CARDOON TWO WAYS

Vegetarians rejoice!

This week, as promised, we are bringing you two variations on one classic dish.
Cardoon is vegetable you may have seen in your grocery store or specialty market but had no idea what it was or how to prepare it. It’s a vegetable I have had only a handful of times before, it’s very tasty and a great change from the norm.

Cardoon has a taste similar to artichoke and celery with a pleasant lemony flavour. It’s actually a member of the thistle family like artichoke and grows well in most gardens. The best part of the cardoon is the meaty inner stalks that are pale white. They have the best flavour and tend to be less bitter than the outer green stalks. Experienced gardeners will tie up the cardoon as it grows to keep the inner stalks from getting sun and turning green producing desirable pale white bunches with the best possible flavour.

At this time of year in Umbria, cardoon is at all the markets and discerning shoppers carefully inspect bunches to ensure they were grown properly and have good stalks that are not corky and green. We were lucky to have a few bunches of cardoon left in the garden for us to use so there was no need to even go to the market.
Be warned though, cardoon have a series of tiny barbs running up the edges of the stock that sting and stick in your skin like a sliver but if you handle them carefully you can easily avoid injury.

That brings us to cleaning the cardoon in preparation for cooking and why possibly the average home cook is not jumping on the cardoon bandwagon. There is a pretty considerable amount of work to be done if you want to eat delicate tender pieces. Like celery, cardoon has ribs running the length of the stocks with strong strings in them that need to be removed. First though you must trim the edges of each stalk to remove the thorns. In preparation for cardoon cleaning, fill a large pot with cold water and squeeze a lemon into it, as you clean each stalk you throw it into the water to keep it from turning brown, like an artichoke. With the thorns trimmed, using a sharp pairing knife, start at one end of the stalk and pull away the string down their length. If the stalk is very coarse you can also trim away the outer skin but don’t go too crazy, the main thing is to remove the tough heavy strings. Working quickly, carefully peel the backside of the stalk of the thin white skin that runs its length, in the same manner. If it is stubborn, a gentle scraping will remove the pieces that stay behind. Trim the stalks into 2 or 3 inch pieces and put them in the lemon water. The first few stalks may take a little longer to do but once you know the technique it goes pretty quickly.
With the cardoon stalks all trimmed and in the acidulated water they now need to be precooked in order to make them nice and tender for the finished dish. Bring the pot of cleaned cardoon to a boil and simmer for about 15 minutes then remove them from the heat and let them cool in their cooking water. The cardoon is now ready to be used in our recipes.

Cardoon recipes

One of the most classic dishes cardoon is used in is a gratin. Cream or milk and cheese are excellent foils for the subtle flavours of the cardoon and who doesn’t like a bubbly golden brown baked gratin?

In my gratin recipe I use a combination of mozzarella and grated Pecorino Romano with a hint of garlic, that got me to thinking, what about making a cardoon pizza? So I whipped up a batch of pizza dough and using the same basic recipe I transferred the gratin mixture to a pizza crust and a cardoon pizza bianca was born, A Cook Not Mad style.
Cardoon is a vegetable that every cook should prepare at least once to taste its unique and delicate flavours and if you can put it on a pizza well it makes it that much better.
So gardeners, plant some cardoon for next year and share the goodness of this unique vegetable with your friends.