Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

Pretty much everyone was cooking pasta today. My section was down to do Courgette & Basil Lasagne and Fettucini Alfredo as well as two desserts, Zabaglione Semifreddo and an Italian Fruit Salad. Somehow I ended up with the two most complicated ones, the lasagne and the semifreddo. As today was the day to start turning sourdough starter into a sourdough loaf, I had a busy morning.

I started in the Bread Shed, weighing out my starter, diluting this with water (to make the next step easier…) and adding in the flour. As Victoria, a member of the Bread Shed team, explained to a fellow student also making his first sourdough loaf, pretty much everyone who makes sourdough has their one true recipe and their one time-tested process. This was in answer to a question about why Ballymaloe recipe weights are as precise as 114g and 476g rather than, say, 115g and 480g. I suspect conversion between imperial and metric has something to do with this as well, but I digress. The Ballymaloe method, though, has you leave the starter/water/flour mix to rest for 30 minutes or so, add salt and then strengthen the gluten through a series of stretch-and-fold manipulations every 20-30 minutes over the next three hours. Me being me, I forgot to take any photographs during this stage, but I ended up with what I thought was a reasonable ball of dough which is resting in the fridge overnight.

As for my assigned tasks, the Zabaglione needed to be tackled first, despite exhortations to start making the pasta dough. The recipe might be “Zabaglione Semifreddo”, but it needed to freeze solid to be served and that would need time (spoiler: it didn’t freeze enough to be ready for serving). Before it could be put in the freezer, though, it needed at least half-an-hour of whipping with an electric beater and cream needed whipping to be folded into the sabayon. The test of how well this was done was to see how full the loaf tin was with the mix. Mine was very full, earning me a “well done” from Benita as she saw me pass on my way to the freezer.

More usefully, perhaps, Benita told me that the easiest way to get a piece of eggshell from a bowl of egg white (and even whole eggs, I guess), is to use another piece of eggshell; there’s some magnetic attraction between pieces of eggshell, apparently. I didn’t have chance to test this as all my spare eggshells were in the hen bucket by this stage, but I’ll have to try it sometime.

After cleaning up the sabayon spatters from around the section, it was finally time to make the pasta dough. Then on to make the bechamel. Fortunately, Benita had spotted that the lasagne recipe needed a triple quantity of the bechamel. Less fortunately, this meant that I needed triple the amount of roux and the nice full box of freshly prepared roux from which I’d taken 45g early in the morning was now empty… Making roux doesn’t take much time but, as usual, my schedule doesn’t take account of the time needed for teacherly interventions…

I managed to get back on track, though, as a pasta machine came free just as I was finishing the bechamel. I was in the middle of slicing my ~1kg of courgettes and wanted to finish the last two but Benita wasn’t having that; she had five students who all needed to roll out their pasta! The school pasta machines are large and really heavy duty, though, so it didn’t take me very long at all. Blanching the pasta did, though, as the large pan needed for this was also needed to cook the courgettes and basil for the filling so it was getting on for 12 o’clock by the time my lasagne was in the oven. It was supposed to take only 10-15 minutes in the oven—time I spent cleaning my station—but was refusing to brown. I set the timer for another ten minutes and spent two of them realising that I wouldn’t be presenting the semifreddo. Changing tack, I turned the oven to grill mode, collected some green salad and made a dressing. By then the lasagne was satisfyingly brown but it needed to rest for 10-15 minutes before serving. Luckily(!) my partner had finished presenting her dishes by then so I had something useful to do: scrub down the very dirty hob!

And at 12:30, I could present:

As my plans for a bike ride for some exercise have been scuppered by the Irish weather, you get this tale of my mornings work early…