Radish.

The rainbow root that I don't think we should be messing around with.

Welcome to ingredient, where once a month I take a deep dive into some of my favourite seasonal and store cupboard ingredients. This month I’m focusing on the humble radish, a root that is so easy to grow everything from a city window box to my kitchen garden.

For paid subscribers click here to find recipes for my Scallop & Radish Crudo, Quick Sesame Pickled Daikon, and Tonnato with Radishes, all using this wonderful, crisp and vibrant vegetable. To access these recipes, plus all of the recipes from past newsletters, you can upgrade your subscription here.

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French breakfast radishes were the first piece of veg that poked its way out of the soil in my kitchen garden this year, the first thing I planted. It is the only thing that is not a tomato or an onion I’m growing different varieties of (above you can see my first harvest from a mixed rainbow pack I grew in a pot by the back door), and as my father (the biggest vegetable gardener I know) pointed out to me the other day: if you plant radishes, they’ll pretty much always come up.

Radishes are pretty and pink (and sometimes purple and white or red or black too) in their little plastic packets if you buy them from the supermarket, but, even better, if you buy them from your greengrocers or the market, they’ll come in great, muddy bunches with beautiful green tops¹ denoting them as something to pull out of the ground with a great flourish. If you go even father afield and start hunting down or growing different varieties from the watermelon radish (a type of Daikon radish that originates in China, which, you guessed it, has a green skin and a pink middle) or the pale purple blue moon you’ll find something even more vibrant and beautiful, the type of thing you seem to see all over salads and thinly sliced atop pieces of avocado toast on Instagram. I always plant French breakfast radishes because if I close my eyes and picture the markets I love to shop at in France: in Brittany and the Saturday market in Sarlat down in the Dordogne, it is those big, plentiful, vibrant bunches I see first. There are so many photos of radishes taken in France in this newsletter, because every time I visit a market I just can’t help myself!

There are many different directions I could take whilst waxing lyrical about the humble radish: I could tell you that it is an edible root, evangelise about the crisp, clean crunch and the peppery taste (which is why I think my favourite way to eat them is julienned very thin and tossed with buttery lettuce leaves and a sharp French-style vinaigrette made simply from balancing together olive oil, Dijon mustard and red wine vinegar to taste), list all the ways they’re eaten around the world (though, I am still sort of going to touch on this) or expound on how I honestly don’t understand the appeal of eating a French breakfast radish with good French butter and sea salt before a meal (in my mind, only melted butter, not even butter soft at room temperature has any place alongside anything that has its own moisture.) 

I had planned to write an opus on why we should be lifting the humble radish out of the salad drawer and start cooking with them on a more regular basis, and I did try a couple of cooked radish recipes as a starting point. Alongside a beautiful leek tart from Rick Stein’s latest book Rick Stein’s Secret France and some air fryer French fries for dinner one night I served roasted radishes tossed in my aforementioned quick vinaigrette (perfectly tasty and a good thing to do with a glut of radishes, though I think everyone around the table except for me would have preferred lettuce). In spite of the frankly terrible reviews in the comments section I tried these Savoury Radish & Goat Cheese Muffins from The Kitchn (quite nice when warm, if not a bit soggy from the radishes. But the question I wanted to ask was: why?) and for lunch one day we had Brooklyn Supper’s Pink Radish Soup (a very tasty vegetable soup that tasted nothing of radishes). I’d also planned to try this Radish Curry, these Crispy Fried Radish Cakes, and these Braised Radishes with Shallots & Bacon. I’m sure at least one of them would have been delicious, but I realised that while radishes can be excellent cooked and it is something those of us who grow our own should consider for a glut, as a general rule, I should not be trying to reinvent the wheel here.

What makes a radish special is their cool, crisp, and depending on the variety, peppery flavour, as well as, again, variety dependent, their rainbow hue.

So back to fresh, crunchy, peppery radishes. In my mind, the whole point of ingredient is yes, an opportunity for me to wax lyrical about some of my latest ingredient obsessions, but it is also about learning and discovery. I hope that you, reading these newsletters and cooking these recipes will take something away from them each month, and I also hope I learn a little something in putting them together, too. With this in mind, next I started looking at what types of recipe do radishes in their beautiful crisp, crunchy state most often appear in.

In the end, I inadvertently settled on three radish treatments which showcased the three most important facets of a radish: colour, crunch and flavour, because that is what all those many, many recipes I ended up pouring over had in common.

Starting off with the colour aspect, in unrelated (at least for the moment) news, ever since I made the stunning Scallop Carpaccio with “Thai-bouleh” (a fancy way of saying cashew and lime tabbouleh) from The Palomar Cookbook I’ve been progressing with a series of seasonal scallop carpaccios (there is sufficient Instagram evidence for this) every time I visit my fishmongers. Once blood orange season came to an end I was looking for a new way to add a bit of colour, which is how thinly sliced rainbow radishes came to form most of the crunch and some of the heat in the Scallop & Radish Carpaccio I’ve shared this month with paid subscribers.

Now, onto crunch. We all know radishes (the ubiquitous kind) are crisp and crunchy, but they’re nothing compared to the clean, crisp, satisfying crunch of a slice of a daikon radish² (also sometimes found as mooli which is a variety of daikon winter radish) which is why it is what I now reach for when I’m after crunch or crispness to accompany Asian-style dishes where the colour lent by pink-hued radishes won’t be missed. It’s brighter, fresher and juicier than a regular radish, and missing most of that peppery heat. It’s sheer size, also, really lends it to making pickles. Hence, my Quick Sesame Pickled Daikon which yes, I’ve intended as a side to cut through Japanese and other Asian-style meat dishes, but that I also rather like to make just to snack on.

And then no, I’d not forgotten about a radishes peppery flavour profile; but then I ate out.

If you’re sitting reading this article in the archives, rather than in real time, I feel the need to point out that at the time of writing (typically I write ingredient 1-2 months ahead, though I try to leave the recipes as last minute as possible so I can work with seasonal produce) restaurants have been closed to indoor patrons for 6 months and only during the last few weeks we’ve been able to play chicken with the weather and dine out, eating out is a big deal.

But, we managed it on a gloriously warm and sunny May afternoon outside one of my old favourites for good, British produce: The Goods Shed in my hometown of Canterbury. For those of you who care about such things I shared everything delicious they cooked over coals and we ate on Instagram, but, obviously, I’m here to talk to you about the radishes.

Just a little snack before the meal, a plate of local radishes (pictured, which I’m pretty sure came from their own small holding, but don’t quote me on that) dressed with extra virgin olive oil and sea salt, and a little pile of the most divine smoked bass roe with which to dip and scoop up using these pretty pink, early season beauties. Yes I know, I’ve just told you I’ve never got the whole French breakfast radish and sea salt thing, but with some sort of sharp, salty, savoury, fishy dip? This was the very best thing we ate that wonderful lunchtime, which brings us to the recipe that I think best showcases radishes peppery flavour.

So, fish dip. A pâté type situation was not going to work here, I wanted something silkier than that, and if I find it bloody difficult to get the right type of smoked fish to make taramasalata or other smoked whipped roes, you will too. After lots of scribbling, Googling and brainstorming, I remembered tonnato.

A classic Italian mayonnaise-based sauce made with tinned tuna and bottled anchovies, tonnato it is typically served as a sauce for veal³ (odd I know, but apparently it works - I’ve just not been about to get a hold of any good veal recently to check), but it was Melina Hammer’s treatise on the brilliant of tonnato - and her stunning recipe for Tonnato Toast with Colorful Radishes - on Food52 that made me think tonnato may be just the thing here.

I think the lesson I’ve taken away from writing ingredient this month has been that sometimes, there is a reason we eat a certain thing a certain way. Yes, innovation is fun and exciting, but at other times, the classics are classics for a reason, and in a lot of cases, there is just no need to mess with really good, really fresh seasonal produce.

1. I’ve not yet had a chance to cook with them myself as bugs stripped my radish tops last summer (I’m trying some companion planting with some mint and lavender this year which seems to be working well before I have to resort to nets or sprays) but it is worth nothing you can eat those leafy greens, too. This summer I hope to have the greens to try two recipes from Paris based American food writer David Lebovitz: Radish Leaf Soup and Radish Leaf Pesto.

2. If you live in a big city head to Chinatown (or Koreatown, you get the general idea) and you’ll have no problem getting your hands on a daikon radish. Ocado and Asda also sell them as mooli, and I have a good track record of finding them at big independent grocery stores who focus on fresh produce grown abroad as well as at home such as Macknade in Faversham.

3. There is a recipe for a tonnato and tomato salad in Ed Smith’s brilliant book On The Side: A sourcebook of inspiring side dishes which while I’ve not tested it yet, now I’ve become more familiar with tonnato I just know is going to be delicious. That being said, it is such a great compendium of side dishes you really ought to own a copy anyway.