks and mortar shop with a serving hatch/window and b) a food truck. Possibly influenced by the charcuterie class earlier I said different varieties of sausage sandwiches for both. Some people were clearly thinking about potential customers, though, with a couple proposing trucks selling sandwiches outside a high school! And some reality was injected into the conversation by people with experience of working in a food truck—one was definitely not keen to take up the challenge.