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October 29, 2019
What Can’t Fennel Do?
By: Leela Punyaratabandhu Photos: Lizzie Munro



FROM SEED TO FROND, POLLEN TO BULB, FENNEL IS THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM’S TRUE
UTILITY PLAYER. AND IT DESERVES YOUR RESPECT.

People don’t squeal at the sight of fennel—at least not the people who shop at
my neighborhood supermarket in a Chicago suburb.

And I get it: Supermarket fennel isn’t the most comely. When Kit Marlowe
soliloquized the face that launched a thousand ships, or when Lord Byron
murmured of an entity that walks in beauty like the night of cloudless climes
and starry skies, they probably hadn’t been inspired by a fennel bulb.

Mary Shelley, on the other hand, might have been. There’s something
Frankenstein-esque about a chubby orb with long, stiff stalks—tubes of various
circumferences—shooting out of its top in a manner that lacks any obvious
principle of organization, only to conclude with the bluntness of a song ending
mid-sentence without an outro. The lacy tufts of fernlike fronds at the base
joints of the stalks seem a tone-deaf attempt to shoehorn a touch of elegance
into the overall lack of graceful proportion.

No wonder when a fennel bulb walks by a playground, young children hide behind
their parents.

Mollie Katzen, the author of The Moosewood Cookbook and the more recent The
Heart of the Plate, thinks the vegetable’s lack of popularity is precisely due
to its gaudy, awkward anatomy. “People get anxious when they perceive an
ingredient as requiring great knife skills,” she says.

Bryant Terry, the author of Afro-Vegan and the forthcoming Vegetable Kingdom,
agrees. “From conversations I’ve had with folks, there are two major barriers to
incorporating more fennel into their meals,” he reveals. “Not knowing how to
prepare it, and the perception that fennel has a licorice taste.”

Licorice—the black candy that has crushed the spirits of little ghouls and
created frowns among the perkiest of tiny superheroes all through the history of
trick-or-treating? Licorice—the flavor most associated with cold and flu
medicine? In fact, both Katzen and Terry independently cite the licorice factor
as the reason why fennel hasn’t been adopted among American home cooks as widely
as other once-foreign vegetables, like bok choy, daikon, bean sprouts, and napa
cabbage.

Fennel’s PR rep has had their work cut out for them. Even I, who came to the
United States with little experience with fennel, fell victim to the negative
press and preemptively developed a distaste for it. But the supermarket picture
is neither fair nor complete. I hadn’t realized that until I took a trip to a
friend’s fennel farm, located a couple hours northwest of Chicago, where I
experienced the vegetable for what it truly is for the first time.

Fennel, whole and observed in situ, is exquisite—a field of green filigree
crowned with golden inflorescence, looking like it could be floating, had it not
been anchored with strong, rotund bulbs. I pulled a couple off the ground and
realized that fennel had looked so strange and disproportionate in the
supermarket because they always show up there with their stalks trimmed off
halfway.



Apparently, packing whole fennel plants—bulb, stalks, leaves, and blossoms—in
boxes and transporting them across the country is like transporting a herd of
giraffes in a VW Beetle. Trimming them down as much as possible is a way of
making them more compact, less unruly, and, hopefully, less intimidating to
consumers. Ironically, the procedure that’s meant to beautify the fennel plant
ends up suppressing its beauty and limiting its usefulness.

A whole fennel plant is supermarket fennel in the transfigured state—full of
promising potential. Shoppers curious enough to pick up a bulb of fennel,
finding themselves equally disquieted and enticed by the unfamiliar, would do
well to remember that when Robert Frost found himself at a place where two roads
diverged in a wood, he took the one less traveled by, and that made all the
difference.

Here are some of the treasures laid up on that road.

Sliced paper-thin, the bulb makes a crisp, clean-tasting salad. When Terry
discovered fennel for the first time at a restaurant in Milan, it was served as
a salad with slices of blood orange and drizzled with a simple dressing of
vinegar and olive oil. He has been making that salad to this day. Katzen
rhapsodizes about her first time eating fennel bulb, lightly dusted with flour
and deep-fried into ethereal fritto misto, served with a squeeze of lemon.

The bulb is also a solid performer when wedged, anointed with a touch of olive
oil, and oven-roasted in a sheet pan. This is the side dish of your
dreams—caramelized, creamy, dulcet.

The seeds can be toasted or lightly pan-fried. Used in bread pudding or to top
cooked rice furikake-style, they add flavor and crunch. Toasted in a dry pan and
ground, not only do they bring character to anything from fish to meat to
vegetable dishes, they also perk up any store-bought curry pastes.

> Fennel’s PR rep has had their work cut out for them.

The stalks can be added to the next batch of your homemade stock. Sliced thinly
crosswise to render the fibers running along the length impotent, the resulting
crisp coins of flavor gladden the hearts of any salads, soups, or stews you add
them to.

Roughly chopped fennel fronds blanketing a side of salmon or nestling inside the
cavity of a sea bass before roasting or grilling are a beauty untold. How about
gathering what’s left of the fresh fronds, making pesto with them, and serving
that with the aforementioned fish?

The crowning glory of fennel, however, could very well be its pollen—the essence
of fennel concentrated into dust of gold. Use it for its bright, summery
flavor—the violin, if the seed’s the cello—as a seasoning, or add it to a spice
mix or a steak rub.

Fennel, as I’ve come to learn, punches above its weight. And maybe the best way
to showcase fennel—to get people to see, use, and recognize it in all its
benevolent glory—is to leave it whole. In fact, if we lean in close to the
fennel bulbs at a grocery store, we may hear our mutilated hero’s silent cry for
justice.


RECIPE: ROASTED SALMON WITH FENNEL POLLEN AND CARAMELIZED FENNEL WITH BUTTERED
FENNEL SEEDS


RECIPE: FENNEL-RUBBED PORK CHOPS FOR TWO


RECIPE: CHICKPEAS, FENNEL, AND POTATOES

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LEELA PUNYARATABANDHU

Leela Punyaratabandhu is the author of Simple Thai Food and winner of the Art of
Eating Prize, Bangkok. Epicurious has named her one of the 100 greatest home
cooks of all time.

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