A chocolate feast!

Last Friday morning I had my usual physiotherapy appointment in Descartes. While waiting for the kiné to appear, I thumbed through the ghastly celeb magazines to find a "star" I'd actually heard of who might be capable of stringing a sentence together. Instead, I turned up a trio of recipes in a magazine I no longer recall the name of. I photographed them with my mobile phone. At the bottom of one page it says "Retrouvez nos recettes sur www.magazine-avantages.fr" but there is no sign of any of them at that address. Apparently there is a fourth one. It must remain in lost El Dorado forever. What they do have there looks good, I must say. That link is well worth following up.

The original recipe

Yesterday I tried "Tartes choco/gingembre" (chocolate and ginger tart) on friends and family. This turned out to be a rich, sophisticated dessert that's as easy as... er...pie. It's a deep, dark chocolate ganache in a crisp sweet pastry shell, garnished with preserved ginger, "confit de gingembre". The buckwheat flour gives the shell a crunch that contrasts welI with the smooth ganache. I substituted home-made confit de clémentines, which gave a fresh lift to the richness of the chocolate.

This recipe serves six, if making tartlets, and at eight in a round tin. The amount of pastry is probably about right for six square tartlets, but I only had a round 21 cm tin and there was twice as much as needed (surface to volume ratio, you know). I found that loose-based tart tins were not a great success. A solid tin or tins is preferable. There is no need to line or grease the tin.

Ingredients

For the pastry :

150g wheat flour
75g buckwheat flour
25g ground almond powder
70g icing sugar
A pinch of salt
150g unsalted butter, cut into small cubes
1 egg

For the ganache filling :

300g good quality dark chocolate, the best you can find. I used 72% cocoa solids
30cl liquid cream (30%fat)

To decorate :

30g crystallised ginger
or 2 confit clementines

Method

Prepare the pastry :

Sift the wheat flour and the icing sugar. Place all the dry ingredients for the pastry in the bowl of a food processor or blender. Mix until well blended. Add the butter and the egg. Mix until the pastry forms an irregular ball. Mould it into a ball shape with your hands. Wrap the pastry in cling film and chill it in the fridge for an hour. Do not leave it in the fridge (as I did, for four hours) because it goes rock-hard - if you need to leave the pastry for more than an hour, move it to a cool place. If making one large tart, cut the pastry ball in half and freeze one half for next time.

Make the pastry shell :

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Roll out the pastry on a sheet of greaseproof paper. Pick it up holding the paper only - warning, fingers go through the pastry! Garnish 6 tartlet moulds or one 20cm square mould or one 25cm round mould with the pastry.  Prick the pastry with a fork, cover it with a circle of greaseproof paper wider than the base and weigh it down with baking beans. Blind bake it for 15 minutes, taking out the weights and the greaseproof for the last five minutes to let the bottom of the pastry brown. Leave the pastry shells to cool.

Prepare the ganache :

Cut the chocolate into small pieces (you can use a hand grinder for this) and put it in a heat-proof basin. Bring the cream to the boil and tip it boiling over the chocolate. Leave it untouched for five minutes for the chocolate to melt. Stir well with a spatula until the ganache is smooth.

Fill and decorate the tarts :

Pour the ganache while still hot into the bottom of the cooled pastry shells. Leave to rest at room temperature and, just before serving, garnish with slices of the preserved ginger / clementines.

Save some for next time!

Astuces: Leave the ganache to cool at room temperature rather than in the fridge. It will then stay glossy and won't go hard.

Don't try adding alcohol or anything fancy, it isn't needed. I put walnuts on but they weren't needed either. The pastry should be sweet: the ganache should not.

A basket of clementines

The 2 kilo basket of Corsican clementines, each still decorated with a couple of leaves, looked charming.
The fruit tasted superb, fresh and sharp, with a background sweetness.
The following morning they were still fine, but it would not be possible simply to eat them till they were gone without losing more than a few.
Find a recipe - already got clementine marmalade - aha! Recette Clémentines confites!

This recipe comes from Le Journal des Femmes (aka Women's Journal) with a stack of comments and queries, mainly on three subjects:
(1) how much fruit do you use,
(2) I can't find glucose syrup, can I use anything else, and
(3) why have my fruit collapsed / shrivelled up (three different french verbs, all meaning roughly the same thing).
I have tried to incorporate the responses and my own experience. 

Firstly, the picture illustrating the process told the story:
you need enough fruit to cover the bottom of your pan in a single loose layer.
I had 18 fruit, but found one of them later uncooked, still on the table.
Note you will not be able to use this pan for a fortnight.
Secondly, you must include glucose syrup, there ain't no substitute.
It stops the sugar crystallising out / turning to jam.
Thirdly, choose fruit just coming to the peak of ripeness, and once cooking begins, handle it as little as possible.
Don't pile one fruit on another until the bottling stage - keep them in a single layer.
I used a deep melamine slotted spoon to lift the clementines in and out of the cooking liquid, which was ideal;
a silicone one would be good if you can find a small one about the size of, well, a clementine.

Capturing a clementine

Ingredients
Clementines
granulated sugar
Glucose syrup
Water


Method
1. Wash the fruit, prick them deeply several times with a fork.
Place them in the bottom of a large pan in a single layer.
Cover with water, bring to the boil and cook gently for 15 minutes.
Drain the fruit, retaining the cooking liquid.

2. Place the fruit in a large pan with a lid, that you won't be needing for a fortnight. 
Measure the cooking liquid. You will need to sums here!
Add 500g granulated sugar and 200g glucose syrup per litre of cooking liquid.
Place on a medium heat and bring to the boil, stirring until the sugar has all dissolved, then turn up the heat.
Remove from the heat at the first decent bubble.

3. Pour the syrup over the clementines.
Put a big plate on top of the clementines to hold them under the surface of the syrup; otherwise they will float.
Put on the lid and leave in a cool place for two days.

4. Two days later (D+2), pour off the syrup, add 100g granulated sugar per litre of the original cooking liquid.
Bring to the boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar.
Pour the boiling syrup over the clementines.
Put on the lid and replace the pan in a cool dark place.
Leave for another two days.

5. D+4, D+6, D+8, D+10, D+12 proceed exactly as on D+2.

6. D+14: place the fruit in storage jars and cover with syrup.
Handle them very gently as they are extremely tender at this stage.
Six fruits fit nicely in a 500ml Le Parfait storage jar.

Not a tight fit

Save any remaining liquid in a sterilised glass bottle with a good cork or stopper.
It makes a delicious cordial, with lots of ice and some fizzy water.

To make glacé clementines, drain the fruit for 24 hours (don't waste the syrup!), mix icing sugar with a little of the syrup, dip the clementines in the mixture and put them in a hot oven oven for a few minutes to dry off.
Alternatively the fruit can be dried in a food drier for four hours.
I'll have a go at this after they have matured for a month or so.

Citrus fruit and the ways thereof

Or, how I ended up with 31 jars of this...

One of each, February 2014

Late January and early February see oranges amers (Seville oranges, literally bitter oranges) in the shops in this part of France. I harangued the couple who run the fruit and vegetable stall at Le Grand Pressigny market for five weeks, to be told they wouuld have some "la semaine prochaine". The next week, the answer was the same. Meanwhile I had bought two kilos of Seville oranges from Intermarché and made "Jill Archer's Ambridge Marmalade" (see recipe). Then the market stall turned up with the goods and I felt obliged to buy some more. This time I made Delia Smith's Dundee marmalade, a dark, chunky marmalade with a lovely deep red colour. The recipe is here. It set rather better than my last Oxford marmalade but still was not as firm as I like. I now had 23 jars of marmalade, not including stock from previous years still on the cellier shelf.

I had done what I always do when making marmalade - bought too many lemons. I therefore decided to make lemon curd, with the addition of two more lemons. The recipe is from the Good Housekeeping Cookery Book, 1966 edition (one of the things I'd try to save from a fire, along with the cats and my husband). For me, lemon curd involves a gadget! My mother's Swan Brand double saucepan comes into its own for lemon curd. You can find one on E-bay for less than a tenner.

Never mind photographing that saucepan! Where's my supper, you worthless dog?

This is basically one saucepan that fits closely inside another. You place a little water in the bottom pan, and the food goes in the top pan, to be cooked by steam from beneath. This permits gentle cooking of sauces, eggs and anything else that requires consistent low heat or that burns easily. Egg dishes in particular are very heat sensitive and the protein in the egg denatures (and goes hard) if it gets too hot. The double saucepan  makes perfect creamy, smooth scrambled eggs - as my landlady, Vera Sargisson, taught me when I first started work, in York in 1973. Mrs Sargisson was the widow of a housemaster at Ampleforth College in North Yorkshire and no doubt she used to scramble eggs for the boys of his house when they were feeling low.

Double saucepans are known in the US as double boilers. The classic French bain marie was once the same thing but has spawned numerous offspring with the addition of electricity, steam valves, etc. You can substitute a basin standing over a saucepan of simmering water, but it's tricky to lift in and out without a handle, and painfully slow unless you have a metal (stainless steel) basin.

Lemon Curd is a British delicacy, in French properly called "pâte à tartiner au citron" - lemon spread for bread - but also called "lemon curd"!.

Lemon curd on Carré moulé bread from the Abilly bakery

According to my Good Housekeeping Cookery Book, 1966 edition, lemon curd is made as follows:

Four eggs, beaten (I added an extra yolk, because they were small eggs)
grated rind and juice of 4 lemons
100g (4 ounces) of butter
450g (1 lb) of sugar

Put all the ingredients into the top of a double saucepan. Heat gently and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Continue heating, stirring from time to time, until the curd thickens. Pot and cover in the usual way. Keep in a cool place, refrigerate once opened. Keep no longer than two months.
Makes about 700g (1.5 lb, or three more jars).

.
The secret of the process is not to stir continuously, whatever your recipe book says, because it will never thicken if you do! Some recipes say strain the eggs, some say strain the cooked curd, some don't say to strain either. The objective of all this straining is to get rid of the slime strings which turn into wiggly white lumps in the curd. The easiest way to eliminate these is to pick them out of the cooked curd with a teaspoon as you see them while filling the pots. It's a good idea to strain the lemon juice, to remove those tiny seeds and bits of fruit.You can make curd with any citrus fruit in the same way - substitute 6 or 8 limes, clementines or tangerines, or a couple of oranges, or a grapefruit for the lemons.

The jar count is now 26. And then Tim bought 2kg of Clementines, variety "Nour". These were plump and gleaming, but turned out to be incredibly sour, and suitable only for cooking or juicing. Eight of these became five jars, albeit small ones, of Clementine Curd, courtesy of Jamie Oliver (recipe here).

Clementine curd, to a Jamie Oliver recipe

The grand total is 31 jars. I have been giving jars to every visitor, to the fruit stall people (non-plussed) and to the Joumiers at the Saffron Fair (regular customer, swap for goat cheese). I'm saving some for special friends of course!

Incidentally, my Fuji Finepix JZ300 camera recognised a human face in one of these photographs, and put a green square around it to show how clever it had been. Anyone who spots this face before I give the game away gets a jar of marmalade, or curd, according to preference.

The makings of a reet good tea