Patisserie – Week Six
I may have had the flu this week, but when we brought this Mandarin Cake home Friday, I finally had my appetite back and devoured this slice!
Mandarin Cake:
Passion mousse, passion jelly and a crunchy cookie bottom. Tangy and sweet!
Tear Drops White Chocolate Dessert:
Coconut cake (dacquoise) and passion jelly in Chantilly cream and white chocolate.
Chocolate Banana Mousse Dessert:
Layers and layers of yummy! Caramel dipped chocolate banana mousse on a bed of chocolate cake and crunchy cookie encircled by dark chocolate!
A La Cuisine – Week Ten
The flu was going around this week and it was hard to pull through the long feverish days! I would write about the dishes but my brain wasn’t in it; thank goodness my camera still was! Enjoy the photos.
Patisserie – Week Five
Pain Paysan/Seigle:
This rye bread was outstanding! I will certainly be making it at home often. Chef recommends it to be served with oysters and a crisp, fruity white wine.
Pâte à Choux:
This was my first time making choux pastry. It takes lots of arm muscles! We turned our pâte à choux into chouquettes and eclairs. It is so interesting how they bake up hollow, ready for a filling.
Pain au Chocolat:
We made croissant dough again this week, except rolled them out completely by hand instead of using the machine. I would say you have to be even more careful to create an even product (butter evenly distributed within the layers of dough) when rolling this dough out by hand. I was glad to do it without the machine this time, however, simply because I don’t believe my kitchen at home will be equipped with one!
Pains aux Raisins:
The pains aux raisins were made with brioche dough and pastry cream. In stores here, they are often called escargot because their spiral shape resembles a snail’s shell. I’d rather eat the pains aux raisin!
A note on Puff Pastry:
Did you know 5 tours of the dough creates 729 couche de beurre (layers of butter)? A tour is the way the dough is folded and then rolled out. You can make simple tours or double tours as viewed in the photo of the white board lesson. A double tour is equal to 1.5 simple tours or 2 doubles would be the same as 3 simples. For puff pastry, or feuilletage, we usually do 5 tours (2 simple and 2 double).
Feuilletage has 2 parts. The first part of the recipe is the detrempe. Detrempe is the dough you make before you add the dry butter. It contains flour, water, salt and melted butter. The second part of the feuilletage recipe is the dry butter (in the photos you see this as the butter we wrap the dough around and begin incorporating into the dough with our tours).
A La Cuisine – Week Nine
I really enjoyed the cabbage rolls this week. There are so many different kinds of cabbage and some of their leaves are really quite beautiful. We lightly blanched whole cabbage leaves and used them to wrap a mixture of sauteed onion, garlic, bacon, salt, pepper and a variety of cabbage.
Each week we have prepared different decorations for plating. As well as having lots of fresh herbs, edible flowers, oils and balsamics on hand, we often make coloured simple syrups (such as red syrup made from beets), mandolin vegetables or fruits and put them into the dryer or make tuiles.
A tuile batter is a runny, sweet, biscuit-like composition. You can pour it or spread it into different shapes or into stencils, bake it and then peel it off the tray for either drying or re-shaping. Commonly, we will take a hot tuile from the oven, still malleable, and set it over a rolling pin to form a curved final shape when it completely cools and becomes hard. In the photo below you will see us re-shaping the tuile with a metal circle form while it is hot.
A glimpse of the everyday
A photograph of one of the many cheese stalls at the Saturday market at The Port in Cap d’Agde, only a five minute walk from our apartment.
The market runs from 5am – 2pm each Saturday and is something we both look forward to. It is a place to try out our French, do some tastings, plan out our next few delicious meals and pack home our heavy bags of bounty (while often munching on our Saturday morning pastry).
Some of our favourite things to purchase are: olives or olive tapenade, fresh goat cheese, farm fresh eggs, figs and other bright colourful fruits and vegetables, crispy and soft bread and an item or two from the butcher (whose line up usually takes a good half an hour to get through!)
A note on bakeries. The french have patisseries, viennoiseries and boulangeries. Boulangerie comes from the french word for ball – boul, because traditional loaves of bread were in a boul (round loaf). Therefore, Boulangeries sell bread! A patisserie will sell pastries of all different kinds with a variety of fillings. Viennoiseries are Vienna (Austria) specialties. Viennoiseries are almost a cross between a Patisserie and a Boulangerie. Popular treats considered to be Viennoiseries are croissants, pane au chocolat, brioche, chausson aux pommes and pane aux raisins. These items use yeast-leavened doughs like breads, however, usually cream, butter, eggs and sugar are added, which make them more pastry-like. Many stores are Boulangerie – Patisserie, or Patisserie – Viennoiserie etc.
So far, my favourite loaf of bread is the Siegle (rye) or the traditional Baguette. When it is time for a pastry, you just can’t go wrong with a fresh croissant.
There are many legends regarding the origin of the croissant. Some tales would tell that the croissant, shaped like the Islamic crescent, was first made to celebrate the defeat of the Muslims in 732 by the Franks in the Battle of Tours, where another legend would put the croissant’s debut in Vienna in 1683 at the end of the Turkish Siege as a reference to the half moon on the Turkish flag. Regardless of where they have come from, they are welcome!
