Le Cordon Bleu - Instruction #25

Instruction #25 – Lyonnais

• Lyon-style sausage with potatoes
• Pike-perch dumplings in crawfish sauce
• Lyon-style Mardi-Gras fritters

Think warm potato salad. With a potent vinaigrette. For the entrée. Mixing onion, mustard, vinegar, parsley, and white wine with warm (operative word) potatoes is the key. Full flavor infuse-ment.

I loved this dish. Served along pistachio-sausage of pork shoulder, lean veal, and pork fatback. Slowly cooked in court-bouillon – water flavored with onion, celery, bay leaf, thyme, white wine, salt, and black peppercorns.

I had trouble envisioning the main dish from the title. I was thinking some sort of a ravioli-type item. Actually. It is more like a soufflé. Quenelles – dumplings – made of milk, butter, flour, egg yolks, cream, and pike-perch. Much like past mousselines. Poached in barley simmering water. Placed into a gratin dish.

Coating the bottom of the gratin, crawfish coulis. Essentially an over-reduced crawfish stock. Mixed into béchamel. All baked until puffy, golden, and hot.

I was surprised that the final dish tasted less like fish. And more like milky eggs. Chef’s quenelles were quite large. So maybe more sauce or small dumplings to intensify the flavor? With practical on Monday I have the weekend to mull-it-over.

Since the dessert batter – flour, oil, rum, salt, lemon peel, baking powder, sugar, butter, and eggs – wasn’t made the day before, it hardly puffed when fried. According to Chef Caals. Had the dough rested overnight, the final result would have been dramatically inflated.

Lyonnais is known as the cradle of traditional, hearty cuisine. Perfectly situated near the Rhône River. Pike-perch, gudgeons, crayfish, trout, and carp are produced. The land rears the famous Bresse chicken and Charolais beef.

On the non-protein side. Onions, potatoes, green beans, watercress, cherries, apricots, cardoons [pictured] and its artichoke relative are harvested.

Rich in foodstuffs and wines of the Rhône and Loire Valleys and neighboring Burgundy. Another. Must see when touring France.