64 JANUARY 2021
THESE FURLED, BITTER PLANTS, which pop up when cold weather
hits, come in all shapes, some resembling roses, or peonies, or
lilies with ruffled petals. Some look like torpedoes or tiny foot-
balls; others resemble scraggly mops of hair that could belong to
a Muppet. (Look at a large head of frisée—you’ll see.) In winter at
the farmers market, cooks gravitate toward their glossy leaves,
which might be pink, burgundy streaked with bolts of white,
or a dappled chartreuse, their bold colors a rare break from
winter’s root vegetable pallor.
But the fervor over chicories is about much more than just
their looks. “Chicory varieties offer taste and texture that let-
tuce never can,” says Chris Field of Campo Rosso Farm, who
sells chicories at the Union Square Greenmarket in New York
City. Field and his partner, Jessi Okamoto, offer a wide range of
Italian chicories and always sell out well before market hours
are over.
From Seattle to Detroit, chefs are cooking with chicories
in new and unexpected ways. Chef Vartan Abgaryan of Yours
Truly in Venice, California, embraces the bitterness of chicory
leaves in his Escarole Shakshuka (recipe p. 69). “I love bitter
flavors because, as a cook, bitterness forces you to balance it out
with acidity and sweetness,” he says. Mary Celine Bui, execu-
tive chef of Van Da in New York City, is drawn to chicory root,
which for her invokes a distinct nostalgic aroma: the toasted
nuttiness of Vietnamese-American corner-shop coffee. “In
chicories
grab your
attention.
combination with milk, chicory works really well when you
want a strong roasted flavor without the extra caffeine,” Bui
says (see “Just Brew It,” p. 72). Elsewhere across the country,
chefs are pickling chicories and stuffing them into tuna melts
(recipe p. 71), basting them with schmaltz (recipe p. 75), and
even baking them into cakes (recipe p. 75).
In addition to offering vivid color and freshness during the
lean months of the year, winter chicories are an important
source of income for farmers in the off-season. Siri Erickson-
Brown, owner of Local Roots Farm in Duvall, Washington,
which supplies many of Seattle’s restaurants, says: “From a
farmer’s perspective, winter vegetables are so heavily brassica-
dependent that it’s hard to do good crop rotation. You’re
only trying to rotate kale and cabbage? No. You’ve got to put
something else in there, and chicories of all kinds are a good
way to break up the crop rotation cycle.” According to Cassie
Woolhiser, an organizer of Seattle’s annual Sagra del Radicchio
festival and Chicory Week campaign (which took place virtu-
ally this past October), locally grown chicories represent an
important, more sustainable alternative to lettuces, especially
in the Northern states. “It costs so much in fossil fuel, synthetic
fertilizer, pesticide and fungicide, and human labor to produce
lettuce and other tender salad greens [in the Southwest] for
the whole country year-round,” Woolhiser says. “Radicchio
grows in cooler climates, is less input-heavy, and tastes great.”
There are no genetically
modified chicories on the
market. All varieties,
including the rosso di Verona
radicchio shown here, are
developed through
open-pollination breeding.
FOOD STYLING: RISHON HANNERS; PROP STYLING: CHRISTINE KEELY
