Christmas Concerts

Over the last couple of weekends, I've gone to two awesome Christmas concerts - one at a French church and one at the American Church. The American Church has a very professional music director, and the whole program was wonderful and eclectic. There were children's and adult choirs, handbells, and some invited professional classical musicians.

The French concert, though, was a group of young volunteers, called Pic'Pulse, performing an entire concert of Gospel music. I really had no idea that Gospel was so popular in France, but they were very well received and got a rousing ovation. They did a dozen classic Gospel songs like We are Climbing Jacob's Ladder, Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho, and Go Tell it On the Mountain, with a couple Zulu songs, including the National Hymn of South Africa. It was a really great concert, not because they were terribly professional, but because they sang with such enthusiasm. They may not have perfectly achieved the Gospel sound, but they sang with a lot of heart.

It was a bit strange to hear Gospel such with strong French accents, but anyway I admired their effort of learning so many songs in English. I have a fun time attempting Christmas carols in French, but I can't imagine performing by heart! Sorry about the blurry picture, but it was the best I could do.

Pic'Pulse has some more concerts in the spring, if you're around in May, and for the Fete de la Musique in June.

Wine Blogging Wednesday 28: Non-Champagne Sparklers

This is not a wine blog, nor a food blog, but it is about my experiences in Paris while doing my postdoc, and it would be ridiculous to claim that living in France had not broadly widened my experiences in food and wine. I have a blog, which makes me a blogger, so without any excuses I am participating in Wine Blogging Wednesday, even though it may not do anything to advance my career or my chemistry research. The theme for this blog event was sparkling wines from outside of Champagne, so I tried to select something interesting that was probably not available outside of France.

What I ended up doing is taking a look at the alternatives to Champagne which are available in a typical small Parisian grocery store. I was stunned to find out that there were so many sparkling wines at a fraction of the cost of the bottles of Champagne. There were sparkling wines for less the two euros! Could they be any good? Why are they so cheap? We may never know the answers to these questions, but one has to start somewhere, and it might as well be cost-efficient.

An aquaintance of mine who hails from Toulouse and was on my trip to Champagne with the Club International des Jeunes a Paris last November had mentioned her preference for the sparkling wines of Limoux, which I did find among the section of cheap sparkling wines in the grocery store. I selected two: a Blanquette and a Cremant. They are from the Languedoc-Roussillon, which is the region between Provence and the France-Spain border, along the coast of the Mediterranean sea, although Limoux itself lies 50 km inland, in the mountains.

Both the Blanquette and the Cremant are non-vintage wines distributed by Jean Babou, with not much else indicated on the label. Blanquette de Limoux is probably the oldest sparkling wine in France, having been 'invented' by monks in the 16th century who noticed that the wines they bottled in April became naturally sparkling in the bottles. The name 'Blanquette' is actually the local name for the Mauzac grape, which has a fine powdery 'blanket' on the underside of its leaves. The majority of the grapes in Blanquette de Limoux are Mauzac, with up to 10% allowed to be from Chardonnay and Chenin, according to the standards of the appellation controlee. The wine becomes sparkling in the bottle due to incomplete fermentation of the juice before bottling, avoiding all the steps of degorgement and addition of liquor that are necessary as part of the second fermentation in the Methode Champenoise.

When I poured this wine, it had a nice pale yellow color with foamy bubbles that lasted only a couple seconds and left behind a bimodal set of bubbles: big ones along the side of the glass, and some fine ones floating up from the bottom. The aromas were not yeasty at all, but rather lemon and green apple. The flavor matched the aroma, with the addition of a very light honey note, and it was acidic and quite dry. The attack was very light but came on stronger on the midpalate and had a refreshing, moderately lingering finish. At a price of 3.60 euros, I would take this to an informal party because it would strike up a conversation and be fun to drink, but its not worth dragging home on the plane to the States.

I also tasted a Cremant de Limoux, which is also an 'appellation controlee' but it is allowed to have up to 20% of Chardonnay and Chenin with the Mauzac grapes. It held up its bubbles longer then the Blanquette after pouring, but after those dissipated the wine was only weakly carbonated. Just as pale in color as the Blanquette, the aroma was less citric, with faint vanilla notes, but when it came to the the flavor it was right back to the green apple that I tasted in the Blanquette, with a more even balance between the front and midpalate, but hardly any finish. I searched this wine in vain for a hint of complexity. I have to say, though, that it was less acidic and significantly less dry (though not sweet) than the Blanquette, which made it more quaffable. I could drink this wine quite easily without getting tired of it, but I would probably get drunk quickly, since it's so mild and goes down so easily, even at 12.5% alcohol. For 4.50 euros, I was satisfied that I enjoyed this wine enough to buy it again, but I wouldn't try to introduce it to friends, because it's not really much fun to have a wine that is only a little sparkly. It doesn't really fit into the category of dud, party, or celebration drink, but rather, the sparkling wine that doesn't require any excuse: the one to have at home for when you've had a tough day. If I have to choose, I'll probably put this in the category of dud for its lack of sparkle and its forgettability.

In my quest to taste alternatives to Champagne I also bought a Brut de Loire and Cremant de Loire, which were in fact actually from wine stores. But, I'm just one girl and I didn't have the chance to open them up yet. They're chilling in my fridge, though, ready for me in case of a really tough day (or a really great one!) or for someone to appreciate them with me. I'll write about it here if any of those things happen.

Truffes au Chocolat et Piment d'Espelette

In my last post, I talked about truffles, as in tuber melanosporum and tuber incinatum, but here I'm talking about the truffle which only sort of looks like a truffle and is not nearly so rare, though occasionally just as expensive. Before my cooking class this weekend, it had not actually occurred to me that the dusting of cocoa powder on a chocolate truffle is supposed to mimic dirt.
Anyway, inspired by a dessert I got a nibble of when I went for cassoulet with La Petite Americaine a few weeks back, I decided to investigate the combination of chocolate with Piment d'Espelette, the only spice to be given is own controlled appellation of origin, similar to the designations for wines like Champagne and Bordeaux or cheeses like Roquefort and Brie de Meaux, which must follow rigorous preparation guidelines in order to maintain their identity. Piment d'Espelette is a spicy red pepper, but only in French terms of spiciness, rating a 4 out of 10 on the Scoville index of heat, with a warm, sweet aroma. The pepper is named after the town of Espelette, or Ezpeleta, in the Basque region along the border of Spain and France. It was originally brought to Spain by explorers returning from the New World 400 years ago, so it's fitting that it should be paired with chocolate, another gift from the New World. In Basque cooking, it is added to stews, omelettes, and sauces and also rubbed on roasted meats.
I added the ground pepper to the ganache for the truffles and then finished with barely a sprinkle of it on top of the truffles after dusting them with cocoa powder. I had never made truffles before, but found the recipe involving piment d'Espelette on a French health website, so I figured it was worth the trouble, since it was health food and all. The pepper is not really discernable at first bite, but if you let the chocolate stay on your tongue and melt, there is a delicious lingering warmth. I'll report back later on the reactions of mes amis francais!

L'atelier des Chefs Part Deux: La Truffe Noire

I have an incredible amount of work to do at the moment, so for anything pleasurable, I find myself trying to really justify to no one that what I want to do will be VERY productive for improving my quality of life. Otherwise, I better just sit right back down at the computer and keep on working. Fortunately, the bad angel over my other shoulder tells me that I'm only in Paris for a few more months and I'll regret it later if I miss out on living the good life while I've got it. So my brain gets stuck on the decision whether to seize the day for work or for play, until something unusual comes along.

Now, what could be more rare and intriguing then the ephemeral black truffle? You'd have a hard time finding one even if you were standing in front of it in the forest, as they're hidden in the leaves and well camouflaged like black golf balls covered with dirt, requiring the use of trained dogs to hunt them down. I've never even tried truffle oil, and I'm pretty sure that I won't be cooking with truffles in the foreseeable future, but I always wondered what all the fuss was about. It just so happens that the Atelier des Chefs was holding a 2 hour class to explore cooking with black truffles. Et voilà, it's, as they say, 'Mon Noël à Moi.'

It turns out that a black truffle is just a little ball of fungus, with hard, dry, bumpy exterior, and an interior very finely marbled in white and black. The more finely and evenly marbled your truffle is, the better its quality. How can you know this before buying it, I wonder? They're stored in cool conditions, but once at room temperature or warmer, black truffles exude a rich, earthy aroma which, while strong, isn't really pungent or assertive. I think it's this balance of earthiness and delicacy that makes truffles special in food dishes. But who in the world first thought of eating something the dog picked up, which smelled like dirt? It frequently occurs to me that there is no limit to what weird stuff the French will eat, and the weirder the better. It must be something in the wine.

The instructor was the same Japanese chef that I studied with last time when the 'special' ingredient was corn. This time we made a whole menu of starter, main dish and dessert, all featuring truffles. For the 12 of us, there were two good size truffles, coming from Drôme, a département in the Rhône-Alpes region. These truffles probably retail for 350 euros per kilo, while their cousins of another species from the Perigord region in the southwest retail for about 1000 euros per kilo. Funny enough, I read in a French cooking magazine, Regal, that you have to be careful because there are also Chinese black truffles on the market which are a different species, mass produced, of inferior flavor, and no aroma. I'd probably buy the wrong ones anyway, and that's why I'm happy to let the chefs do the buying. At L'atelier des Chefts, our recipes involving truffles for 6 people called for 30g of truffles. The menu, with four recipes, called for 20g of truffle per person, for a cost of 7 euros of truffles per person, not counting any other ingredients. Fortunately, the recipes make economical use of the strong aroma of the truffle, which acts as a condiment. According to the chef Regal interviewed, though, a dish should be 10-15% truffle, at minimum, or half as much if you have the pricey kind from Perigord.

First, by storing the truffles in a closed plastic container with eggs for two days, the eggs were allowed to soak up some aroma from the truffles. For the starter, we poached those eggs and served them on a creamy lentil soup, on top of which some slices of truffle were crumbled at the last minute. This picture shows the soup and the eggs, but not the truffles, since they really need to be crumbled on top at the last minute. The best temperature for appreciating the aroma of truffles is 57C (from the Regal article) and the aroma degrades quickly, somewhat like the way that the aromas in coffee don't last very long at high temperature.
In the next dish, we cut incisions part way through a trio of beautiful scallops and tucked a thin slice of truffle inside each, then skewered the scallops and truffles together. After letting the scallops rest in the fridge to allow the truffle's fragrance and flavor permeate the meat, we simply pan-fried each face of the skewered scallops in a small amount of olive oil. What was left of each truffle after our slicing was chopped up and added to a vinaigrette of radish and celery brunoise (very small dice, about 5mm on a side) with olive oil and white balsamic vinegar. To take advantage of every bit of the truffle's flavor and aroma, the dry outer part that we peeled off before slicing the truffle was saved by chopping it up and using it to infuse some softened butter that was later added to a potato purée.


Our purée was 'façon grand chef' which implies a heart-stopping 450g of butter for 600g of potatoes. The women in the class were quite hesitant about all of this butter, but the men in the class almost universally called for our instructor to bring out more butter!

The dessert was a traditional fondant au chocolat, with a slice of truffle hidden in the middle. I wasn't all that impressed with this, compared to the direct aroma and sense of the truffle in the starter and main dish. In fact, and since you can't see the truffle and its taste is a bit mild, I didn't feel that truffles really enhanced the chocolate cake. I'm sure there is some other combination of truffle and chocolate that is more interesting. Sorry, no picture on this one, but it looked pretty much like any other molten lava chocolate cake. I like this photo, if you must have one.

It was pretty fun to play around with a fascinating ingredient that I would never come across otherwise, and the food was indeed delicious in the end. For less money than I would have stresfully spent trying to cook with truffles on my own and wonder if I was missing something because I bought Chinese fakes, I got to relax and play around with them in someone else's kitchen. It was fun for sure, and definitely an experience I'm glad to have had in Paris.