Fate must have aligned our paths once again as I returned to Artisan du Chocolat’s production ‘Atelier’ just in time for the Sloe Season. These wild plums grow abundantly in the ‘bush’ behind the fences and last year, they escaped me, as it was late October when I noticed these sloes and it was the season’s end.
This year, in mid-September, they tasted awful, with a mouth puckering astringency and bitterness that laid “eat ‘em all” dares and bets around the lunch table. Tasting them every other day, it wasn’t until now, early October that they tasted ‘right’. The astringency was there, but tamer, the plum flavour more pronounced and most importantly, the previously starchy centre bits have now turned into plump, juicy flesh.
40 minutes of picking during the lunch break yielded 4kgs worth of tiny sloes and probably 200g of assorted spiders, wood lice and other creepy crawlies that probably now inhabit my kitchen! So, how do you tell a sloe from a damson from a bullace and from a plum?

Mille Feuille (French) or Milhoja (Spanish) basically just means 1000 Leaves in English, a reference to the layers of flakey puff pastry that make up this iconic pastry. Mille Feuille, sadly, is oftentimes assembled waaaay too ahead of time and ends up with flaccid pastry layers.
