[…] the radishes will have changed to pink blushing orbs, still crispy but a hint of giving.
– Fergus Henderson
Recently I was rifling through an old draw – the kind that sticks when you try to open it. And while searching for something completely unrelated, found my Opa’s vegetable slicer. It seemed so dinky, a price sticker half torn off, the wood stained by washing and radish salads we’d enjoyed together.
Having German grandparents meant radishes were an accepted part of life, we knew where and how they fitted in: sliced to make salad, layered like roof tiles on an open-faced sandwich, or served whole for picking up by the leaves, salting, and eating as part of the bread course with a pot of Schmalz (lard) and a section of sourdough loaf.
Without that childhood conditioning, ‘What to do with a radish?’ is a legitimate question. And if not normalised through repetition, biting into a raw radish can be surprising at best. At worst, the robust crunch and peppery warmth – precisely what I love – can come across as unfriendly.
How to soften that surprise and encourage a relationship is often on my mind when radishes show up – perhaps the human compulsion to share, in the hope others might love the things we love.
For a hobby gardener like my Opa, radishes are rewarding because they’re ready within a few weeks. But a warm spell can quickly turn them horseradish-hot with woody centres. So, part of standing the best chance of enjoying a milder radish is to eat them in milder seasons, like spring or autumn. Then there’s how to treat it.
It was a salad of Indian origin that turned a light on; quartered radishes showered with roasted peanuts, dressed with lemon juice, and cumin and mustard seeds tempered in oil. The spicy bite of the radish was tempered too. And this brought back a salad memory of glossy radish wedges with crisped up bits of pork.
It was made by a chef who’d had Fergus Henderson as a mentor. And Fergus describes cooking radishes in roasting juices or duck fat until they are transformed to ‘pink blushing orbs, still crispy but a hint of giving’. There was one common denominator: hot fat.
It turns out there’s an enzyme reaction that gives radish it’s pungency, but cooking radish deactivates the enzyme and not only downplays the peppery flavour but emphasises sweetness. So, one simple way to take the edge off a radish to cook it briefly.
A lot of that enzyme occurs in the skin so when eating radish raw, it’s a matter of getting a lower ratio of skin to centre. And that’s how we came to rely the precision of a Japanese mandoline, to produce translucent wafers that make radish more palatable because it’s a far more delicate delivery of the flavour.
Once the radish has been tamed by uniform slicing, it can be used in many different contexts. We toss it through delicate oak-leaf lettuce or more sturdy baby gem leaves with garlicky vinaigrette or lay it on dark rye spread thick with butter that’s mixed with finely snipped chives.
A friend and fellow epiciure, Peta, arranges her radish slices on buttered sourdough crackers to be paired with sips of sake, which brings us back to Japan and the mandoline. It seems the founder of the brand we use first made one in 1940, out of wood, referred to specifically as a ‘radish slicer’.
Tatiana – a friend whose love for radish rivals mine! – mixes the cerise rimmed slices with sour cream, spring onions, and plenty of dill, to make the salad of her Ukrainian childhood. The rich buffer of generously spread butter or a coating of cultured cream helps tone down radish’s spiciness too.
And in a highly simplified take I’ve smeared crème fraiche on a plate and covered it with the round shavings of radish, spring onion rings, a spritz of lemon juice and a sprinkling of sea salt flakes. Salt can take things a step further and not only downplay flavour but also texture.
With a Radibrot (radish sandwich) Munich-style, the radish slices need to weep, and are sprinkled with salt and left for 10 minutes until glistening with moisture and – importantly – softened. Opa applied the salting for his salad too.
Although we took the scenic route to understand the ‘why’, we’ve come right back to treating radishes like he did. Opa’s radish salad, so commonplace it’s like an object in peripheral vision – part of spatial awareness but not seen. The answer hiding in plain sight.
For Opa’s radish salad, click the link below.