French Food Safari spends a delightful day in a small French village in the Ardeche with top selling cookbook author Stephane Reynaud. This is a celebration of the butcher and the baker, the closeness to the land and the slow calm of village life, followed by a demonstration of warm French hospitality – from the groaning cheese platter with 16 different choices to the huge pot au feu and local delicacies of pork mince cooked over the open fire.

Then it’s into the precision of the commercial kitchen at Guillaume’s restaurant for a lesson in how puff pastry is made with pastry chef Kirsty Solomon – it takes a staggering three days to make.

Respected Sydney chef Serge Dansereau (Bathers’ Pavilion) uses puff pastry to wrap up a beautiful fillet of beef with a mushroom duxelles into one of the marvelous French dishes – boeuf en croute.

Chef Chui Lee Luk, from acclaimed modern French restaurant Claude’s in Sydney, creates a wonderful salad that plays on the traditional boudin blanc (white sausage). This is filled with crab meat and served as part of a composed salad of spring onion sprouts, salad burnet leaf and grilled spears of asparagus, with a dressing of avocado puree. This all sits on top of choux pastry which is baked until crisp.

French Food Safari joins passionate Parisienne baker Fabrice le Bourdat in the pre-dawn hours to see the work behind the scenes that leads to his pretty bakery filling up with baguettes and croissants, madeleines and petits fours.

Guillaume makes madeleines – little sponge cakes with a distinctive shell shape, made famous by the great French novelist Marcel Proust. It was he who described the moment of eating a lemon-scented madeleine as being “filled with such exquisite pleasure”.

Add comment