While perhaps not as scary or threatening as the stinging nettles reported on a few weeks ago, Fiddlehead ferns are certainly not your average vegetable. They really do come from ferns, copious amounts of which blanket the forests and parks here in the Pacific Northwest. The fiddlehead part refers to the tightly wound coil of the young fern shoots. There is about a two week window in the spring where this new growth is tender enough to eat, just before it unfurls into the common fern frond. It is at this point when the Fiddlehead ferns can be harvested for consumption (by professionals, of course), as they were by one of my favorite purveyors, Foraged and Found Edibles.
Wanting the ferns to maintain their crisp texture, I knew that cooking them for a long period of time was certainly out of the question. We first started by rinsing them thoroughly and then trimming off the bottom of the stem ends. As we already had the grill fired up, I decided to give them the simple treatment of olive oil, salt and pepper before putting them into a "grilling skillet" (just a pan with holes in it so that you can grill small things without losing them). Once they were mostly tender when poked with a fork, we pulled them and served them alongside a delicious pork chop and some grilled bread.
At first bite, this unusual vegetable struck me as tasting very similar to asparagus, or perhaps a cross between an asparagus and a green bean. But then the bitterness came. I don't think I cooked them long enough. They still tasted mostly raw, and their texture was closer to celery than that of a perfectly cooked asparagus. So I will attribute the bitter aftertaste to user error, not an inherent flaw of the fiddlehead. Next time I try them, I'll perhaps blanch them for a minute or two before grilling or sauteeing them. So if you're ever in the market for a whimsical-looking side dish, hopefully you can learn from my mistakes and try your own hand at the Fiddlehead ferns!
3 comments:
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True - raw milk tastes pretty much like regular milk. We had raw milk for the first time yesterday and we prayed to god several times to protect us from any possible infections. We are okay so far :) But the milk itself tasted like any other milk. We had milk with chocolate too, and had the same experience that chocolate dominated the taste. We'll be trying raw milk on my wife's mom who's had some lactose intolerance lately. Waiting to see if "real milk" gets rid of this problem :)
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