Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

… and also beetroot and make butter. But first of all, check on my sourdough starter. I was a little worried that I should have taken it out of the fridge last night to start on making my bread this morning, but James says I needn’t have worried. Instead I have to reduce it to 200g, give it another big feed, leave it at room temperature for 3-4 hours and then leave it in the fridge overnight (it’s too warm now to leave large volumes of starter out all day). This I do.

In the kitchen after assembly, the first step is to make the stuffing (but with the beetroot starting to cook away in the background as these take an hour or so). The recipe is titled “potato stuffing”, but it’s really potato and apple stuffing added orange juice & zest. It sounds weird but it tastes pretty good when I’ve finished making it. The duck is stuffed and in the oven by 9:45 and, by the time I’ve tidied my station and washed up, the beetroot are cooked so I peel these and leave them to cool.

On to the butter! Just overwhip cream and you end up with butter… Not quite as easy as that; the cream we use is cultured thick cream from jersey cows, not the cream you’d buy in a supermarket, so it looks pretty thick even before you whip it.

But whip it long enough and the buttermilk comes out (you can see a bit in the bottom of the bowl in the picture below) leaving butter in your whisk.

This isn’t the end game, though, the butter needs to be washed in cold water to remove as much buttermilk as possible (removing all the buttermilk makes for a longer shelf-life) and then salted. Unfortunately the butterbats have disappeared so the washing in cold water was a little hard on my hands. And there are no pictures of that stage, but here’s the wrapped 450g of butter I ended up with from ~600g of cream.

After chopping up the beetroot (900g raw, so quite a few!) and tidying up again, the duck is ready to come out of the oven and I start on the gravy whilst it’s resting. Then on to carving. Ballymaloe are very particular about this. Everybody should have a portion that includes a bone, dark meat and white meat (well, breast meat for a duck). It’s a bit complicated but I think I manage better than with the chicken a couple of weeks back, even if taking the legs of a duck is harder than with a chicken. The six portions rest in the oven under damp parchment paper while I scrape the carcass with a fork to remove the scraps of meat, tidy up the considerable mess on my station, finish the gravy and cook the beetroot in cream—the beetroot is supposed to be served immediately it is ready.

Unfortunately, the stuffing now tastes rather more of orange than a) it did before it went in the oven and b) it should. Generally, though, Benita is happy with the overall result.

After the demo session I get a chance to discuss my final menu ideas with Rory. It’s actually timely as we’ve just been given more details of the planning process—and these say we’re supposed to explain the occasion for the menu. My original thinking was a menu which I could cook in Valréas along Ballymaloe’s “farm to fork” approach—so something with pork, for example, given I could source that from Ferme St Martin. Given I have to use Ballymaloe recipes, though, the idea now is to have some olive oil flavour and use Nyons olives in some way. Rory was happy with the general idea, more than happy with the olive oil ice cream dessert and willing to countenance the olive soufflé with an olive oil based roux. He wasn’t happy with my main course idea, though, as the original recipe has cream which I’m not allowed to leave out. I have another week to figure out another main course option but I guess I have to go with the olivey theme now…