Common Ice Plant and Fire-Starting Challenges at LCB - Thursday, 27 October

they passed a few leaves of the
common ice plant around class
for us to get a close look

Hey, have any of you horticulturists out there grown "ficoide glaciale" ("common ice plant")? It was featured in the first course of the class I took at Le Cordon Bleu today. It's an odd-looking salad green, with small clear scale-like projections that look like ice crystals. It tastes somewhat like iceberg lettuce, slightly citrusy/minerally and maybe a little more watery, but its appearance is apparently making it the hip new ingredient with the fancy chefs in town! So let me know when you've grown some! I found a French-based supplier of the seeds: http://www.frenchgardening.com/item.html?pid=SEVE41  (You can click on this picture to get a larger view.)

[Update Feb. 2017 - that supplier's website seems to be down; other options are:
http://www.rareseeds.com/succulent-iceplant/
http://www.cherrygal.com/lettuceiceplantheirloomseeds2015-p-16419.html ]

So for the first course, salmon fillets were lightly cured with salt, sugar, coriander, fennel and dill, and then barely-lightly smoked over beech sawdust. I say barely smoked because Chef Christian Moine had a hecuva time keeping the sawdust lit! He placed it in a aluminum tray but didn't punch any holes in the bottom or scatter the sawdust over some chunks of wood - in other words, he didn't set up his smoking chamber in a way that would allow oxygen to circulate around the sawdust. Apparently he has never been camping! I was dying to make a suggestion, but he wasn't exactly of a temperament that would accept input from the students, much less the rank amateurs (ha ha) in the audience! It was still good, but would have been terrific slightly smoked. This was served with a creamy mustard sauce, a wasabi cream, white wine vinaigrette containing a little honey, cylinders of cooked potatoes, batons of Granny Smith apples, and the ice plant greens.

Next, seared duck breast with orange-glazed braised daikon, apricot chutney (very interesting and intense - he used dried apricots and didn't reconstitute them but rather sweated them in butter), carrot purée, and fabulously buttery potatoes Anna.

This was class #23 (out of 90) for the students, thus part of the "basic" semester, and apparently the dessert portion of the lesson came after a break. Chef Moine spent a lot of the 2.5 hours of class joking with the students. So it was about 1.5 hours of instruction crammed into 2.5 hours of class! As I said in Tuesday's post, these classes used to include a dessert, making them richer in more ways than one and more rigorous and satisfying! But I guess that today's students just don't have the stamina or attention span of those in previous years.