Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

… all will be well! So, fingers crossed…

The start to the day was a bit disorganised, though. Juliet from the Bread Shed is on holiday and James managed to cut himself yesterday. Mostly, therefore, students were running the show as the only experienced baker was with the people making croissants across the way in Kitchen 3 for much of the time. This meant my sourdough was somewhat overbaked but I knew what I was doing with my focaccia and could get on with things without too much of a bother.

I mentioned on Tuesday that I needed to make Grand Marnier soufflés today but I also had a starter recipe: beef consommé with julienned carrot, turnip, leek and celery as a garnish. Although you start with a beef stock, the recipe calls for a long slow cooking to extract flavour from chopped shin of beef, carrots, leek, celery and tomato and to allow the egg white to do its clarifying job. You’re supposed to bring everything to the boil slowly so that gave me time not only to julienne the garnish but also to cook and refresh it as well. This all matched well with my continued nursing of my focaccia so by 10:15 the consommé was gently simmering away and my focaccia was resting back in the Bread Shed (walk in) fridge.

Time to start on the soufflés! As per Tuesday, these start off with a crème pat base. Crème pat isn’t something I’m particularly keen on—me saying this led to an animated discussion with a fellow student across the hob but we agreed that the key taste in fruit tarts should be the fruit with a crisp pastry—and I’m sure the crème pat I was making knew this as it was determined to turn lumpy. A sieve turned out to be my friend, fortunately.

Preparing the soufflé dishes was the next task. This took longer than I expected—I had ten dishes to brush with butter and coat with caster sugar. Liv was asking me how things were going at this point and I reckoned I was about 30 minutes behind schedule; the earlier calm julienning was a distant memory as I started to worry about the various tasks still left on my order of work…

But! When I looked at my order of work after finishing preparing the soufflé dishes I realised I’d forgotten to tick off the cooking of the garnish for the consommé which I’d managed to fit in earlier. So, at 11am, 5 minutes after Liv’s question, I was magically back on schedule!

And things went (almost) smoothly from there. My filtered consommé was perfectly clear and my soufflés rose as soufflés should. The only flies in the ointment were that my consommé was a little under seasoned and that I’d rather over-estimated the amount of cream to serve with the soufflé. Liv and I discussed the under seasoning of the consommé; Rachel had warned us yesterday to be sure about the seasoning before we started the cooking as adding salt afterwards would turn it cloudy. Liv wasn’t convinced, though, that scattering over a little salt and leaving it to dissolve in gently would be much of a problem and she was right: just a little touch of salt improved the flavour vastly without affecting the clarity.

Back at the cottage after the demo, having my sourdough loaf to hand meant I could finally taste the olive oils J. had brought from Nyons. the fruit one is certainly fruity so I think the (bechamel based) olive soufflé I plan as a starter will be fine—and I can test these over the coming weekend. I’m a bit more worried about the ice cream for dessert, though. We can’t use the school equipment this weekend but I think I should anyway make and taste the custard here at the cottage and see what I can do about freezing some in the freezer we have here. A suivre…