Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

But first, making a smoked fish & beetroot salad and bread and butter pudding. I’m back in the demo kitchen this week but, fortunately, in a better section. As usual, though, being in the demo kitchen means we don’t have as much time to prepare before assembly and that people are keen for us to finish early so there’s time to set up the afternoon demonstration.

Not surprisingly, then, there isn’t a great deal to do for either of the two recipes on my list. As the bread and butter pudding needs to rest for a while to allow the cream and milk mixture to soak into the bread before baking, I started with that. We didn’t, though, have the 20cm square dish the recipe was for, though, but a rectangular 20x30cm one. And Julia, the teacher, thought scattering half the 200g of sultanas over a layer of bread was too much. This led to us having three layers of bread rather than just two. That was OK as one student was away so we could use her loaf—and I could even add nice triangles of bread on top as in Fridays demonstration. More on that later.

That done, I made a quick trip back to the Bread Shed to put my sourdough starter back in the fridge after a feed before starting the planned sourdough loaf for J. I learnt from Juliet that focaccia doesn’t take three days as the recipe misleadingly suggests, but only two. This means I’ll have time to prepare the dough on Thursday—J. will be eating a lot of bread over the weekend! (Like the sourdough loaf, there’s a lot of stretching and folding the dough on the first day which isn’t really possible on a Wednesday as we don’t have the cooking time in the morning.)

Anyway, back in the demo kitchen I salt my hake, pickle beetroot for the salad, put my bread and butter pudding in the oven to bake and smoke the fish in a strove top smoker. It comes out much browner than the fish in Friday’s demonstration but it is cooked perfectly, so there’s no problem. As the fish is supposed to be at room temperature for the salad, I plate and present that just after 11 (we’re in the demo kitchen, remember!)

Julia’s only complaint is that the horseradish cream isn’t sufficiently pungent. That’s not my fault, though, it’s that the horseradish root is too old. Adding more grated horseradish doesn’t help as it makes the mix thicker so you have to add more cream which dilutes the pungency…

All that’s needed now is for my bread and butter pudding to finish baking and rest a while. Remember those triangles of bread, though? They’re browning nicely but the layer underneath isn’t so it’s a bit of a trial to get that layer to brown whilst not burning the triangles. My neighbour in the next section didn’t bother with the triangles and so, despite problems with her oven temperature, her pudding is ready well before mine. I still manage to present before the noon deadline, however! I don’t, though, remember to take a picture of the presented plate (which included whipped cream), but here’s a picture of the rest of the pudding.

The afternoon demonstration is devoted to various dishes that could be presented as part of a cold buffet—this used to be the tradition at Ballymaloe house. These included ox tongue, two of which had been boiled earlier in the day and were left to cool before being skinned.

Rory pressed one but sliced the other to create a demonstration plate. Ox tongue wasn’t offered during the post-demonstration tasting though but Rory was delighted when I asked to try some. And it was nothing like the thin tongue I remember from the 1970’s even if it did have a slightly grainy texture.

Then, after a quick trip to fermentation HQ for more water kefir, it’s off gooseberry picking. I can’t remember how exactly this came about (it was proposed last week), but someone with a number of gooseberry bushes just had a hip replacement and, as he can’t pick the gooseberries himself, said he’d be happy for the school to take what they could pick. Six of us went and managed to pick a fair few in not much more than an hour. We suspect, though, that we won’t be profiting much from our labours: no gooseberry recipes are in our pack for this week and next week is our last normal school week before our exams. Anyway, it was an interesting evening outing and I’m sure I’m not the only one who was tempted to try a few…