vegetables

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Zucchini and friends: late summer’s greatest plate-mates

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By Leslie Brenner

Nature has a remarkable ability to create harmony on a plate. That’s why if you stick with what’s emphatically in season, it’s hard to go wrong.

This time of year, zucchini, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, okra and corn are bountiful in American markets and gardens, and they’re incredibly easygoing. Throw them together in nearly any combination in pan or on grill, their flavors start singing, and everybody wins.

You might think of zucchini as their bandleader. Cartoonishly prolific in late summer, the affable summer squash plays well with everyone. So do tomato, its umami-packed pal, and peppers, whether sweet or hot. They’re all Meso-American in origin, as is corn. Zucchini is a cultivar of Cucurbito pepo, which gardeners have been growing in parts of what’s now Texas and all over Mexico for 8,000 to 10,000 years.

Okra is in peak season as well. Not a native to the Americas, its appearance here was diasporic; it was grown by in the Carolinas by enslaved African people. Today, stateside, it’s mostly grown in Florida and Texas.

Eggplant is also an immigrant to America, having traveled here — and to the Mediterranean — from Asia. Botanically it’s a cousin to tomatoes and peppers, all being nightshades.

So, how to throw them together deliciously?

Try a shrimp sauté with zucchini, tomato and corn, like the one shown above. It shows best with wild shrimp from the Gulf, which the Meso-Americans would also have enjoyed. Our recipe includes serrano chiles, crisply grilled okra and lots of cilantro, but it’s endlessly riffable. Recently I skipped the okra, swapped the serranos for sweet, mild red bell pepper, and used fresh basil in place of cilantro — giving it a Cal-Italian vibe.

Shrimp sauté with zucchini, corn, red bell pepper and basil

RECIPE: Shrimp Sauté with Texas Veg

Whether you’re doing a shrimp sauté (chicken works great too) with this group of veg, or just throwing the vegetable pals together in a pan, herbs and spices can add pizzazz and depth. Besides cilantro and basil, thyme, parsley, marjoram, oregano work great with these guys.

Oregano is front-and-center in one of my all-time favorite dishes by Yotam Ottolenghi, Stuffed Zucchini with Pine Nut Salsa. Cherry tomatoes and lemon zest add bright exclamation points. Enriched with egg and rounded out with breadcrumbs, it makes a fine main course, as well as a spectacular accompaniment to grilled lamb or chicken. The dish may have been born across the pond, but it’s very much at home on either side of it.

Stuffed zucchini (courgettes) with pine-nut salsa from Ottolenghi Simple

Zucchini and friends, Mediterranean-style

What if eggplant is one of the friends? Think Mediterranean, and reach for a roasted ratatouille.

Why roasted? Disenchanted with watery, soggy renditions of the French favorite, I thought maybe sending the eggplant, peppers, zucchini and garlic into the oven for a spell would deepen their flavors and keep them more distinct.

It did indeed, and now I’d never make ratatouille any other way.

It’s a delightful dish for summer-into-fall.

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Greatest vegetable rehabilitation ever: Brussels sprouts' 23-year rise to culinary power

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By Leslie Brenner

[Updated Dec. 22, 2022]

“Brussels sprouts are never going to win any popularity contests.”

That was the dire prediction, printed in The Los Angeles Times in 1999, of its then-Food Editor, Russ Parsons. If you happen to be a Gen Zer, it may shock you to learn that Brussels sprouts were not always the most glamorous members of the vegetable kingdom. Parsons continued:

“They’re the weak member of the vegetable pack, the one everyone likes to pick on. Brussels sprouts are weird-looking, like miniature cabbages. Maybe that’s why they’re usually shoved away in some dark corner of the produce market. Unlike broccoli, which is also weird-looking but seems to be in your face every time you turn around, they’ll never gain acceptance merely through familiarity.”

Two decades later, Brussels sprouts — those ping-pong-ball-sized upstarts of the Brassica oleracea family — are the darlings of, well, just about every omnivore in America. They’re so popular and menu-ubiquitous that no one under a certain age would probably even wonder whether they were ever not a thing.

What’s the explanation for the once lowly vegetable’s meteoric rise?

Most brassica-watchers would point to David Chang, the chef who founded the Momofuku empire that began in New York City in 2004 with the opening of the first Momofuku Noodle Bar. On its menu were Brussels sprouts that Chang pan-roasted with bacon then tossed with puréed kimchi. “Every single table ordered them,” he told GQ magazine in 2009. “It was ridiculous.”

“Cook the shit out of them; just don’t turn them to charcoal.”

He also told the magazine the secret to making them not just palatable, but crave-able: “Cook the shit out of them; just don’t turn them to charcoal.”

Brussels sprouts also made a splash, in a different form, a few years later at his second place, Momofuku Saam Bar. There they were fried and tossed with pickled Thai and Korean chiles, fish sauce, garlic and mint, and topped with fried Rice Krispies. Recipes for both were included in Chang and Peter Meehan’s Momofuku: A Cookbook, published in 2009.

Three years later, Brussels sprouts’ rise to culinary glory was achieved; in fact, it looked like a revolution. “Brussels sprouts’ transformation from maligned cafeteria gross-out fare to foodie luminary is complete,” is the way a Slate article by L.V. Anderson put it in 2012. “Trendy New York restaurants gussy them up with pig fat and sell them by the tiny $8 plateful; David Chang’s Brussels sprouts at New York’s Momofuku were so popular he had to take them off the menu for his cooks’ well-being.”

I remember the moment well: I had moved from Los Angeles, where we’d been enjoying Brussels sprouts for years, to Dallas, where they were just then hitting every restaurant in town — usually roasted with a dose of sugar and a good deal of bacon.

Though Chang certainly did more than anyone to popularize the B-sprout, by no means was he the first to fall in love with them.

From Brussels and Burgundy to Birds Eye and bistros: a quickie B-sprout history

According to the late British cookbook author and food historian Jane Grigson, who wrote more than anything else I could turn up about the history of Brussels sprouts, the vegetable’s past is somewhat mysterious. “It seems they were being grown around Brussels in the Middle Ages; market regulations of 1213 mention them,” she wrote in Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book, published in 1978. She continued:

“They were ordered for two wedding feasts of the Burgundian court at Lille in the 15th century . . . . Then silence. They do not seem to have caught on in Burgundy . . . Nor did they appear in French and English gardens until the end of the 18th century.”

Across the pond in America, Thomas Jefferson planted them in his garden at Monticello in 1812.

In the intervening century and a half, not much to report. When I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s in Southern California, Brussels sprouts made frequent appearances on our dinner table, having been pulled from a Birds Eye box in the freezer and boiled whole. Most people I knew did not enjoy them; I was an outlier, who loved their little tiny-cabbage-ness.

My husband Thierry tells me they were not so reviled and stigmatized when he was a child in France. Perhaps they were treated with more care there. A spin through Julia Child’s 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I, offers no fewer than eight recipes: braised in butter; braised with chestnuts; browned with cheese; chopped, with cream; creamed; custard mold; and gratinéed with cheese sauce. Volume II, published nine years later, didn’t include a single B-sprout recipe.

They certainly were popular in England. “The great success of Brussels sprouts in this country has been in modern times,” wrote Grigson. “We serve them now with beef, game, poultry, and especially with the Christmas turkey, when they are often embellished with chestnuts. She went on to offer nine ways to cook them.

Could they have been a thing early on at Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse, which opened in Berkeley, California, in 1971? They make no appearance in the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook, published in 1982 (the Washington Post, incidentally, has called it one of the earliest restaurant cookbooks). There is, however, a fabulous recipe in the book that followed eight years later — Chez Panisse Cooking. In fact it’s the recipe that made me fall hard for the vegetable: Brussels Sprouts Leaves Cooked with Bacon and Mirepoix. Yes, bacon!

Brussels Sprouts Cooked with Bacon and Mirepoix, prepared from a recipe in ‘Chez Panisse Cooking’

That recipe has been a fixture on my Thanksgiving table every year since.

The bacon in the light and elegant Chez Panisse dish comes in the form of pancetta, which gets diced and sweated with the mirepoix (diced carrot, onion and celery) before adding Brussels sprouts leaves which get sort of steamed; a hit of white wine vinegar at the end gives beautiful balance.

A pre-Chang boost

Russ Parsons — the California cook who doubted their popularity potential — was actually an influential Brussels sprouts cheerleader a few years before Momofuku’s Chang started charring them and umamifying the bejeezus out of them. Parsons gave his legions of L.A. readers a full chemical explanation for why the hapless veg fell into such disrepute: People overcooked them, producing hydrogen sulfide — a sulfurous stink, and they turned a sickly color thanks to a transformation of their chlorophyll. “To get around it,” he suggested, “try treating Brussels sprouts with the respect they deserve. It takes a little more care in preparation and a little more attention to detail, but the payoff will be amazing. . . . "

Following instructions on how to prep and steam or blanch them, he added:

“What you do with them after that is up to you, of course. They’re delicious simply dressed with olive oil and a little chopped garlic. But they also are assertive enough to hold their own in the company of more emphatic flavors. I really like to pair Brussels sprouts with smoky things like bacon. And when you’re using bacon, it’s usually a good idea to add something sharp, like vinegar, to cut the fat.

Look at it as making a he-man out of a scorned vegetable. Call it the Brussels sprout make-over.”

Bacon and acid: That’s the Momofuku B-sprout blueprint right there. The fact that Chang pushed everything so far — the char, the bacon, the exuberant flavors of chiles and fish sauce — made his two dishes prime for borrowing by chefs all around the country. And there you have it: the cementing of Brussels Sprouts primacy.

Ottolenghi: a bit late to the sprout

Surprisingly, London’s superstar vegetable-loving chef and world-dominating cookbook author Yotam Ottolenghi was somewhat late to the Brussels sprout game, which is odd considering the brassica’s longtime popularity in Britain. There’s not a single B-sprout recipe in Ottolenghi’s first, second or third books (published in 2008, 2010 and 2012). Finally, in Plenty More (2014), he offers instructions for Brussels Sprouts Risotto; Brussels Sprouts with Caramelized Garlic and Lemon Peel; and Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Pomelo and Star Anise.

I went wild for the Brussels Sprouts with Browned Butter and Black Garlic in his 2018 book Ottolenghi Simple, largely thanks to the black garlic’s serious umami and the creamy earthiness of tahini, all balanced by zingy lemon and herbs. So have our readers: Our adaptation was Cooks Without Borders’ fourth-most clicked on recipe in the last year.

Insalata di Cavotelli (Brussels sprouts salad) prepared from a recipe in the new cookbook from Via Carota

Now trending: B-sprouts salads

This season, Brussels sprouts are trending raw: They’re featured in two of this fall’s most exciting new cookbooks. The first, shown above, is from Via Carota — the new volume from Jody Williams and Rita Sodi’s beloved New York City restaurant, which is Cooks Without Borders first-ever Cookbook of the Year. Tossed with Via Carota’s signature dressing, plus julienned apple, pomegranate seeds and crumbly aged cheese, it’s spectacular.

The second is from Tanya Holland’s California Soul, in which the star of “Tanya’s Kitchen Table” on the Oprah Winfrey Network presents a recipe for Shaved Brussels Sprouts Salad with Warm Bacon Dressing. (I know, right?!) It’s one of our Best New Cookbooks of 2022.

And finally, here is a super-easy roasted number studded with pancetta. No thin-slicing or leaf removal necessary!

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Zucchini coming out of your ears? These 8 stupendous dishes will make you wish you had 5 more pounds

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Stuffed zucchini (courgettes) with pine-nut salsa from Ottolenghi Simple

Summer Produce Special, Part II: Zucchini

We feel your zucchini abundance-state here at Cooks Without Borders, where we’ve been grating, shaving, slicing, dicing, salting, draining, sautéing, roasting, steaming and sashimi-ing zucchini round the clock to help you make the most of the season’s inevitable bumper crop.

• One dish — Stuffed Zucchini with Pine Nut Salsa — is so outstanding it shook the two courgette-fatigued fellows with whom I shelter out of their summer-squash stupor.

“Amazing,” said the older one. “I would eat this again tomorrow!” (We did.)

“Wow,” said the younger. “Whose recipe is this?” Ottolenghi’s, I replied — from his 2018 cookbook Ottolenghi Simple. “He is a genius,” proclaimed the younger zucchini critic.

I had been skating on thin ice with the vegetable when this show-stopper saved us. It was maybe only day 3 of zucchini trials, but junior and elder had already hit the zucchini wall. They are weak, after all, and lack summer squash stamina.

I had set my sights, this particular evening, on two possible Ottolenghi recipes. The exhausted eating panel chose the Stuffed Zucchini, pictured above. Excellent call: Its filling is rich with Parmesan and egg, bright with height-of-season heirloom cherry tomatoes, plumped with bread crumbs and set with a golden-brown crust inside a perfectly roasted shell that maintained integrity but melted at fork’s touch. On top of that, a deeply herbal salsa — at once dusky (oregano) and bright (thanks to lemon) — made meaty and crunchy with toasted pine nuts.

Do try it; I think you’ll love it. It’s so delicious, you can let it stand proudly as centerpiece main dish, even probably for dyed-in-the-wool carnivores. (But oh, yes, it would also be great with lamb. Or chicken.)

Once your swooning subsides, consider the possibilities for your next zucchini triumph. For you know there will be more zucchini!

Here are other faves:

• Raw Zucchini Salad with Green Olives, Mint and Pecorino. I first learned the joys of raw zucchini in the early 00’s from Russ Parsons, the L.A. Times’ longtime columnist (“The California Cook”), who taught us that salting thin-sliced or shaved raw zucchini and letting it sit a few minutes turns it delightfully silky and slippery, seeming almost to cook the flesh while keeping it firm.

For years I had a Parsons salad in my arsenal and pulled it out often. Slice zucchinis in half vertically, then cut them into thin half-moons. Toss with salt in a colander and let sit for 15 or 20 minutes. Transfer to a bowl and dress with minced garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, freshly ground black pepper or red pepper flakes and fresh herbs — mint is especially nice, but you can do any combo of mint, dill, parsley or basil. The Ottolenghi recipe makes me think oregano would be smashing as well.

Raw Zucchini Salad with Green Olives, Mint and Pecorino from A16 Food + Wine

Raw Zucchini Salad with Green Olives, Mint and Pecorino from A16 Food + Wine

Nate Appleman and Shelly Lindgren took the salting-raw-zucchini technique to delicious heights in a recipe published in their 2008 cookbook, A16 Food + Wine, named for their beloved Southern Italian spot in San Francisco. Their salad marries ribbons of zucchini carpaccio with a brilliant trio of complementary flavors. I’d never have thought of green olives and mint together, but the combination sings — especially with the bright, pure flavor of Castelvetrano olives (green Cerignolas would be great, too). Earthy pecorino smooths it out and pulls it together.

• We’ve been thinking about Barry’s Insanely Delicious Zucchini Fritters since test-driving the recipes in José Andrés’ Vegetables Unleashed led us to a zucchini fritter recipe that didn’t quite do it for us (the batter was thin and the fritters ran all over the pan). Barry’s Insanely Delicious are little flavor-bombs, soft and packed with herbs (dill, mint and parsley) on the inside, crisp on the outside and warm, served with a cool and tangy yogurt sauce. Pop one in your mouth and it’s hard to stop there. They’re brilliant bites for your next Zoom Happy Hour, if that’s still a thing.

Barry’s Insanely Delicious Zucchini Fritters

Barry’s Insanely Delicious Zucchini Fritters

• Speaking of José Andrés, another zucchini recipe in that cookbook turned out to be one of our favorites ever: Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs. It’s as simple and wonderful as it sounds and looks, with a sprinkle of za’atar — the Levantine herb and spice mix — to keep things zippy.

Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs from José Andrés’ ‘Vegetables Unleashed’

Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs from José Andrés’ ‘Vegetables Unleashed’

Camarón con Fideos de Calabacita (Shrimp with Zucchini Ribbons) from Anán Medrano’s ‘Count the Tortillas’

Camarón con Fideos de Calabacita (Shrimp with Zucchini Ribbons) from Anán Medrano’s ‘Count the Tortillas’

• Another dish that probably has roots in the Texas Mexican cooking known as comida casera, Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken is an easy, delicious pseudo-braise that makes luscious use of abundant zucchini (and any other summer squash that needs a home), along with corn, tomatoes, onions, cilantro and serrano chile. It has been one of my favorite late-summer dishes since I was a kid growing up far from Texas, in Southern California. (It’s a pseudo-braise because you don’t actually add liquid; the juices that end up braising all come from the vegetables.)

Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken (the chicken formerly known as The Chicken that Killed Grandpa)

Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken (the chicken formerly known as The Chicken that Killed Grandpa)

• A super-flexible dish we call Warm Summer Salad Without Borders is another late summer stunner — and a great way to feature as much zucchini as you want to throw at it, along with grilled corn, tomatoes and — if you like — grilled okra. It makes a lovely light dinner when it’s still blazing hot, or a warm pick-me-up for when you’re a little sad the season is on the way out.

And hey — I sometimes toss some grilled okra on top of Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken, too. The Warm Summer Salad is kind of like a vegetarian salad version of that dish.

Warm Summer Salad Without Borders

Warm Summer Salad Without Borders

• Last but certainly not least — as it’s one of my favorite things in the world to cook and to eat — a Chicken and Lamb Couscous will usher summer into fall, pulling a pound or two of zucchinis in its wake. As the season changes, keep it in mind. We offer an easy version that uses canned garbanzos and five-minute couscous grains and slower OG version that has you soak dried chickpeas overnight and steam and fluff the couscous grains two or three times. Both are tucked into the same recipe, as you might want to combine them (dried chickpeas + quick couscous grains, for instance). On our to-do list: Creating or turning up a stellar harissa recipe.

Chicken and Lamb Couscous (with . . . zucchini!)

Chicken and Lamb Couscous (with . . . zucchini!)

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A million delicious ways to put asparagus on your springtime table (including some new ones!)

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Goodbye, Brussels sprouts. Hello, asparagus – springtime's A-list vegetable.

Of course fava beans, English peas and artichokes rock the season as well, but asparagus stands apart, as it's so abundant and easy to get along with. If asparagus were as expensive as it was once upon a time, we'd likely celebrate it as a luxury, up there with morels and ramps and fiddlehead ferns. But it's not – which is why it finds a starring role on my table several times a week when it's in season.

There are a million delicious things you can do with it, from steaming to roasting to grilling to braising, sautéeing or stir-frying – even shaving the stalks with a peeler and adding them raw to a salad.

Most traditional is steaming it – in one of those upright baskets. I've never owned one; instead I trim the ends, use a vegetable peeler to peel the stalks halfway up or more, lay them flat in a wide pan and simmer them in salted water. After draining the stalks well, you can dress them in butter and serve them warm or send them to the table with a fluffy, lemony hollandaise. Or dress them in vinaigrette (that's lovely served warm, at room temp or chilled). Or keep them naked, chill 'em and serve with mayo. 

Easiest is roasting asparagus. A turn in the oven gives it a completely different character, no less delicious. Just snap off the tough bottoms or trim them with a knife, lay them on a baking sheet with a teaspoon or so of olive oil and a sprinkle of salt, roll the stalks around to coat them, and roast for 17 minutes (for stalks of medium thickness) at 400 degrees F.

Grilling is nearly as easy: Brush the stalks or roll them around in a little olive oil, sprinkle with salt, toss them on the grill or a hot grill pan and cook until they're just tender.

One mistake people (including home cooks and many a restaurant) often make: undercooking them. They shouldn't be crunchy; they need to be tender. How to know when they're done? Use tongs to lift them up by the middle of the stalk. When they're done, they'll droop a bit on either side. 

Roasted asparagus and radishes from Steven Satterfield's Root to Leaf cookbook

Last spring I fell in love with Steven Satterfield's recipe for roasted asparagus with green garlic and radishes, from his then-just-published cookbook Root to Leaf: A Southern Chef Cooks Through the Seasons. I haven't been able to find green garlic where I live in North Texas, so used regular garlic, Satterfield's suggested substitution. Simple and fabulous, the dish instantly became a regular player in my spring repertoire. Best of all, it's so easy to put together you don't even really need the recipe: Just cut the asparagus into 1 1/2-inch lengths, cut the radishes into quarters and toss both in a bowl with a little olive oil, finely chopped garlic, salt and pepper. Spread them on a baking sheet, baking dish or roasting pan and roast in a 400 degree oven till they're just tender, about 15 minutes. Want more specifics? Here's the adapted recipe:

Last weekend I fell in love again: With a technique for braising asparagus in butter I gleaned from a recent story and recipe in the New York Times by David Tanis. 

Butter-braised asparagus with herbs

The technique is brilliant: Place asparagus spears flat in a pan with a good deal of butter and a little water, salt and pepper; cover the pan and cook till the asparagus is just tender. Remove the asparagus and reduce the cooking liquid to nice sauce. Tanis adds lemon zest, lemon juice and chopped herbs, then garnishes the dish with herb leaves. It was super, though I had to tweak the recipe a bit (mine needed more liquid and longer in the pan; I added more water and a little more butter. I'll add an adapted recipe here once have time to retest it (watch this space!). In any case, butter-braising gives the asparagus a rich and luxurious silkiness and this too will become a go-to treatment chez moi. I love the lemon and herb flavors with it, but it should be great without them, too.

Meanwhile, in case you're wondering about the photo that leads off this post, that's a salad of shaved raw asparagus, sautéed asparagus and black lentils from Michael Anthony's V is for Vegetables, which just won a James Beard Foundation Book Award in the category of Vegetable Focused and Vegetarian. Again, this recipe needed some adjustments (more acid in the dressing, for one thing), but it's pretty swell, so I'll tweak and provide an adaptation soon! (I was wowed last fall by Anthony's cooking at Untitled at the Whitney Museum in New York City, so was excited to cook from his book). 

Asparagus with new-wave gribiche

Are you still with me? I want you to have all these asparagus ideas and recipes in one place. Another great way to serve asparagus is with sauce gribiche, whether the new-wave version shown in the photo above, or a slightly more traditional one. Just simmer the stalks in salted water, roast or grill them (as explained earlier in this post), and dress with the gribiche of your choice. Here's the new-wave gribiche recipe:

And here's an adaptation of Judy Rodger's four-minute egg gribiche from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook: 

Just one more direction, and it's a good one: Stir-fry asparagus Chinese-style. I wrote about this version adapted from Lucky Peach 101 Easy Asian Recipes in mid-February, when springtime was still a dream away.

I know you want the recipe. Here you go:

Now let's get cooking!

 

 

 

 

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Celebrate spring with a sugar-snap pea salad with lemon and parmesan

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Spring is here – officially, anyway. In my hometown, Los Angeles, that means asparagus and fabulous strawberries and English peas, favas, nettles and morels. Where I live now, in North Texas, it means tornados and thunderstorms and hail. English peas? Not so much. 

I do find nice asparagus in the market, and good sugar snap peas – which I love to blanch lightly, slice up and toss in a lemony vinaigrette with snipped chives and grated parm. It was inspired by a salad I fell in love with a couple years ago over lunch with my girlfriend An-My at ABC Kitchen in New York. 

There's really not much to it. It takes a little while to slice up all the sugar snaps; after that, it comes together in a flash. I'm thinking it would be really nice served with frico, those lacy Italian parmesan crisps. (Remind me to scare up a recipe for them sometime soon!) 

Anyway, it's a lovely starter on its own.  Even if it's stormy outside, at your table it will feel like spring. Here's the recipe:

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Sauce gribiche makes every simple thing you cook instantly delicious

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Seared barramundi with gribiche

How about an easy-to-make sauce that can turn the simplest grilled fish into a dazzling dinner party dish? Or that can dress up boiled or roasted asparagus? Or that you can add to sliced boiled potatoes to turn them into the snazziest potato salad ever?

That's the beauty of sauce gribiche: It can make every simple old thing deliciously new again. 

Poached leeks. Poached chicken. Boiled shrimp. Cold cracked crab. Fried or pan-fried soft shell crabs. Steamed mussels. Thick roasted slices of cauliflower. Sliced rare roast beef or lamb or ham. The possibilities are, you know, endless.

Traditional sauce gribiche is a mayonnaise made with hard-boiled egg yolks instead of raw ones, dressed up with herbs, capers and cornichons. (It's French, which is why it's called "sauce gribiche" instead of "gribiche sauce.") That old-style version is just as tedious to make as mayo, too, as you have to dribble in the oil while you constantly whisk, being careful not to let it "break." (Don't worry, though: Our new-wave version is super easy!)

The traditional style of gribiche bears little resemblance visually to the new-wave versions turning up in restaurants these days, though the ingredients are the same. The reason? Instead of whisking the ingredients into an emulsion, you quickly stir everything together. Using soft-boiled eggs instead of hard-boiled ones, and lots of herbs, brings it irresistibly into the 21st century in terms of looks and taste. 

Grilled jumbo asparagus with gribiche and bottarga from Gjelina: Cooking from Venice, California

I stumbled on one as I flipped through Gjelina: Cooking from Venice, California – the new book from chef Travis Lett. Lett uses it to sauce jumbo asparagus that he first parboils, then grills; the dish is finished with lots of grated bottarga, dried cured mullet roe. I love bottarga, and I happened to have some in my fridge, so I made it – and loved it. (Note: in case you happen to make it, boil the asparagus longer than he tells you, or it will be crunchy-hard. Also, I substituted panko for the garlic crouton crumbs that added a bunch of extra steps to his recipe, and the panko worked great.) But bottarga is hard to come by, and it's expensive, so before I added it to the dish, I tasted it without. Good, but not great. It wanted a little more zing. I decided to develop a recipe that would be zingy enough to jazz up simple, plain food without the help of bottarga. 

I pretty quickly hit upon the answer: cornichons. Traditional gribiches include them, yet Gjelina's did without them (probably they would taste weird with the bottarga). Adding them did the trick: It was much more vibrant. I made a batch and tried that on asparagus I cooked simmered in salted water till tender:

Asparagus with new-wave gribiche

Bingo! This was perfect! I also used it to sauce barramundi, a delicately flavored fish with nice body. I did nothing fancier than put salt and freshly ground black pepper on the fish, and seared it gently in a little olive oil. Wow – it was really good, something I'd happily serve at a dinner party. 

Want to try it? Here's the recipe:

Seared barramundi with new-wave sauce gribiche

I didn't stop there. I also found a version in one of my all-time favorite cookbooks, Judy Rodgers' The Zuni Cafe Cookbook. I'll tell you about that – and more about gribiche – in my next post!