Cooking was good again today. I made flaky pastry (like puff pastry but with less butter). This involves rolling out into a rectangle, dotting butter on your pastry, and folding into three, like a letter. You turn it 90ยบ, roll again fold again and return to the fridge. You do this four times, each time adding another 2oz of butter. By the time you are finished, your pastry has 729 layers within it. Neat huh? It sounds like a right pain in the ass to make but I found it strangely cathartic. The key to pastry is temperature - everything has to be cold. If it is, it can be quite enjoyable. Or maybe there's just something wrong with me.
In between rolling pastry I make confiture d'onions (very French theme today). It's not hard but it does involve slicing a pound and a half of onions. Short of buying onion goggles (I recently saw a pair for €20 - can you imagine breaking them out in the kitchen?), the best way to avoid the tears is to fight fire with fire, or acid with acid in this case, and sprinkle them with vinegar. I also have a batch of crepes to make. Not a problem there either, though it is quite time consuming. I take over a cheese souffle that my partner doesn't have time to make, and intersperse stages of this with the crepe making, onion jam reducing and pastry rolling. I like testing myself with a few things on the go - the pressure focuses your mind. You don't just stand there stirring a pan looking out of the window, or spend half an hour chopping an onion ( I watched one girl spend an hour slicing onions for confiture a couple of weeks ago). You don't have time. You have to leave things, and know when to come back to them. It is more like being in a proper kitchen.
There is one minor hiccup when a ring is on under the souffle mixture, which I wasn't aware of. I thought I was leaving it in the pan to cool, but was in fact welding it to the metal. Luckily Rosie spotted it while I was rolling pastry. In such situations, you can usually just decant and carry on. I had to add a little more milk to compensate for the evaporation but it didn't make the slightest difference to the dish. Another minute or so might have been interesting though.
Everything works out in the end. The jam is good (I used grenadine instead of creme de cassis just to be different), the pastry will be tested on Monday, the souffle was great, and will definitely get rolled out again as people always assume it is harder to pull off that it actually is, and the pancakes are pancakes, but when I smear nutella and chopped roasted hazelnuts in them and throw in a bit of my vanilla ice cream they improve dramatically.
After demo I popped into the kitchen to be shown how to prepare a rack of lamb. I am really enjoying the butchery side of things and want to learn more. The more you watch, the more you get to understand what it is you are looking for and trying to achieve each time. All these things; butchery, baking, patisserie - there is something magical and enchanting about them. Learning their secrets is intoxicating. In four weeks, the learning stops. I need to find another way to feed the addiction.
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