The Emerald Goddess salad at Twin Tails.
Picture: Courtesy Twin Tails
No salad is extra resilient than the Caesar, owing as a lot to its literal sturdiness as the pliability that permits it to take all kinds of recent types: with kale or little gem, fortified with grilled rooster or salmon, changed into a wrap. The important thing tenets are creaminess, saltiness, and crunch. When chef Jessica Lee-An was creating a salad for the menu at Sae Ron, a contemporary Korean restaurant on the Decrease East Facet, she recalled the piles of chrysanthemum greens that her grandmother would forage from neighbors’ yards in Seoul rising up. Grandma cooked them — in a stew or sizzling pot, or blanched and dressed as a banchan — however the former Gramercy Tavern pastry chef needed to characterize each her Korean upbringing and American tastes, so her chrysanthemum Caesar salad at Sae Ron is an ethereal mound of frondlike chrysanthemum greens tossed in a traditional anchovy-laced dressing earlier than it’s topped with a snowfall of shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano and crumbles of toasted black quinoa and fried sunflower seeds. “It’s very herbaceous and refreshing — it’s nearly like consuming parsley crossed with a touch of cilantro with grassy and peppery notes,” Lee-An says.
She isn’t the one Asian American chef to faucet the assertive style and feathery texture of tender, younger chrysanthemum greens for a salad, which classically have been eaten uncooked solely after they have been in stolen bites from a platter of hot-pot fixings. (Consuming chrysanthemum greens — or any leafy inexperienced — uncooked moderately than cooked is taboo in lots of East Asian cultures, making the leap from hot-pot fixture to salad all of the extra shocking.)
“I all the time thought they have been carrot tops,” says Craig Koketsu, the chef and companion at Twin Tails, an upscale Thai and Vietnamese restaurant in Columbus Circle. Rising up in a Japanese American household in San Jose, California, he and his household typically ordered sukiyaki at eating places to arrange tableside; chrysanthemum greens have been all the time one of many elements to be cooked within the effervescent pot, though he didn’t appropriately determine them as such till a lot later in life.
At present, he tosses chrysanthemum greens with shredded cabbage, cucumber, apples, jicama, honeydew, pea shoots, basil, and avocado with a tamarind dressing within the Emerald Goddess salad at Twin Tails. They stand out not just for their sharp style however for his or her distinctive look on this combination, Koketsu says. Whereas Don Angie, a sister restaurant owned by the identical hospitality group, serves a chrysanthemum Caesar salad as a signature dish, Koketsu says his inspiration was the Canadian chef Susur Lee, who as soon as made a slawlike salad at his New York restaurant Shang. And, in fact, sukiyaki. “Chrysanthemum leaves wilted in that candy sukiyaki broth with the noodles and all the pieces is a style reminiscence that’s nonetheless ever current,” Koketsu says.
“As a child, it was simply eaten to fulfill your mother, however as you grow old you actually develop a style for this bitterness,” says Patty Lee, the chef at Lei wine bar in Chinatown. She “sort of freaked out” the primary time she bit into the leaves uncooked for the primary time. Her Taiwanese mother and father would have sautéed even iceberg lettuce, and she or he’d solely ever had chrysanthemum greens cooked. However she discovered that the distinctive taste was about the identical uncooked as when it was cooked, says Lee, but the feel was extra crisp.
At Lei, she clothes the freshest chrysanthemum greens she will be able to discover (that usually means shopping for them from Lani’s Farm) with a French dressing made with rice vinegar and strong-brewed chrysanthemum tea earlier than the salad is topped with shards of fried burdock root. Annie Shi, Lei’s proprietor, says her first chunk of the salad was “transportive,” recalling each hot-pot meals and containers of Vitasoy-brand sweetened chrysanthemum tea.
Sae Ron’s chrysanthemum Caesar.
Picture: Christine Yoo
A chrysanthemum salad has additionally been served at Bonnie’s, the trendy Cantonese restaurant in Williamsburg, because it opened in 2022. The greens are tossed with whipped-tofu dressing and coated with blitzed-fried shallots for a bread-crumbish topping. Calvin Eng, the chef and proprietor at Bonnie’s, says he, too, had by no means eaten chrysanthemum greens uncooked till he tried the Caesar at Don Angie’s, which helped him see the acquainted ingredient in a brand new gentle: “It’s just a little medicinal however in a great way.”
In response to Zoey Xinyi Gong, a dietitian and the writer of The 5 Parts Cookbook, the medicinal properties transcend taste: “Their capabilities embody harmonizing the spleen and abdomen and calming the center Qi. In fashionable language, it implies that they’re good at serving to us regulate fluid metabolism and calm us a bit after we really feel irritated, impatient, and indignant.” (She prefers her chrysanthemum greens blanched in bone broth and topped with tahini, soy sauce, and vinegar.)
For the cooks who covet the greens, it’s additionally useful that they develop properly in New York, particularly this time of yr. Christina Chan, founding father of Choy Division farm in Chester, has been rising chrysanthemum greens for the previous few years and distributing them to the 300-some clients of the Choy Commons CSA. She’s discovered that this vegetable grows finest in cooler summer season months and early fall, so her crop will likely be accessible within the coming weeks. And now she may give her clients some new recommendation on the best way to put together them. “The largest query we get is, ‘What can we do with them?’” Chan says. There aren’t a complete lot of recipes for chrysanthemum greens, and many individuals don’t understand they are often eaten uncooked in any respect. Or no less than, that was the case. “Possibly they are going to now!” she says, hopefully.
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