Big Brother Meets Masterchef
Last summer I was lucky enough to go on a press trip and enjoy the experience that is Cook in France in the Dordogne. Here are my ramblings on the experience……
No I am not in Borehamwood. Thank God, no offence intended but I arrive in Limoges to be welcomed at the airport by debonair and all round good egg Phillip. On arrival I and another fellow foodie from London jump in the car for a scenic and incredibly informative journey on Peter’s transition to living in France and subsequent other personal snippets, to St. Armand de Coly, Sarlat in the rolling hills of the Dordogne.
We are warmly greeted on arrival by Lucy and Jim Fisher at their magnificently converted tobacco barn. Shown to our rooms and pleasantly greeted with a complimentary bottle of wine in our rooms for us to drink at our leisure, my fellow traveller and I decide to go for a saunter through the delightful woods and adjacent village in the warm afternoon sunshine whilst awaiting the arrival of our fellow housemates…sorry foodies.
Throughout the evening other guests start to arrive around the table in the courtyard as we are liquidly looked after by Lucy whilst Jim is beavering away in the kitchen preparing our welcoming meal….this was tough I can assure you! Eventually there were 12 good men and true, well actually seven gorgeous ladies, me being one of them and five lucky chaps. The steady consumption of French wine allowed the conversation to flow. Among us was a couple who had flown in from Boston, USA for the Jim Fisher, Cook In France experience as well as a hotelier and prolific charmer from Finland, Aberdeen Ali living in Chichester but off to live in Houston, a couple from Warwick but popping up from their new pad in The Lot…..and then there was little old me, I wonder how interesting I was!
We sat down on the first evening for a beautiful meal of Rillettes de Canard (Potted duck) & Eminces de Canard Fumes (Thin slices of local smoked duck breast) & Gelee de Monbazillac (dessert wine jelly) & Gendarmes de Pain de Noix (walnut Bread soldiers) followed by Croquette de Merlu & Sauce Gribiche, hake fish cakes to you and me with a classic bistro sauce of Dijon mustard, gherkins, capers and diced hard boiled eggs. All finished off with Mousse aux Pepites de Chocolat & Croquant de Chocolate Blanc with Glace a la Crème Fraiche, doesn’t it all sound fabulous in French, but for those of you struggling with the Gallic translation, its a chocolate chip chocolate mousse, white chocolate cracknel and crème fraiche ice cream which was then washed down with a digestif and cafe.
Totally sated, spoilt and complete we head to our beds to recharge for the week ahead.
It’s an early start for breakfast at 8.00am eating croissant, fresh crusty bread and jam and coffee whilst rubbing the sleep out of ours eyes.
Cue Geordie intro… “Day One”!
Jim has designed the weekly menus around classic French bistro and Mediterranean cookery but with a Brit twist and takes into consideration everyone’s food preferences. For the duration of the week every day we will be preparing, cooking and eating lunch and dinner & dessert…except for Wednesday…phew…when we will have the awful chore of wandering around Sarlat weekly market and wondering how many goodies we can purchase and cram into our bags for the return journey!
So, Monday’s menu comprises of lunch, Oven-Dried Plum Tomato and Goats Cheese Tarts with Chive Mascarpone and dinner of Grilled Sea Bass, Buttered Baby Gem Lettuce and Sautéed Ratte Potatoes with a Star Anise and Fennel Butter followed by Crème Brulee. Yikes, where do we start?
We start by slow roasting the plum tomatoes with a very generous chef slug or two or three of olive oil. Tasty tip No.1 –when cutting your plum tomatoes you will notice it has a small valley on the top, cut across the valley not down it, it will look much prettier when roasted. They are then baked on a puff pastry case with goats cheese or any filling of your choice for that matter and served with a classic French Dressing and with a quenelle (pronounced “kennel”, meaning egg shaped) of chive and mascarpone. This is the chance to get up close and personal with cheeky Jim as he puts his arms around you to show you the right way to quenelle…strangely the chaps seemed to get the hang of this and didn’t require the demonstration!
So we then cook lunch, eat lunch, quaff wine, I’m exhausted already. Next onto the sea bass.
The grilled sea bass is Jim’s own creation for which he was paid a handsome sum of £5,000, nice work if you can get it. Seriously, this was the dish that won over Rick Stein in the Rick Stein/ Radio Times seafood cookery competition which in turn determined the path for Jim’s future.
The dish is impressively easy including the making of the fish stock and reducing of it that so many of us believe is too complicated and too difficult to do at home. We get to fillet the whole fish which we get told by Jim to “love” and “caress” your fish, to treat it like a woman, read into to that however you wish!
Sitting down to dinner is a chatty cheery affair after having a rest before drinks in the early evening, we chat about the day and the non-cooks of the course join us for dinner and hear in great detail how expertly we have prepared everything. There is nothing more satisfying to sitting down to a meal that you have constructed from scratch and produced to restaurant standard, everyone is suitably chuffed with themselves.
The Sea Bass was sublime and the meal was finished off with the French classic Crème Brulee (this can be argued that in fact the French pinched it from the Brits but in my opinion Crème Brulee sounds far sexier than burnt custard!)I have to say that I concur with Jim that this is one of those dishes that shouldn’t be messed around with by adding bits such as fruit or nuts and that if you want to add foreign bodies it’s not Crème Brulee anymore!
Digestif, coffee…..bed.
“Day Two”!
Another early start and before your coffee has reached your stomach you’re back in the kitchen. Today for lunch it’s Fougasse a typical Provencal flat bread and a raid of the fridge to source a variety of toppings. We use various cheeses, roasted tomatoes, olives, Parma ham and made our own pesto. Sorted!
Dinner sounds a tad more complicated being Confit de Canard with Garlic Mash, Choucroute and a Fig and Balsamic Sauce followed by Glazed Lemon Tarts with Homemade Vanilla Ice-Cream. Confit de Canard is found in every single one of Sarlat’s sixty-four restaurants, it has to be one of the tastiest heart warming dishes of the region. Packed into sterile jars along with its cooking fat, Confit will keep indefinitely.
This session in the kitchen has us wielding chopping knives around as we butcher a whole duck, any excuse for the chaps to get their hands on a bird, and go through the entire confit process which is not as difficult as it sounds. It’s just an age old tradition of preserving that has continued down through the centuries. The flesh of the duck after re-heating is very similar to that of Chinese crispy fried duck and eats extremely well with the traditional accompaniments of plum sauce and Chinese pancakes.
The non-cooks arrive for the evening meal from a hard day of golf and of course need to be refreshed. After few apero, our most beautifully tender duck and lemon tarts made with the most delicate and sweet pastry, the wine is flowing and we are treated to the most expert rendition of Ernie driving the fastest milk cart in the west by Paul, a non-chef golfer and then, not to have our American compatriots feeling left out Sue and Linda reminiscing with Camp Grenada…eat your heart out Alan Sherman.
“Day Three”
It’s our day off and our visit to Sarlat market. The market is crammed with local produce from whole foie gras and duck carcasses to the most pungent vanilla pods and lilac picked out of the framers garden along with fresh asparagus and displays of local cheeses. After leisurely coffee we head back to Bombel to make lunch which is a simple dish of baked camembert with rustic croutons, yummy! In the afternoon we were free to go sightseeing or continue to bother Jim with our questions on cuisine and more practice in the kitchen, so reams of homemade pasta were made. The evening is our own and we go back into Sarlat for our evening meal, a very relaxed affair.
“Day Four”
Back into the kitchen on day four and I have to say we had been salivating since the day before as dinner is a Slow Roast Belly of Pork with Crackling, the poor Bostonians didn’t know what crackling was so have never savoured this delight or parsnips for that matter, Pommes Sarladaises, Savoy Cabbage with Lardons and Pan Gravy Jus. We prepared the pork on the previous day and it had a total cooking time of an amazing eighteen hours. Lunch was a beautiful Confit and Poached Egg Salad with Early Summer Vegetables and an Orange and Walnut Oil and Grain Mustard Vinaigrette and desert a fantastically wobbly Panna Cotta with Berry Sauce.
It was then off to bed to prepare for our ‘Masterchef’ challenge on Friday.
“Day Five”
We had been pared off to decide which dish and what we were going to cook for our challenge. It was also a test for us to use all the tips and skills we had learnt during the week. So our final meal was constructed throughout the day and it consisted of Asparagus Soup with thin slices of grilled pancetta and horseradish cream, Haybox Roasted (yes, haybox!) Leg of Lamb Studded with Garlic, Orange and Rosemary, a Plum Tomato and Fennel Ragout with Pastis and Noilly Prat and a Spicey Herbed Cous Cous and the finale was a stunning dessert of Tarte Tatin, Apple Sorbet, Calvados Cream, Almond Brittle and a warming Calvados Shot. A glorious finale to all the dishes that had been prepared all week.
So in summary this course is a fabulous way to learn new skills and techniques and taking on fresh ideas and having the confidence to experiment. We got stuck in with blanching, blowtorching and searing. Learnt how to cook ahead so that the stress can be taken out of dinner parties allowing them to run smoothly and efficiently, leaving time to enjoy the company of your friends, being able to judge when a piece of meat or fish is cooked ‘to the point’ and had our palates educated to the flavour enhancing benefits of seasonings such as salt and sugar. We developed our chopping, filleting and slicing skills and stock and sauce reductions. But above all it’s about doing what everyone loved doing on the course – cooking. A wonderful gift or treat for any discerning foodie.
Jim and Lucy are the ultimate hosts and the Cook In France experience is one to be savoured, enjoyed and remembered.
