Créme Fraiche Potatoes

Everyone loves potatoes in some form or other. Part of their delight is the variety of dishes the humble spud can enable. This dish is one of our favorite side dishes as it is so easy to make and so sensational on taste. 

serves 6

Ingredients

250ml creme fraiche

2 eggs

salt and pepper

clove of garlic

half kilo of finely grated potatoes

6 foil cups

Method

Butter the foil cups well using butter. Mix the creme fraiche, garlic and eggs together. Season with salt & pepper using more salt than normal. Bake in oven at 220 degrees for 30 minutes.

Pan fried abalone with crispy parsnip and kale

Following our wonderful visit to the abalone sea farm of Sylvain Huchette  up at Kerazan on the North Breton coast, we invited our neighbors in to enjoy our cache of fresh organic gastropods! They are very simple to prepare and within minutes we had them sizzling in butter on a hot pan. As one of our friends said, we have something both delicious and beautiful! The shells will be inserted into the candelabra over the main dining room as a permanent reminder of a superb starter!! Thank you Sylvain Huchette and France Haliotis!! 

Ingredients ( serve 6)

1 kilo of fresh abalones  (25 in total)

2 parsnips

2 leaves of fresh kale 

50g of butter

vegetable oil to fry the kale and shavings of parsnip 

Salt & pepper to season as required. 

Method 

The abalone will be served as a starter on a bed of parsnip purée dressed with crispy kale and parsnip shavings. 

First peel the parsnips. Then take18  shavings from the parsnip and set aside. Slice the remaining parsnip and boil on a pan until soft. Once soft, strain the water and blend the buter into the parsnip purée. Keep warm. Fry the parsnip shavings on a hot pan with oil. Set aside when golden. Fry the kale leaves in hot oil until it is crispy. Set aside and keep warm. 

Using a spoon, remove each snail from its shell. Try to keep as much snail as possible by sliding the spoon close inside the shell. Then clean off the snail removing intestines and valve. Rince off and dry the abalones. Using a wood hammer and a clean cloth, gently pound each abalone once. In a hot pan, place 20g of butter. When sizzling, add the abalones cooking for two minutes on each side. Prepare the warm plate first adding the purée, then the cooked abalone and dress with the crispy shavings and kale. Spoon over any remaining hot butter and  immediately. 

Abalone - The Truffel of the sea!

Abalones are regarded as the rarest and most prized shellfish in the world. Almost extinct due to overfishing, they are now becoming available again due to the success of specific breeding farms such as the one belonging to Sylvain Huchette  (France Haliotis) which we recently visited on the L'Aber Wrac'h bay of northern Brittany. The hatchery deals with the selection and breeding of the baby abalones which after nine months are removed to fresh deep cold waters about  500 metres off shore. There in this mineral rich non polluted waters these gastropods will take up to five years to grow before they are lifted and harvested for some of the finest dining restaurants of France and all over the world. 

What makes Sylvain's sea farm so special is that he has retained natural food sources for his baby abalones who dine on healthy seaweed and  micro algae which is sustainably grown on the sea farm.

When they reach 1cm, they are placed back in their cool native waters of L'Aber Wrac'h in special cages and fed on the rich seaweed like red dulse. Today France Haliotis is the European leader supplying eggs and expertise to new farms in Ireland, Denmark and Spain. France Haliotis is the first certified organic abalone farm in the world.

We arrived after lunch and were warmly received by Sylvain and his colleagues. A detailed tour of the sea farm followed by a tasting of the abalone cooked on a simple pan by Sylvain himself. There are many ways to cook abalone but seared on a hot pan with Breton butter is hard to beat! The abalone tasted delicious - nothing like what we had bought in a supermarket a few years earlier. This was so fresh and tender and tasted of scallop crossed with foie gras! No wonder the Michelin chefs of the world are regular customers to Sylvain's door. 

www.abalonebretagne.com