frisée
ingredient / ingredient-frisee
フリゼ / Cichorium endivia L. var. crispum (Frisée Group)
Frisée is a curly-leaved cultivar group of Cichorium endivia; the French name means "curled". It has narrow, deeply divided curly leaves. The dark outer leaves are described as more bitter, while the pale center, blanched by excluding light during growth, is less bitter. It denotes the same cultivar group as English curly endive and Italian indivia riccia.
Photographs (captions in Japanese)
Plants of frisée (curly endive) with thin, deeply cut, frilly leaves growing in rows in a field.
Shown: Cichorium endivia var. crispumPart / state: Plants growing in the field (whole leaves)
Photo: Atilin / CC BY 3.0 / original image / ledger's original image
Scope and provenance of the photo
Identification: Identified as labelled in the source. The description is "Curly endive". It appears to be a growth stage dominated by outer green leaves, before the center is blanched. I opened the image and confirmed that several plants with dense, finely split curly leaves are lined up in a field. The outer green leaves show no paling of the center.
Image shown: The original from Wikimedia Commons, reduced to 2400 px on the long side. No cropping or color changes. For display, a WebP capped at 1200 px wide is served; the ledger's original image can be checked from the link above.
On this page (9 sections)
Reading the bitterness
Frisée names the curly-leaved Cichorium endivia group in the aster family and genus Cichorium; in French it means 「縮れた」 (in translation: "curled"). Taxonomically it corresponds to Cichorium endivia L. var. crispum, also called Curled Endive Group. The University of Melbourne multilingual plant-name database and North Carolina State University extension common-name list support its identification with the same cultivar group as English curly endive. In Italian it is called indivia ricciuta, meaning curly endive. The extent of overlap with the existing general endive entry remains to be resolved.
Frisée’s dark outer leaves are described as more bitter, while its pale inner leaves grown without light are less bitter. According to a U.S. extension explanation, tying the outer leaves or removing them after harvest to exclude light from the center (blanching) slows chlorophyll production, thereby reducing bitterness. This mechanism is a simplified extension explanation, however, without direct chemical-analytical verification. It is at a different level of explanation from findings that light exposure raises sesquiterpene-lactone concentrations in witloof chicory, another member of Cichorium.
An RNA-seq comparison of frisée, described as a more bitter cultivar, and scarole, described as a less bitter var. latifolium, reports differences in expression of several GAS-like, GAO-like, and COS-like paralog genes involved in sesquiterpene-lactone biosynthesis. This account is limited to the discussion of an earlier study (Zhang et al. 2022) in a French doctoral thesis (Domont, 2023); the original paper’s abstract says only 「より苦い品種」 (in translation: "more bitter varieties") without naming the varieties. The evidence concerns gene expression alone, without direct measurement of bitter constituents or sensory testing. The thesis author also cautions against generalizing to C. intybus (industrial chicory), a different species.
Sources for this overview
Checked for this overview: Used the Melbourne University database’s identification with var. crispum.
Cichorium endivia (Batavia, Endive, Escarole, Frisée)
Checked for this overview: Used the extension common-name list’s parallel listing. / Used the extension explanation of blanching as evidence for this paragraph.
Indivia — Cichorium endivia L.
Checked for this overview: Used confirmation of the Italian spelling indivia ricciuta.
Checked for this overview: Used the gene-expression differences presented in the doctoral thesis as evidence for this paragraph.
Checked for this overview: Used the scope of the original paper’s abstract as evidence for this paragraph.
Other names: chicorée frisée (fr), indivia riccia (it)
Structured claims — open a section to read each claim's confidence, evidence and limits
Composition and content (1)
Scope: Taxonomy in the University of Melbourne Multilingual Multiscript Plant Name Database and the common-name list in NC State University extension information.
Note: The plant-name dictionary lists 『Frisée Group』 as an alternative name for 『Crispum Group』. Several independent primary sources agree on the correspondence between frisée and curly endive.
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ingredient-frisee —is_a→ (the claim sentence above)Mechanism and receptors (1)
Scope: An RNA-seq comparison of 2 Cichorium endivia varieties, var. crispum and var. latifolium, as summarized in the French doctoral thesis by Domont (2023) from Zhang et al. (2022).
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ingredient-frisee —has_biosynthesis_controlled_by→ (the claim sentence above)How processing and cooking change it (1)
Scope: A description by a North American horticultural extension service (NC State University).
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ingredient-frisee —has_perceived_bitterness_suppressed_by→ (the claim sentence above)Culture (1)
Scope: A description on an Italian agricultural website.
Note: The regional name "scarola riccia" (in translation: "curly scarole") from Campania appeared in search results, but because it is not in the sources compiled for this entry, it has not been recorded here.
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ingredient-frisee —has_local_name→ (the claim sentence above)