Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

And with a little panic as it took me a fair while to find my sourdough starter in the Bread Shed this morning. I think people are starting to plan what to do with theirs when the course ends so some that haven’t been looked at in a while have been taken out to see if they’re worth keeping. Some definitely aren’t…

But, I found my jar and also set up a rendezvous tomorrow morning for my focaccia to be baked at 7:30 so all is good. I used the Nyons oil in the preparation but the amount is small (just 15g), so I don’t know how much difference that will make as I had to use school oil to slather the readied dough with before covering it in baking paper for fridge storage overnight. I should have enough of my oil to put on before baking, though. Anyway, as J. wants a picture and there wouldn’t be any otherwise, here’s one of my focaccia just at the beginning of the 3-hour coil fold process to get the gluten working.

As we didn’t have any cooking this morning I had to sneak out of the demo session a couple of times for the folding process—Darina is very firm about keeping the demo area clean and tidy!

Rory’s last demo session covered a few extravagances—hot oysters with champagne sauce, poached whole salmon and sea trout, haunch of venison, carpaccio—but also one particular bête noire of mine (and others I know…): Œufs à la Neige or Îles Flottantes. Rory’s might be good (he did cover them with caramel) but I can’t help thinking they only exist because restaurants have egg whites to use up.

After the demo we had the draw for which bread we have to cook tomorrow. I’m down for a traditional brown soda bread which is probably on the easier end of the scale although, as Liv pointed out yesterday, judging is likely to be more harsh for these: we’ll be expected, especially in Ireland, to produce an absolutely perfect soda bread.

Following lunch I had my cook ahead session for my ice cream–remember that at Ballymaloe ice cream is most definitely not served soft and three hours allotted isn’t enough time to achieve a hard enough set. This afternoon it even took over an hour for mine to freeze in the ice cream machine—way longer than it took for my trial on Saturday. At one stage I was beginning to wonder if I’d made some mistake but then I realised that others who were churning theirs away at machines elsewhere were also waiting. The end result seemed to taste OK so it’s on to the soufflés, peppers, steak and shortbread. My plan of action for tomorrow fits the time available (I’ve only been docked 7.5 minutes for the time I spent actually doing anything other than anxiously waiting this afternoon…); let’s see what happens!