Italian Vegetable Garden. Rosalind Creasy
trace the concept of blanching back several centuries to the time when vegetables were more closely related to their primitive ancestors—which meant they were often tough, stringy, and bitter. Blanching made them both less strong tasting and more tender. Nowadays, most modern varieties are more refined and seldom need blanching, and because forced vegetables are less nutritious and take more hand labor, they are generally less favored. So why blanch vegetables? Basically, because some vegetables have yet to be completely civilized. Cardoon, some radicchios, escarole, dandelions, and some heirloom varieties of celery and cauliflower are all preferable blanched, and Belgian endive can be eaten no other way. And sometimes gardener-cooks blanch vegetables simply to alter the taste for a treat. Thus, for elegant salads, one might blanch endive to make its curly leaves light green and sweet in the center, or dandelion leaves to make them creamy colored, tender, and less bitter.
The blanching process consists of blocking light from the part of the vegetable you plan to eat, be it leaf, stem, or shoot. The blockage keeps chlorophyll from forming, and the vegetable part will therefore be white, very pale, or, in the case of red vegetables, pink. In most cases blanched vegetables are more tender than nonblanched ones.
A few general principles cover most blanching techniques. First, you must be careful to prevent the vegetable from rotting, since the process can create fungus problems. Select only unbruised, healthy plants and make sure not to keep the plants too moist. Such vegetables as cardoon and celery need air circulation around the stalks. Make sure you blanch only a few plants at a time and stagger your harvest because most vegetables are fragile and keep poorly once they have been blanched. Thus, you would not blanch your whole crop of cardoon, escarole, or endive at one time. After you harvest your blanched vegetables, keep them in a dark place, or they will turn green again and lose the very properties you worked to achieve.
Let’s go through the blanching process in detail first with a vegetable that must be blanched to be edible—Belgian endive.
In the fall cut off the tops of the plants to within an inch (2.5 cm) of the crown and dig up the roots. Once the plants are out of the ground, cut back the roots to 8–10 inches (20–25 cm). Bury the roots in a bucket in about a foot (0.3 m) of damp sand, packing them fairly close together. Store the roots in a dark cellar where it stays between 40º and 50ºF/4.4º and 10ºC. Check occasionally to make sure the sand stays moist; water sparingly when it gets dry. Within a month or so the crowns will start to resprout and produce “chicons” (the forced shoots), which you harvest when they get to be 4 or 5 inches (10 or 13 cm) tall. (The newest varieties maintain a tight head without being held in place by sand. Old varieties must have 4 or 5 inches (10 or 13 cm) of damp sand packed around the new shoots to hold them in a tight chicon.) The plants usually resprout at least once, and sometimes you can harvest them a third or fourth time. Some of the “forcing” radicchios can be blanched in the same way. In mild-winter areas both types of chicories can be blanched in the garden. Start the plants in midsummer, cut them back to the crown in early fall, build a temporary wooden box around the bed, and blanch them by covering the garden bed with 6–8 inches (15–20 cm) of sand.
To blanch celery, the stems are kept from sunlight for a few weeks. Here traditional terra cotta forms are used, but a wrapping of black plastic would also work. Cardoons are blanched in a similar manner. Curly endive can be blanched by being held in a tight head with a rubber band or string. This method also works for escarole, dandelions, and cauliflower. Heading chicories grow in loose heads when young. Once mature, some of the older varieties must be cut back at the crown. They will soon start to resprout and form a tight head.
The preferred way to blanch cardoon stalks is to wrap the stalks with burlap or straw, surround the bundles with black plastic, and then tie them with string.
To blanch cauliflower, after the curds start to show through the leaves, gather the leaves and tie them up with soft string or plastic strips to cover the emerging head. Other vegetables can be blanched in a somewhat similar way. Blanch dandelions by loosely tying up the leaves and covering the plant with a flowerpot for a week or so, or cover the bed with 4 or 5 inches (10 or 13 cm) of sand. The flowerpot process also works well with some of the leaf chicories and is occasionally used for romaine lettuce.
Serve these blanched vegetables with ceremony and give them special treatment. Most are quite mild and are best featured with light sauces and, because they are so tender, short cooking times.
Interview:
The Sebastiani Vegetable Garden
Vicki Sebastiani is a former co-owner of Viansa Winery in the Sonoma Valley of California. Vicki has been a vegetable gardener since the age of four. I visited Vicki a number of years ago to see her garden, renowned for its beauty and bounty. When I spoke with her, Vicki’s garden contained a hundred varieties of vegetables and herbs (most of them Italian), including red and yellow varieties of Italian tomatoes, white eggplant, Italian yellow and light green zucchini, giant cauliflower, variegated and red chicories, and her favorite, yellow romano beans.
Vicki’s vegetable garden was a special place. It was designed with long stone planter boxes arranged in a somewhat informal oval-shaped area. The garden had benches and wrought-iron archways planted with scarlet runner beans and was bordered by a low stone wall and rose garden on one side and an inlaid stone patio and a small pond on the other. The vegetable garden was the focal point of the area, and visitors enjoyed wandering through the garden as well as viewing it from the patio tables when dining. Vicki said that most people had never seen many of the vegetables she grew.
To plant her Italian vegetable garden, said Vicki, “In late winter I send away to specialty seed companies for authentic varieties of Italian vegetable seeds. I order my American varieties from both large, well-known seed companies and small companies that carry heirloom and hard-to-find varieties, and I glean the Italian varieties from some of the large American companies, plus poring over some of the specialty seed company catalogs. I purchased a few of the Italian varieties when I was in Italy and ordered others from an Italian seed company, Fratelli Ingegnoli.”
Vicki Sebastiani’s garden in the Sonoma Valley of California. It’s mid-summer, and the tomatoes and beans are in full production and the cutting chicories and chard are filling in ready for the fall harvest.
The garden is located off the patio. The raised stone planters and archway make it an elegant setting for entertaining. The beds contain the last of the spring peas, leeks, onions, and many varieties of eggplants. Scarlet runner beans grow over the archway.
Vicki harvests cardoon, a close relative of the artichoke. Instead of eating the flower buds of this dramatic plant, the succulent stems are enjoyed.
To get a jump on the season, Vicki would start her tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash, basil, chicories, and cardoon in flats early in the spring so that she could transplant them into the garden after all chance of frost has passed. As the soil started to warm up in spring, she would plant the seeds of some of the early vegetables, such as lettuce, beets, carrots, fava beans, endive, arugula, and fennel. In early summer she’d start the leaf chicories for fall harvest, and a little later the broccolis for the next spring harvest.