I used to keep radishes for all the wrong reasons. In the garden, I planted them because they grow quickly and I wanted to harvest something, anything, as soon as possible. During the early weeks of farmers markets, I’d buy radishes out of pity at the sight of sorry farmers languishing behind tables of radish bunches, with little else for sale.
I’d bring a bunch home with a half-baked plan like, ‘I’ll put them in a salad.’
Sound familiar? Was your last radish floating in leftover dressing at the bottom of a salad bowl? Was it untouched garnish?
Shriveled in your compost pile?
Raw radish is too pungent for most people, and few understand how delicious it can be if you cook it – which turns the spicy bitterness into an earthy sweetness. My favorite methods of radish cookery are: without pork, with pork and pickled.
Without Pork: the Whole-Plant Option
Radish leaves are edible and cooking the leaves and bulb together creates radish-on-radish juxtapositions of flavor and texture. This recipe works best with long and slender varieties, like icicle or French Breakfast, and is a great way to use small radishes thinned from your garden. (You can follow this recipe with large, round radishes too, but mush chop the leaves and slice the bulb.)
Wash a bunch of whole radishes with the leaves still attached. Cut off the spindly taproot at the bottom of each bulb. Heat a combination of butter and olive oil in a pan. Sauté the radishes slowly on medium heat without stirring. After five minutes, the leaves will flatten against the bottom of the pan and begin to crisp, while the bulb begins turning slightly translucent. Add a shot of sherry or white wine to loosen anything sticky, and carefully flip the radishes. Now add a few sliced garlic cloves and sprinkle with salt and black pepper. Cook until the garlic browns.
The leaves become melt-in-your-mouth crispy, like the small legs of soft shell crabs. The juicy flesh of the bulb, meanwhile, becomes soft and sweet.
With Bacon: aka the Oldest Trick in the Book
My first-ever positive experience with cooked radish was in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. I had to go around the world to discover a trick that’s completely obvious, but it was worth it.
Technically, there’s no bacon in Bhutan. But there is phag-sha, which means ‘pork dried in cold air.’ Cut from pork belly, like bacon, phag-sha isn’t cured with anything but the mountain breeze, and there’s usually a layer of pig skin on one edge of the slab. Pig skin is flavorless, extremely chewy and contains the occasional coarse belly hair. Pig skin isn’t necessary for bringing out the best in radishes, and neither is phag-sha. Bacon works just fine, and so does any other kind of pork, cut into small pieces.
Unless the pork is very fatty, start with some oil in the pan, like grapeseed or safflower, and some cut pork. Cook on medium, stirring often, until meat is nicely browned on all sides. Add water if it starts to stick.
When the pork is browned, add a bunch of sliced radishes, a chopped onion and as many sliced hot peppers as you desire with the seeds removed according to your heat tolerance. Season with salt. Cook slowly for 15 minutes on low/medium with the lid on, stirring often and adding water if it starts to dry up. Add chopped ginger and green onion when it’s almost done, stir-fry a bit longer and serve with rice.
Pickles ’n’ Pad Thai
Putting up a few quarts of pickled radishes early in the season is a nice way to get warmed up for when pickling season begins in earnest during the summer’s dog days. Use a brine that’s two parts water, one part cider vinegar, one part white wine vinegar, and enough sugar to taste – just enough to soften the edge of the vinegar, but not overly sweet. Trim the leaves and taproot and pack the radishes into clean, sterile quart jars after adding a teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon of mustard seeds to each jar. Follow the pickling instructions that come with the Mason jar lids.
In three weeks your radishes will be pickled and ready to snack on or served alongside a rich meal like steak (à la horseradish and prime rib).
Pickled radish can also be cooked, and one of the best-known examples of pickled radish cookery is Pad Thai, a stir-fried noodle dish from Thailand. Boil, strain, rinse and set aside some rice noodles. In a hot wok with a 1/4-inch puddle of oil on the bottom, brown a mess of chopped garlic and then add cubed tofu (or chicken or other meat) and chopped pickled radish. As the proteins cook they’ll release water; keep stirring the sputtering pile until everything is cooked. Then pour in one or two beaten eggs. When the eggs start to set up, add soy sauce and stir it all around to break up the eggs into fragments. Then stir in the noodles, along with bean sprouts, chives and ground peanuts. When everything’s hot and mixed, remove from heat and garnish with more bean sprouts, chives, ground peanuts and a slice or two of lime.
Now that you’re ready to roll with radishes, you can buy them and plant them for all the right reasons. Just remember to keep that radish out of the raw dish.
