SFist In The Kitchen: Kohlrabi
We felt uninspired as we shopped at Oakland's 9th Street Farmer's Market on Friday, shivering against the sheets of rain and high winds. But as we chatted with a jacketless worker from Watsonville who hopped about to stay warm, piles of green kohlrabi caught our eye. We've never cooked with this vegetable, so we decided to give it a try.
SFist Derrick, contributing. Photos by Melissa Schneider.
Most cookbooks that mention kohlrabi wonder why Americans don't eat it more. Now that we've tried it, we have to agree. Its deep, earthy flavor reminds most writers of broccoli stalks, though to us the peppery bite evoked a turnip-cauliflower hybrid. Perhaps cooks here don't like the look; hold it root side up and the stems could be hot wax dripping off the "bulb";really just the stems swollen into each other.
You'll benefit by not manhandling the vegetable too much. Peel it with a paring knife before using it (and feel your heart break if you've found purple kohlrabi, whose royal coloring is only skin deep). You can serve it raw in thin slices, or blanch slices until just tender in boiling, salted water. Toss with oil and salt before roasting it at 450 degrees for thirty minutes to deepen the already earthy taste. The leaves can be cooked like kale, but the stems are woody and should be tossed out.
You'll find kohlrabi mentioned frequently in Indian, Asian, German ("kohlrabi" is Germanic, surprisingly) and Hungarian cookbooks. David Bouley features a brilliant green kohlrabi puree under an almond-crusted halibut in East of Paris. If you want to improvise, kohlrabi's cauliflower-esque taste marries to many of the same flavors: bechamel sauce, ham, parsley, and cream.
We used our new vegetable in a simple appetizer. We diced kohlrabi and fresh baby carrots, tossed them lightly with salt, and let some moisture drain out. The smaller your dice, the better the texture will be. Then we made fennel-seed tuiles by modifying the recipe for sesame-seed cones in The French Laundry Cookbook. We toasted fennel seeds over a low flame, ground them in a mortar and pestle, mixed them into the tuile batter, and shaped the still-hot tuiles in an egg carton. Add a spoonful of the veggies and a final dollop of a parsley-yogurt purée, and you'll have an unusual and flavorful little hors d'oeuvre. The kohlrabi's earthy taste combined marvelously with the sweet carrots, heady fennel aroma, and clean, fresh parsley flavor. We drank a sparkling wine from the Savoie with this treat, but another lightweight sparkler like a Prosecco would no doubt work as well.