Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

… but let’s hope it’s my last!

I was down to make strawberry tartlets today and a “smacked cucumber salad”. The pastry for the tartlets needs chilling for 30mins after you make it and then the tartlet bases need another 30 mins chilling before backing. Given that the cucumber salad only take 15 minutes to make, Julia approved my plan to throw in shortbread biscuits to tick off another item on my technique list.

So, after making the tartlet pastry (in a food processor), I start on the shortbread. I’m told I have to make this dough by hand but, even so, I have a batch of shortbread biscuits cooling on the windowsill before it’s time to roll out the tartlets. These are admired by various passers by and Julia is happy with my presentation later.

Actually, the tartlets aren’t quite as simple as I made out; we also have to make Crème St Honoré as a filling—a lighter version of Crème Pâtissière as you fold in whisked egg whites. So I make this whilst the tartlet cases are chilling and baking. There’s a bit of a faff as they take more like 20 minutes to bake (on an upside down tart tin with hemispherical cups) than the 12-14 of the recipe. Anyway, they pass muster as does the presented tartlet for Julia.

Julia was also a fan of the tiered structure I chose for the other tartlets I’d made, so much so that the others made in the demo kitchen were added for presentation in the dining room.

As for the cucumber salad, not much to say, really. You bash the cucumber a bit, cut it into 4 lengthwise then into pieces. salt it to extract some moisture then toss it in an asian spicy dressing. As I said, 15 minutes work, 10 of which are for the draining (and making the dressing in parallel, I guess).

We’ll be cooking steaks next week, so we had a butchery demonstration in the afternoon. All of the beef we’re using during the course is from a cow from the farm (not one of the Jersey dairy cows!) that was slaughtered two weeks before the course started—-so the side of beef Garry and Pam were butchering down had been hanging for 7 weeks.

And as you can’t have steak without chips we were also shown fried potato delicacies.

I don’t have to make chips on Monday but I do have to make Béarnaise Sauce and start a spiced beef recipe as well as starting on some puff pastry. Luckily, the Ballymaloe version seems more akin to Chef Fabrice’s version at Gastronomicom rather than the very precise pâtissèrie version of Chef Pol. And there’s another Gastronomicom link: I ended up with the dishes I’m doing as my section also has to make Tarte Bordaloue. My partner likes pears so was happy to take the starter & dessert recipes leaving me with the mains. (Teams tend to alternate, so on Tuesday I’ll be doing the starter and desserts and she’ll be taking the mains; we find out what we’re assigned at lunch time the day before.)

Away from the kitchens it was, as I’d mentioned, past time to harvest the extra grains from the water kefir. We use 120g of grains for a litre of sugared water and I had 180g left over when I started my new batch. So the old ones were put in a dehydrator…

… stirred around a little at lunch time and ready to be kept safe for future home production by the evening.

Naturally, I had 1l of water kefir ready for it’s second fermentation (carrot and ginger) this time. As for my kombucha, it’s apparently behaving itself according to Maria but I couldn’t really tell the difference. I guess that’s not really a surprise as it takes two weeks to be ready and it’s only had a couple of days.