Exam Week Over - Smiles All Around!

Exam Week Done and Dusted
So exam week is over and I think everyone is a bit relieved! It wasn't half as bad as people thought it would be and everyone got on very well. We were all made line up this evening and go in, one by one, to have Rory O' Connell tell us how we got on. I am glad to say my results were good so I am a happy camper.

As a result of the exams, the schedule for last week was a little different than other weeks. Instead of us cooking Friday morning, we had a fabulous pizza demonstration before the exams. Chef Rory O'Connell demonstrated so many different creative ways of making good pizzas, calzones and various other pizza styles: Sfinciuni - a pizza pie, Piadina - a deep fried or grilled flatbread, Sgabei - delicious bread sticks, Stromboli - a Swiss roll style pizza, rolled and filled with lots of delicious ingredients. It really opened my eyes to how creative you can be when you know how to make one good pizza dough.

The Beginning of Week Seven
This week we have stepped it up a notch and have a few difficult techniques to master. Yesterday we began 'flaky pastry'. This is a more complex to make than shortcrust pastry and apparently less complex than making puff pastry. It is quite a laborious and time consuming job but I'm sure it will be worth all the effort.

How to make flaky pastry
350g bakers flour or strong flour
pinch salt
225g butter
cold water - 4 fl ozs approx (some pastry make take 6 fl oz)


There are essentially 4 different steps to making flaky pastry.
Divide the butter into 4 equal parts. Start by rubbing one part of the butter into the sieved flour and salt. Bring this together with cold water (Just enough to bring together - not too moist). Leave this to rest in the fridge for half an hour.

When the pastry has rested, you roll it into a long rectangle about 8inches wide. Make sure that the shape is perfectly even.
Place one part of the remaining butter on two thirds of the rolled out pastry. Fold the bottom third upwards and then the top third downwards making a book shape. (The bottom third of the pastry should be kept free of butter).
Turn the pastry 90degrees as if it was a book - opening from right to left. Now, roll the butter into the pastry in a north - south direction. (Never east- west!) Make sure to keep the pastry in a perfect rectangle when rolling. Use a palette knife to help you straighten the edges.
When you can see that the butter has been adequately rolled in, repeat the steps above, folding up the bottom third and folding down the top third of the pastry to make a book shape again. Leave to rest in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Repeat this process of rolling the pastry into a rectangle, placing on the butter, folding it into a book shape, rolling in the butter and folding it back into a book shape and then resting it - for the 2 other parts of butter that you have set aside. By the end of this process, the pastry is then layered really well like the pages of a book and when cooked, is a light and flaky pastry.
Now you can believe me its a mission to make this pastry!

Terrines and Patés
Monday was also an interesting day of making terrines and some complicated patés. I had never made a terrine before and when I saw the list of ingredients it slightly turned my stomach: Pigs liver, minced smoked streaky bacon,unsmoked minced bacon and minced fat streaky pork. It seemed like an awful lot of fat to me!

When it came to cooking it, I just sucked it up and got my hands dirty. When the terrine was cooked, it was so moist and full of flavour. It was, in fact, one of the most flavoursome dishes that I have tried yet on the course.

French Wine Class Number Two
Monday evening after demonstration, we had another amazing French wine class. It began at 6pm and didn't finish till close to 9pm. It was a very long day for me considering I left Dublin at 5am to get there.

In saying that, it was an extremely enjoyable class led by an Irish gentleman named Pat. Pat spent much of his life in France, growing his own grapes, so he was able to share with us his personal experience. The class was predominantly focused on the Southern Rhone region of France. This was of particular interest to me as I have holidayed in this area, in a little town called L'Isle-sur-la-Sorge. I was lucky to have tasted many wines from the neighbouring villages while I was there, such as Gigondas and Ventoux.

Here is the list of the wines we tasted: The best for me was the last!

1. Terra Monte, La Perrine, vin de pays d'Oc, 2009. 85% Viognier 15% Chardonnay grape
2. Preiss Zimmer, Alsace, Pinot Gris, 2008. 
3. E. Guigal, Cótes de Rhone, 2007. 
4. Pierre Amadieu, Gigondas, Romane Machotte, 2009. 
5. Terra Monte, Languedoc, 2008. Grenache Syrah Blend
6. E. Guigal, Crozes Hermitage, 2007. 100% Syrah grape.
7. E. Guigal, Saint-Joseph, 'LIEU-DIT', 2009. 100% Syrah grape.


Tuesday - A Day of Pancake Making and Lots More
Happy Pancake Tuesday everyone. I hope you all kept up the standards and ate as many pancakes as you could until you keeled over!

Pancakes most definitely were incorporated into the days cooking here! We made some delicious pancakes with orange butter and other ones filled with nutella and toasted hazelnuts. They were scrumptious. I even brought some home to feed my sick roommate Ellie and they certainly cheered her up!

Today, for me, was a really great day in the kitchen. I had great successes making a caramelised apple tart and a new bread, using a butter and milk dough, instead of a standard white yeast dough.

Tomorrow morning the day starts bright and early at 7.45am with a gardening class and then at 9am we start our second day with Darina Allen's sister Blathnaid, teaching us about food business. This will be a very interesting and challenging day but I am really looking forward to it.

Below are some more photos from the week.

Please don't hesitate to leave a comment below or send me a mail if you have any questions.

Love

Laura x

Valentines and Ballymaloe Cookery School Adventures - Week 6, Nearly Half Way There!

Week 6 has got off to a cracking start and things are looking good for the week. Here are come pictures to get you in the Valentines spirit!

Valentines weekend - Cooking up a Storm!
I had a very relaxing weekend, pottering around Cork with Simon. I spent lots of time cooking up some yummy food to get in the spirit for Valentines Day tomorrow. On Saturday, we visited the English Market in Cork where we picked up some lovely ingredients for dinner. If any of you havn't been before, you must go, as there's a huge array of fresh and wonderful ingredients to choose from.

Deciding what to cook

The main course pretty much decided itself as I had lovely pheasant that I was kindly given by the school. The pheasants had been hung for a few days so I had the job of plucking and gutting them. Simon got an awful fright when he opened the fridge to be greeted by three dead birds. He soon quite embraced them though, as you can see! Plucking and gutting them wasn't as difficult as I'd imagined it would be. It took no time, with just a little bit of a mess.

I cooked the pheasant slowly in a nice cider, cream and apple sauce. I came across a fantastic local cider which I decided to use instead of Calvados. (An apple brandy, which is apparently quite expensive.) This Irish Craft Cider worked amazingly well and is made by a local brewing company just up the road from my house in Oysterhaven -  'The Nohoval Brewing Company.'

For starter I made some potted shrimp with chilli and garlic. The shrimp was very in-expensive at the English Market and I served this with some of my toasted white yeast bread.

For dessert I made raspberry fool with shortbread biscuits - in the shape of a heart just to get in the spirit of Valentines Day!

Happy out by the fire, drinking wine and eating cheese!

The amazing sunset

A great start to the week - Sherry Tasting
So it's Monday evening and I'm just back from an evening of Sherry tasting with Colm McCan, the sommelier from Ballymaloe House. It opened my eyes to the world of sherry and its huge possibilities for matching with food.
Sherry is made only in one place in the world and that is in the hot, most Southern part of Spain, Andalucia. It's incredibly under priced at the moment so it's a great opportunity for us food and wine lovers to take advantage of this. In London,tapas and sherry bars are the new craze and the most fashionable places to eat and drink - I ought to put a few tapas bars on my list for next time. Hizara and the Salt Yard in London are ones that I have heard are fantastic.

Sherry is quite an acquired taste but there are so many different styles and varieties that there must be one to suit everyones taste buds. One particular Sherry, Lustau's Pedro Ximénez 'San Emilio' is meant to be incredibly good with vanilla ice cream due to its very sweet flavour. To just compare its sweetness, a Chablis has 4g per litre of residual sugar, Coca Cola has 110g of residual sugar per litre and Pedro Ximénez has 450g residual sugar per litre!

Exam Week and baking fun
I think exam week will scare some people but for me I think its just another week of raising things up a knotch and actually forcing us to get really really good at the essential techniques before we move on.

I am still really enjoying baking and making lots of breads and cakes. I feel it is a great chance to delve into something that I wouldn't have normally done before now. Sourdough is one of the breads that has the most appeal for me to make because of the long process that goes into making it and the amazing result you get at the end. To make sourdough it is a three stage process;  you make the starter, then the sponge and then the bread itself.
To make a really active starter you must place 2oz flour and 2 fl oz water into a tightly sealed tall jar for 6 days in a row. Each day as you add the flour and the water, you must stir thoroughly to ensure all the flour and water are mixed, then re-seal. Once you've got your sourdough starter established at this stage after day 6, making a loaf of sourdough will take between 24 and 36 hours.

I have my sourdough starter at the 6th day stage and I am ready tomorrow to give it its final two feeds of 8 oz flour and 8 fl oz water tomorrow morning and then again tomorrow night before I make the sponge.

I'm sure a lot of you are thinking, jeez why the hell is she bothering, but believe me after I have tasted homemade breads here, you would want to make some yourself. I will let you know anyway how I get on later in the week, and hopefully you guys might feel inspired to make some too!

Adventures in the kitchen
I have had a really great few days in the kitchen and feeling like I am taking in so much. Today I made sunflower bread. Doesn't it just make you smile? ! This would be the perfect bread for a dinner party when you're trying to really impress your guests. This would be ideal to serve with some tapenades, hummus and dips or even just some really good quality olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

We have made such an array of dishes it is so hard to keep you all up to date. We had the opportunity to cook some really mouth watering lamb tagine dishes and today we prepared some good auld Irish stews. For me, my experience of Irish stews has never been that great, so I was delighted to learn how to make a really good one and be proud of our local dishes. We also made a selection of fools, poached fruit, florentines and shortbread biscuits.

This afternoon, we covered a new pastry technique - choux pastry. I've never actually made choux pastry before so I am dying to have a go at it tomorrow.

Anyway, I should probably love you and leave you for now.

As always, please feel free to leave any comments or ask me any questions at all.

Laura xx

Holy moly its week 5 already!!

Greetings from Ballymaloe again! I hope you are all well. I'm just back from a 5 mile run and feeling refreshed and revived and ready to update you all on what's been going on! It was so lovely to get out while it was still bright. I finally got to see the beautiful view from the top of the hill back down over Ballycotton. I'm not sure this picture will do it justice as it was taken with my phone but hey I thought I'd share it so you can see my surroundings!

Thursday - Ballymaloe House & Milking the cows

It has been a pretty hectic week since I was last sitting at my desk blogging. I was up at the crack of dawn last Thursday to milk the cows and after demonstration I headed straight up to work in the kitchen at Ballymaloe House.

Milking the cows was great fun and I really enjoyed it. Eileen who works in the dairy is so full of energy and great to have a chat with. They have just found out this week that one of their cows is in calf. How exciting! There will be a little one arriving some time at the start of April. I hope it arrives early so I will still be here and hopefully see the birth.

Ballymaloe House has been closed for the last three weeks so I headed up there for their first night of re-opening.  The staff were getting back into the swing of things and happy to have a quieter night to get things organised. I was okay with it being quiet as it gave me time to ask lots of questions. I spent a lot of time with the pastry chef and he was a world of information.

In Ballymaloe House, the menu changes every day depending on what's in season and what's available at the time from the farm and the local suppliers. There are five desserts on the menu which are also changed daily. This a somewhat a challenge for the pastry chef but a rewarding one. The seasons somewhat dictate what can be on the menu.

Cakes -  baking, and more baking. 
Here are two of the many cakes I made this week. The first, is a parsnip and maple syrup cake and the second is a delicious lemon meringue pie. Lots of work go into both of them but the effort is SO worth it.

Here is the first white yeast bread I have ever made. I think it turned out pretty good if I must say so myself!  White yeast bread requires lot of love and care to knead and allow the bread to rise to the perfect point before cooking. Amazing stuff really.

Friday, a more chilled out day. All smiles!

Friday's schedule in the kitchen was somewhat more relaxed than other days, thank goodness. I didn't get to bed till late so I was very grateful for an easier morning. We cooked up some lovely soups, omelettes, frittatas, salads and seafood. 

I think the pressure may start to increase over the next week as we have our technique exams on Friday the 17th of February. We have a technique sheet that every day we have to fill out with our teacher. This is to make sure we cover all the French techniques by the end of the course. This includes making homemade mayonnaise, dicing, slicing, lining flan tins, making lots of different types of pastry, making breads, scones, stocks, soups, filleting fish, jointing chicken, preparing duck, segmenting fruit etc. The list goes on and on. We will be tested on a number of these at random. There is also an exam on identifying the different salad leaves and herbs which come from the garden - there are LOADS so this may be some challenge!

Today - Irresistible Breakfasts oh YEAH!

Today was a really fantastic day. The focus was on breakfast and how you can make something so tasty out of such a simple meal. Breakfast in cafés is one meal that is really ignored and it wouldn't take much to really make people smile in the morning.

We made lovely fresh juices, smoothies, granolas, mueslis, date and apricot fruit salad, orange and grapefruit cocktail, kippers, kidneys,potato bread, eggs every way, baked, scrambled, poached, and to top it all off - a full Irish breakfast! Wow it was just a fantastic feast. We even had the special treat of finishing early in the kitchen to enjoy it all with a glass of bucks fizz. Oh we were happy campers this morning.

The next few days

We have lots of delicious and interesting things coming up on the menu over the next few days like rabbit casseroles and tasty slow cooked meals. Tomorrow is our first food costing lecture and I am also going up to work at Ballymaloe House again so I think I may fall down once Friday comes. 

If you have comments or questions about anything please give me a shout below as I would love to hear from you. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy following and I will be back soon with more.

Bye for now,

Laura x

Update of wine, cakes and much more!

Greetings from Ballymaloe Cookery School again!

I am now into my fourth week of the 12 week course and almost a third of the way through. Madness! It has been a mad few days -  as usual! On Monday I moved kitchen so I was a bit all over the place to begin with. It takes time to get used to where things are and to settle in with new teachers etc. It wasn't my best day to be honest as I spent a lot of time faffing around trying to find things! By Tuesday, I was back in the swing of things again - thankfully!

We had lots of lovely dishes to cook on Monday including learning to cook with guinea fowl, turkey and pheasant. In actual fact I was given a pheasant yesterday, as there was a shoot on Saturday, so I am going to leave it hanging until the weekend and will have the challenge of plucking and gutting it myself! Excitement!

The week has turned out to be the most calorie filled week yet. We have cooked cakes, cakes and more cakes. Buns, meringues, cupcakes, you name it we have done it this week! This evening I think we are all suffering from sugar highs and lows and on top of that we had a wine tasting morning!

Wine Tasting No 2:
The wine tasting was absolutely brilliant. We had John McDonnell, the manager of Wine Australia, in with us today giving us a class on Australian wines. He was incredibly enthusiastic and an inspiration for anyone looking to get into the wine business. We tasted 5 wines from Australia and 1 French wine to compare. Our first wine we tasted was a sparkling wine from a vineyard in the Yarra Valley called Chandon. I was very excited as this vineyard was one I visited when I was in Australia last year. Sparkling wine at 9.20am - I wasn't complaining!! We then moved on to try two Rieslings, two Shiraz and a Cabernet/Merlot.

I was quite surprised to hear that Australia is the largest supplier of wine to the Irish market, at about 25%, even though they only produce about 3% of the worlds wines.

I learnt so much today and I thought I should share some of it with you:

Did you know that Shiraz and Syrah are the same grape variety?! Well call me stupid.. but I didn't  know that this is true!


Have you have ever wondered how sparkling wine or champagne is produced? Well have a read below to get filled in on how it is made!


How champagne and sparkling wine is made:

The white and red grapes are picked when not fully ripe. Champagne and sparkling wines are best from cooler regions of the world where the grapes don't ripen fully naturally. This ensures you have a good acidic grape.
The skins from the red grapes are removed and then the juice from both the red and white grapes is squeezed out. The juice from red grapes is, in actual fact, clear. The juice from red and white grapes is used for white wine production. It is the red skins that give red wine its colour. The red skins are left in during fermentation for red wine. The longer the skins are left in, the darker the red wine.

Yeast is added at this stage and the sugars in the grape juice ferment with the yeast to make alcohol. At this stage you have an alcohol content of about 11-11.5%.

This juice is then bottled and sealed with a beer crown. During this second fermentation in the bottle, CO2 is produced in the wine. As this CO2 cannot escape from the bottle, bubbles form which gives the wine it's fizz.

The wine is then stored horizontally at first and over the next 4-5 weeks, the riddler gradually rotates and tilts the bottle upwards. The yeast then slowly makes its way towards the neck of the bottle and eventually the bottle will end up in the upright position.

The bottles are then put neck side down in a bath of a small amount of very cold water. This freezes the wine and the yeast in the neck of the bottle. The bottle is then opened, yeast removed and then topped up with fresh wine and sealed again.

Tip: If serving sparkling wine or champagne, make sure your glasses are SPOTLESSLY clean and polished. If any residue of detergent is on them, it will make the wine go flat very quickly and you do not want this to happen with an expensive bottle of wine!

An afternoon of tea and cake

This afternoon we received a lecture from Seán Moran of NOOD Tea. Some of you may think, what is there to say about tea?

In Ireland, we have a tea industry worth millions of euro. When Seán asked for a show of hands to see how many people drink tea, the majority of the class raised their hand - not surprisingly. The point he made was that, out of all of us in the room, how many of us considered what was in our tea bags? or what quality we were getting in our tea bags? The answer was.. well basically none of us.

Tea leaves are classed into 4 categories of quality:
1) Whole
2) Broken
3) Fannings
4) Dust

If you open a teabag from any of the standard brands that you generally would pick up in the supermarket, you will find DUST, the least good quality of tea leaf.

The marketing strategies of the big tea companies have been very clever in convincing us to settle for a standard black tea with milk, made from poor quality tea.

This lecture really opened my eyes to the world of tea. We are very lucky in Ballymaloe that we have leaf tea every day and a wide variety of different types to choose from. Keep a look out at your local farmers market for good leaf tea's. Even Barry's leaf tea is better than teabags AND it's from CORK!

You should check out Seán's website here and www.nood-world.com

Here are some more photos for you to enjoy.

Love Laura x