Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

I was pleased to see I was down to make crab mayonnaise today. There was even some hope from the demo yesterday afternoon that I would be cooking crab as well. Given the disappointing outcome of my previous attempt at cooking crab, I was hoping that I’d learn how to do things properly—even though from Rachel’s demonstration it looked as if I’d at least gone about taking the meat out the right way.

However… I was delivered a partly defrosted male crab. The school is at the mercy of what can be delivered but the addition of a packet of white crab meat suggested I wasn’t going to be able to get much meat out. And indeed not—only 75g! A fellow student across from me managed 140g from hers… That sort of suggests, though, that the 250g I managed from the two at home is about par even if 200g per crab seems to be the expectation. And I guess what I learnt from the day is that I did do things properly at home. Perhaps I should try again…

Anyway, as usual, I was too much in the flow of things to take any pictures of the crab exercise, but here’s one towards the end of the morning where you can see my crab mayonnaise in the metal and white bowls behind the tray with the fish.

And that fish, hake, was another replacement for the flat fish I was supposed to be baking; a shame as the recipe is pretty simple and sounds really good. Cut round the edge of the dark skin on your plaice/whatever—make sure the cuts cross at the tail—put in a baking tray with a little water and bake at 180°C for 10 mins or so until it is cooked (there must still be some water in the tray) and you can pull off the skin. Do that and serve covered with herb butter or beurre blanc.

Instead, I had to fillet the hake—not the easiest of fish to fillet!—and bake it for 5-6 minutes at 250°C. It was good, though, and Fran was more than happy with my beurre blanc.

Very evident on the first picture is the baking tray with chips—cooked once (the potatoes were boiled in their skins) and for a second time (in beef fat at 150°C) and awaiting the third step (in beef fat at 190°C) to make them thrice cooked. As you might expect after yesterday, there was a queue for the deep fat fryers… Anyway, here they are served jenga-style with the crab mayonnaise.

There was also another accompaniment, Namjim, in the mortar in the first picture. This is a coriander-heavy Thai sauce with garlic and chillies—and it takes some time to make as you use coriander stalks (and roots if you have them), so there’s a lot of pounding with the pestle!

The fifth and final (to mention…) thing on the first photograph is the two ciabatta loaves (there’s another two elsewhere). I realised (unlike some…) that fitting these in needed an early start: you need to activate yeast in warm milk for 10 minutes, mix this with water and the biga from yesterday, mix in the flour for another 10 minutes and then knead the dough for another 15-20 minutes before leaving it to rest for 1-1.5hrs before shaping it, leaving it to rest for another 45 minutes and then baking for 30-45. The 15-20 minute kneading step gave me plenty of time to get ahead of my order of work by (hand!) making the mayonnaise…

Starting early meant my dough was resting by 7:30, so shaping the loaves for their pre-bake rest was the first thing Fran saw me doing this morning, somewhat to his surprise. The loaves turned out well, though, and I was pleased to receive some positive comments from other teachers as they were sitting on the bench.

Strawberry water kefir today: