Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

5/15/2026

One third of the way through!

It’s the end of week 4, so we’re a third of the way through the course. As we were warned (and as at Gastronomicom last year), it really does go quickly. And I may now be less worried about lining a flan tin with shortcrust pastry for the test in two weeks time. No picture today, but I did more by myself than yesterday and it turned out OK. Again, though, I didn’t have time to make a filling but that’s not where I’ve been failing. As I don’t have a picture of the pastry base, here’s a picture of today’s dawn instead.

The assigned tasks for today were firstly to make pasta and serve it with a garlic and herb sauce and secondly to fillet a pollock and serve it with a spicy tomato sauce. Rather than using whole eggs, the mix was yolk heavy: one whole egg and 5 yolks to 325g of flour. Kneading it was hard work and I was glad when Laura, the teacher today, said I could add a little water as I was doing the kneading—something I do at home but I wasn’t sure how this mix was supposed to behave. I have to say, though, that it rolled out really well. Another difference to my home pasta production is that we had to leave the cut pasta out to dry a little rather than just keeping it in on the bench.

Maybe I need a dedicated pasta-drying clothes horse at home…

I’m getting ahead of myself a little as although I made the pasta early on, I only rolled it out after filleting the fish.

Unfortunately I failed to cut round the pin bones in the Ballymaloe style but ended up with reasonable fillets for the baked fish recipe. And here are the presented dishes.

Laura was generally happy even if she thought my pasta dish was a little garlicky. She did admit, though, that the recipe was for garlic and herb pasta; it’s just that her preference is for simple herb pasta.

Following the afternoon demonstrations I headed to Fermentation HQ to prepare the latest batch of my water kefir—mandarin and ginger this time. And I had a full litre as my partner had a family visit for the weekend. I’ll be adding kombucha to my preparations next week but I’ve had to reschedule this from Monday to Wednesday as I’m down to make the yeast bread again so have to start early in the Bread Shed on Monday morning.