If there is one area where we appreciate seeing all the colors, it is our food. And more precisely in the vegetable department, since the market garden stalls resist the winter gloom and the ambient depression by offering a welcome chromatic palette to bring a touch of cheerfulness and a semblance of balm to the heart.
Gone are the days when every vegetable was monochrome, orange carrot, pink radish, purple beet, purple turnip, white and green chard. For about thirty years, thanks to the research and experimentation work carried out by market gardeners keen on biodiversity, new, little-known or forgotten species have been rediscovered.
Prized by chefs who know how to magnify them, they are now available to the general public, mainly on organic stalls, through AMAP (association for the maintenance of peasant agriculture) or in short circuit.
It’s a whole range of flavors, textures, crunchiness, sweetness, spiciness, juiciness, sweetness, earthiness or bitterness that we discover by putting color in our baskets.
Yellowstone carrot, golden burpee beetroot …
Just with a vegetable well known like carrot, “We underestimate how the taste differs from one variety to another, from one terroir to another, and how it changes over the season”, says Erwan Humbert, organic market gardener at new meadows farm, in Longpont-sur-Orge. In his clayey lands of Essonne, however less favorable than sandy soils, he cultivates a large number of species, yellow (from Doubs, yellowstone), orange (dolciva, de luc, bollin, napoli …) or blood red – “Which some customers sometimes tell me is too tasteful!” “, he jokes.
The offer is just as plethora of beets (red, white, golden yellow burpee, white and pink striped chioggia …), radishes (black, autumn blue and purple blue meat, white daikon, green green meat , red meat with fuchsia flesh), turnips (green, purple, black, golden ball…), cabbages, mesclun and chard with variegated stems.
“We underestimate how the taste differs from one variety to another, from one terroir to another, and how it changes over the season”
If autumn is the season of choice for vegetable diversity, the current period is still defending itself well with root vegetables still in the ground or recently harvested, and the contribution of those grown in greenhouses.
My two favorites, beetroot and radish, offer inexpensive chromotherapy – the first in cooked form, preferably the second raw. In their generous and oblong format close to a sausage, winter radishes do better than make us wait until the little roses of spring: they are a call to creativity to let themselves be debit (in sticks, in thin rings). the mandolin), admire, combine, marinate, season and bite into. Combine several in a salad of raw vegetables, in carpaccio, in simple toasts as an aperitif, in pickles in vinegar, in fine ravioli superimposed and garnished (with horseradish, crab meat …), it is to play on their visual complementarity and organoleptic, the sweetness of one reducing the spiciness of the other.
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