Day 68: Dans le sac

With the stress of finalising my menu out of the way, I had a few beers on Thursday night, and was thus suffering from a slight slowness of foot this morning. Not as slow as some though, the kitchen had only slightly fewer cooks in it than the galley of the Mary Celeste when they found her bobbing around in the middle of the Atlantic. It is round about the time that people start dropping like flies, I am told.

On account of this, and the fact that I am still shy a few hours' sleep, I decide not to push myself too hard. The day begins with slicing 3lb of onions for a classic French Onion Soup. You can imagine what a ballache that is at nine in the morning. In order to make this dish well, you must first slice the onions as finely as possible, and then caramelise them way beyond the point at which you would imagine you should stop. I expedite the process my sweating them with the lid on until they are completely soft. They are then caramelised on a very low heat, stirring now and then, and whenever a spare few minutes come along I give them a blast of very high heat and scrape the colour off the bottom of the pan.

My sourdoughs have risen nicely overnight in their baskets, so I turn them out onto a baking tray. This is a delicate procedure, and only a true pro can do it without deflating some of their rising. The alternative is to bake them in tins. I will persevere with the baskets. You need them to get the crust:crumb ratio right and, well, sourdough just isn’t baked in tins, is it? I borrow a razor to slash them, and make a mess of it by using a blunt part of the blade and having to go over my cuts. I am slashing the life out of it, I am told. Another lesson learned. They go in the oven before I get the chance to undo any more of my hard work.

My other dish is a tangerine mousse that is supposed to be housed inside chocolate cases. I swapped dishes with someone, since I am yet to use gelatine and need to get it ticked off the list. I melt some chocolate and separately whisk up a base of eggs, sugar and rind. Meanwhile, I sponge the gelatine in lemon juice, and dissolve it in the chocolate’s bain marie. Into the dissolved gelatine goes the rest of the lemon juice and the juice of three tangerines, and this all gets folded back into the whisked up base and cooled on ice.

Now for the chocolate cases. You may recall my first encounter with them last week;

This is a complete pain in the arse, the kind of thing no one of sound mind would ever attempt. It involves melting and then painting it on the inside of petit four cases which you then later peel off. Except you don’t, since they melt the minute they come in to contact with you.

The cases might be bigger, but this doesn’t help. I have since discovered that you can buy them for 12 cents each. They take around two minutes each to make, plus another two minutes to peel the case off without breaking them. Someone with smaller, colder fingers and the temperament for this kind of operation might get the whole thing done in two minutes at best. Even if they did it in a solitary minute, yielding sixty an hour, that would only save you €7.20. The minimum wage in this country is €8.65. And if you’re lucky enough to have someone that skilful on the payroll, you might as well get them doing something useful.

There seem to be a lot of scones being baked around the place this morning, and things get civilised when a teapot is produced along with some butter and jam and we all indulge ourselves a little. I love Kitchen One; it is so very genteel. "No it focking isn’t", says a familiar voice.

I whip some cream and fold a little into the mousse. I pour some into two of the 12 cent chocolate cases (mine all collapsed at the unwrapping stage) and a martini glass for presenting. I spread my remaining melted chocolate onto cardboard to make chocolate caraque and some other shapes for garnish. You need the temperature exactly right for caraque. My attempt is a bit like three putting and going past the hole each time. Too warm; too cold; too warm; oh fuck it. I borrow someone else’s and we eat the evidence. I put tangerine rind and juice through the rest of the cream with a little icing sugar to pipe on for garnish.

The sourdoughs are out of the oven by now, and look grand. The onions are getting close to being ready - they have to be so dark. We are adding chicken stock, since there is an obsession with the stuff round here, but for authenticity one should really be using beef. This goes in, the seasoning is corrected and we cook for a further ten minutes or so. A bit of toasted baguette goes on top, sprinkled with gruyere and then the whole dish popped under the grill. There is a shortage of proper French onion soup bowls, but I manage to lay my hands on a very small one (keeping up the genteel theme).

I garnish the mousses with the I am all plated up on time, they look nice, taste good, and a solid week’s cooking is securely in the bag. The sourdough has cooled so I cut it, and it is good, definitely the best of the three batches I’ve made so far. I picked up a few things along the way, dodged a few bullets, and have plenty to go to war with next time. They kind of make up for the disappointment of the ciabatta texture, though I have a plan to rectify that next week. With only five days in the kitchen remaining, I need to be baking every day to make the most of it.

After demo I squeeze in my customary Friday evening powernap. I make a quick trip out to Cork airport to pick up a friend of a friend, followed by dinner for nine of us in Nautilus in Ballycotton (duck pie followed by roasted cod, very nice). The usual session in the Blackbird ensues, and after a long and happy night's sleep, order has been restored in the galaxy.