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- Donna
- I love to cook, and to eat, and to drink. Lots of each, and probably in that order. And then write a bit about my experiences. And to read about others doing the same. Follow me on twitter at http://twitter.com/donnaross
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Tuesday, 14 July 2009
Leiths School of Food and Wine: Classic French Desserts
17:12 | 
Posted by
Donna |
Demonstration
Crème caramel
Tarte au citron
Practical
Coffee éclairs
Chocolate macaron
Tarte tatin
Today is Bastille Day, the day that marked the beginning of the French Revolution and now a national holiday in France. I like to imagine the nation has sat around all day, celebrating all that it means to be French: eating fabulous cheese, drinking amazing wine and feasting on their favourite pâtisserie. Unlikely, I'll grant you but a lovely image nonetheless.
Crème caramel et tarte au citron.
Prepared by Claudine, eaten by class
Paper choux-t
Upside down and empty. So sad.
Filled with cream and dunked in coffee icing, the right way up. As they should be!
Pound-coin (ish) sized blobs were what we were aiming for as they'd expand slightly when cooking to give little mouthfuls of deliciousness
I should have included something in one of these photos to give some sense of their size. Each single macaron is about 1 -1.5cm thick, so about 2.5 - 3 cm wide in all.
Hubble, bubble, toil and trouble....
"Ah yes, that looks like just the right amount of apples for two..."
"What was that? There shouldn't be any space left around the apples before you snuggle the pastry blanket all around and press down quite firmly, tucking the pastry under as much as you can? Oh." (Will do that next time)
Hey, doesn't look too bad at all, apple-gaps and all.
Leiths School of Food and Wine appear to be of the same mind, honouring the classic French desserts in a 4-hour specialist class today. The menu above was covered at a fair lick, but with plenty opportunity to ask questions or seek clarification.I was most looking forward to making macaron having read a great blog post about a bunch of London food bloggers making them, and drooled over the photos, and also being a fan of eating the Paul offerings.
I had wondered how we were going to get through the advertised 5 desserts in a 4-hour class and the answer was by demonstrating two and making three, which was fair enough in the time we had, but a little bit more interaction with the demos would have been good.
Today I realised how useful having a ceiling-mounted mirror is in a demo - you feel so much more connected to what's going on at the chef's station when you can see exactly what they're doing.Tarte au citron and crème caramel were both made by Claudine in front of the class, and although she explained exactly what she was doing as she went, it would have been better to see what she was doing as she did it.
She had some handy hints about making caramel, custard and pâte sucrée, which I've scribbled round and about the recipes, and having popped my cooking course cheery, I made sure I asked whatever questions I had instead of holding back like I did my first day at Ashburton.
Demo done, it was on to the real stuff. Claudine talked us through each of the recipes we'd be making: coffee éclairs, chocolate macaron and tarte tatin.
First up: choux pastry. I've never made choux, not sure I've even thought about making it. I think I'd written it off as something only pastry chefs make (still have puff pastry in that category) and was amazed at how easy it was.
Top tip for the choux was to make a choux-t (no? ah well) from parchment which allows you to direct your thrice-sifted flour to the boiling water and butter with maximum speed and efficiency and minimum spillage.
This being the first time I've made choux, I'm not sure if this is an improvement on just tipping the bowl of flour in, so for now I'll trust it's a top tip and see how I fare when I inevitably can't be bothered with the paper-folding when I make it at home.
Paper choux-tOnce the flour is beaten in to the liquid and becomes a thick paste - the panade - it's tipped out on to a plate to cool.
Once cooled, it was in with almost three beaten eggs. I didn't need the whole mix; the pastry reached what Claudine called "reluctant dropping consistency" (love that!) before I added it all in. Failing to read the recipe properly meant I added far too much egg initially, and struggled to keep signs of panic off my face as the mixture looked as if it had curdled ( I hate failing in my own kitchen, alone. Fail in a class full of other cooks? Not if I can help it!).
A strong beating arm and silent curses returned it to a smooth paste, and it was on with the piping.The aim was to get even, consistent eclair shapes that would all cook and brown evenly.
We could have piped balls for profiteroles, or shorter sausage shapes for more bite size eclairs, but I tried to go for dainty, two-bite numbers.
I turned them once while baking, and then when done, poked a hole through them with a skewer to let the steam escape and popped them back in the oven for a few minutes to dry a little on the inside. Once cooled, one or two (okay, three) were filled with sweetened cream, dipped in coffee icing and eaten there and then. The rest were iced and taken home, to be filled just before serving them to Ben, Denise and Matt after dinner tonight.
Upside down and empty. So sad.Filled with cream and dunked in coffee icing, the right way up. As they should be!Coffee éclairs, done. Next!
Ah, macaron. Not to be confused with he desiccated coconut and rice paper macaroons with-two-Os. French macaron are airy, almond-y meringues, sandwiched together with a cream of some description.
Pound-coin (ish) sized blobs were what we were aiming for as they'd expand slightly when cooking to give little mouthfuls of deliciousnessThey seemed to take an age to cook. When they're done, they should lift off the baking sheet without sticking. If they stick, they need a little longer. When they cooled, we sandwiched them together with a little blob of chocolate ganache.
I should have included something in one of these photos to give some sense of their size. Each single macaron is about 1 -1.5cm thick, so about 2.5 - 3 cm wide in all.The macaron turned out well - crispy on the outside, fluffy and mallowy in the middle. But I'm not sure I'm that keen on chocolate as a flavour for them. so next time I'll experiment with fruit flavours, and also try them plain almond. Top tip was to make a batch, split it into four bowls (or as many as you want) and play with flavours to our heart's content.And last but certainly by no means least, the tarte tatin.
Now, I have tried to make tarte tatin before, but I think I made it up rather than follow a recipe. I don't remember it turning out all that well. In future, this is the recipe I'll follow. It's from Leiths Cookery Bible, and if you have that book, I implore you to make this recipe.
The pastry has rice flour in it, which I have never used before, but gave a great texture to the pastry, crunchy and a bit nutty. Brilliant idea.The caramel was a mixture of butter and sugar, and although there was some debate over dinner whether I'd cooked it too long (Matt may have said the word "burnt". I may have stuck my fingers in my ears and said "la la la la") it worked far better than earlier attempts at water/sugar caramel.
Hubble, bubble, toil and trouble...."Ah yes, that looks like just the right amount of apples for two...""What was that? There shouldn't be any space left around the apples before you snuggle the pastry blanket all around and press down quite firmly, tucking the pastry under as much as you can? Oh." (Will do that next time)Hey, doesn't look too bad at all, apple-gaps and all.So to recap: 4 hours, 2 demos and 3 desserts. Phew.Once we'd inverted our tart tatin onto a plate and cleared our stations we had a light lunch of cheese, bread and fruit followed by a slice of tarte au citron and a blob of crème caramel. And then the kitchen assistants swung into clean-up action, we packed our pâtisserie into boxes and headed home. A good day's baking, a good class and some great desserts.
Vive la France!
Saturday, 11 July 2009
Sea trout with broad bean risotto
I'm lucky to have an excellent fishmonger (Steve Hatt, Essex Road, N1) a 5 minute cycle from where I live, and it's a favourite at the weekend when I have time to stop by and see what looks good. A price ticket telling me their line-caught sea trout was the cheapest it's been all year won me over, and I tried not to blink when the fishmonger said the whole thing would be £22. I didn't really do the mental arithmetic to work out a big fish would be well over a kilo, and I had the cash to cover it so I said yes, added a dressed crab to the bag too, and figured we'd just have to eat a lot of fish over the weekend!
I got the fishmonger to fillet the fish for me and two massive fillets yielded 6 very generous portions. For dinner on Saturday I fried the first two fillets in a very hot pan with a smashed clove of garlic and a bay leaf, as suggested by Hugh F-W in the River Cottage Fish book (in a recipe for sea trout with creamed sorrel, p308). Since no sorrel was to found in Islington, I served it atop a risotto of broad beans, rocket, spinach and watercress instead. The broad beans were lovely fresh specimens from the veg box, and I love them in risotto.
I made the risotto the usual way, and added the broad beans about 5 minutes before the risotto was cooked. Once cooked, I stirred through the leaves (bought as a mixed bag) until they wilted a bit but not cooked.
The sea trout was just gorgeous, I love trout and this was a beauty. I made the skin good and crispy but by some miracle timed it just right so the middle was still slightly underdone..
The other fillets were served with new potatoes, roast beetroot and home-made slaw the next day, and the two tail end pieces cooked at the same time, but made into a salad with the leftover veggies on Monday.
And I certainly shouldn't be so wary of the spending a bit more than usual on good quality, sustainably sourced fish in the future: at £3.66 a serving, it wasn't as dear as I initially thought. And considering I cut each fillet into three greedy portions rather than the four regular-sized portions it could easily have yielded, goes to show that £22 of fish can go a long way when you try.
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Thursday, 9 July 2009
Summer sausage rolls
I made these as an easily portable dinner for the drive to Glastonbury. That wasn't really thought through all that well - pastry has a habit of crumbling as it's eaten. But given the very, very long queue we joined a mile from Shepton Mallet, I was glad we had something to eat, pastry crumbs or not.
I started off with a packet of defrosted puff pastry, 5 peppery pork sausages from my butcher, and about 150g diced pork shoulder, which I chopped up some more. I squeezed the sausages from the casing and split the meat in half, and added half the chopped pork to each bowl. Each bowl then went in a different flavour direction. The one on the left got about 12 chopped apricots, a couple of finely chopped spring onions. The other got a teaspoon of hot paprika and a finely chopped roasted pepper which I had denuded and deseeded.
After a good squish to mix the flavours through the meat, I dropped lumps of mixture to make a wobbly line of sausage meat down each half of rolled pastry. I tried to made the line slightly off centre and pasted a line of egg wash down the edge closest to the filling so I could flip the other side of pastry over and seal it.
I sliced the line into 4 almost all the way, but didn't pull them apart in the hope of saving my kitchen counter from a crumbly mess trying to slice them later and that worked pretty well.
I baked them at 180c for about 55 minutes as the pastry didn't go all that brown in the first 30-40 minutes. Et voila, home made sausage rolls.
Matt preferred the paprika and red pepper, I preferred the apricot and spring onion. It's like we were destined to be festival-bound car buddies forever or something :)
Saturday, 4 July 2009
Gastron-bury
I haven't done much cooking at all since getting back from Glastonbury as I haven't been in much, so in the meantime, this is a snapshot of what you missed at the summer's best food festival that happens to have bands playing at it....
Creole chicken from Yam the cassava
Cajun (a kind of jerk-lite) chicken from Yam the Cassava. Have to say I thought Yam's offerings this year was really disappointing compared to years past. And proof if it were needed: Matt only ate there once in 4 days!
Best bacon and egg roll on site from the Real Sausage Company. Thick, crispy bacon, egg over easy, brown roll with a cup of tea or coffee thrown in for £3.50. Oddly for a sausage stall, their sausages weren't as tasty though.
Jerk chicken from another Jamaican food stall. Very tasty jerk, just spicy enough.
Red velvet cupcake from the cupcake van in Trash City. Delicious!
Burrow Hill cider: without it, Glastonbury just wouldn't be Glastonbury. Mine's a medium, Matt's a dry.
Curry mutton from the Jamaican stall near the cider bus. Very, very good.
And the music was pretty good too :)
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