Ideas to make bitter greens more palatable

Advertise with us
Miura knives
Kitchen Knife Forums

Help Support Kitchen Knife Forums:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
P

paka

Member
Joined
Jan 20, 2018
Messages
19
Reaction score
0
Hello,

I'm wondering how people, more so in traditional cuisines, cook their super bitter vegetables. For a while now, I've tended to cook indian food and pretty much only that. There are numerous greens more bitter than what's typically eaten now in any modernized cuisines and restaurants such as methi (fenugreek), bitter gourd/melon, gongura (hibiscus), and daikon radish leaves as well as non-Indian such as dandelion, red dandelion (chicory), daikon radish leaves, etc. as well as more bitter ones used in traditional cuisines such as lamb's quarters, amaranth, stinging nettle, etc. Any mixed veg I make tends to be a majority of bitter greens with roots/tubers and fruits (eggplant, capsicum, sometimes okra, …) in lesser quanitities along with garlic, onion, herbs and spices.

I've found that including sweet, and perhaps acid (just makes it taste better anyway) seems to be the only option. More traditional cuisines tend to do more than roast or sauté but mix numerous herbs and spices into some sauce, curry, soup or stew. I think those cuisines – any from the tropics and temporate climates, as well as those part of the spice routes such as North Africa – would have the best ideas though I haven't looked into many except Indian. I eat little meat, and don't really cook with it, so am looking for plant, herb, and spice combinations. Mixing with sweeter roots such as carrot, sweet potato, and yam works well. Sometimes I use crushed date and maybe fruit works the best. One that I like though is a bit hard to find even at Indian markets is dried black nightshade berries. I think in Persian cuisine there's a particular dried fruit though I've never tried it and am not sure if it's more acidic than sweet. I'd prefer not to use blanch or rub with salt as many do as I think that removes nutrients.
 
Done well, sweet and acid tastes will compliment bitterness but salt will balance it. Didn't believe it until I tried it on some of our cucumber surplus. A small grind of salt took away almost all of the cucumbers bitterness.
Edit: Which nutrients are you concerned about losing by salting?
 
Indeed it seems some combo of sweet, acid, and salt works best. Sometimes I might only consume half a teaspoon of salt in a meal, which happens to be one dish, a stew or something, and maybe when I use less, or use more bitter roots like burdock, I notice the difference.

It's a good question what nutrients am I concerned about with salting. Calcium oxalate levels are much higher in traditional and wild greens. I'm not sure what is the upper limit but there are plants with ~20-30x more than spinach, up to ~10-15x more in the fairly easily found ethnic greens. That might be bound to fiber and perhaps not lost in salting. Bitter gourd is among the more bitter common South, East, and South-East Asian foods, in the cucurbitaceae family along with cucumber and likely other wild more bitter members. It's common to salt, or in Chinese food combine it with I think pork and fermented black (soy?)beans. Unsure how Filipinos prepare it. It could be some other substance I'm unaware of. It's said to be beneficial for diabetes in countries that use it. Another fairly bitter ingredient I use often is uncured olives; I think what's said to be beneficial in olive oil is higher in fresh olives, and people tend to but not always cure them because of the strong taste. If you can find uncured fresh oof the tree olives, try 'em out. By itself, it leaves a lasting astringency. Love it. So I'd guess there's numerous bitter substances (tannins, …?) that I'm unaware of but try to keep. I don't know of any truly traditional home-cooking cookbooks except the rare ethnic ones that might include only a few recipes. Those I'd be curious about.

A small/medium dice might help too, allowing some bitter substances to leech into the water or sauce so the bitterness is more evently distributed.

So I'm unsure of what other options are there among sweet and acid. Dried fruits I don't know of but can be found at some ethnic market I've never looked for, vinegar, tamarand, coconut – every cuisine in the world, except maybe those that live where it's too cold, once or still uses wild and semi-wild greens –, there's gotta be more.
 
Get rid of every bit of stem. Add fat, acid and salt...and plenty of onions and garlic...
 
no clue.

one of my favorite veggies is Bitter Melon. but i grew up on it. that is very bitter..boy, i hope that means it's awesome for me.
 
It's rare that I don't use garlic, onion, and tomato. Looking at filipino recipes for bitter melon, that's typical plus sometimes or often meat. Same for Indian. I'm not looking to reduce bitterness of the ingredient itself, I leave stems as I think that means certain nutrients, and I don't typically cook with animal products – once used and still enjoy ghee and butter but don't regularly use it –, so the only option is perhaps various fruits used in traditional cuisines. As it seems all cookbooks, at least the ones I can find in English, cater to modern tastes and what's available at the typical non-ethnic and modern market, it's really hard to find ingredients and recipes from home cooking, traditional, rural, and village cuisine as they existed centuries ago. Sometime, I'll have to go to every ethnic market I can find, note all possible ingredients, and look 'em up.

I don't really often try new dishes and have little interest. I prefer finding new ingredients I've never heard of, such as wild plants, and then figuring out how to combine them, usually following older ways. Among the things I'm mindful of each time I cook is Brillat-Savarin:

Gastronomy is the intelligent knowledge of whatever concerns man’s nourishment.

Its purpose is to watch over his conservation by suggesting the best possible sustenance for him.
Click to expand...
 
Garlic, onions, ginger, and Pork. The acid in vine ripe tomatoes goes good with bitter melon. Chinese, Okinawans, Filipinos cook it with pork good flavor combination.
 
in my endevour for good espresso I've learned that bittter is offset by acidity, you can try too, add some f.e. drops of angosturabitters in a glass of water and taste, then add some lemon juice in small amounts. You'll notice that there is a sweet spot where it's neither really sour nor really bitter.

You could have a look in the 'flavor bible', to see what flavors compliment bitter. I however tend to follow what local cuisine does with a specific veggie, these people have struggled with it for many years and usually found the right solutions.
 
Indeed I use some kind of acid regularly. It is hard finding a wide variety of recipes that list less commonly known ingredients paired with greens. I sometimes find bitter melon recipes but rarely ones with wild amaranth, dandelion, lamb's quarters, stinging nettle, etc. Most cookbooks are adapted to outside audiences so it's difficult to find new ingredients. Some common pairings are vinegar, tamarind, coconut, black nightshade berries, ….. I found mention of a Indian Goan spice related to sichuan peppercorn though I'm sure there's much more. Encyclopedic type books of cuisines that make heavy use of spices too are difficult to find.
 
Also, don't underestimate the role of starchy ingredients here - it works in pasta with pesto (which is full of bitter things), it works in yam woon sen, it works in salads that have croutons added or are eaten alongside fries...

BTW, if you want to experiment with a few really bitter but somehow still interesting ingredients: Bitter melons. Neem buds. If you can make a dish with these in palatable, you can do anything when it comes to constructively using bitterness :)
 
Yes I cook with bitter melon somewhat often, leaves when I can find them. I wish I could get neem, sticks too for traditional Indian tooth cleaning. My username comes from Sanskrit, pakashastra. There are shastras for dharma, artha, and kama though paka (translated as kitchen or cooking?) I'm not sure though there is a Tamil cookbook named Hindu pakashastra.

Traditionally, there's many greens used in Indian cooking more bitter than bitter melon. Some of these might be more bitter, some not as much: leaves of black nightshade, black mustard, wild amaranth, neem, lotus, jute, sorrel, gotu kola, calamus, velvet leaf, gourds like bitter melon, ginger, figs, asparagus, willow, etc. The ayurvedic texts mention many greens that seem to have been mostly forgotten, though they likely still grow wild in India and elsewhere.

What I typically make is very similar to a sambar rice (sambar sadam, bisibelebath) except using more traditional ingredients like mixed grains, red rice, barley, mung dal, etc. and in my vegetable mix I tend to focus on greens more than it seems currently typical.

The mentioned books by Karen Page – The Flavor Bible, The Vegetarian Flavor Bible, and her newer Kitchen Creativity –, are very helpful. There's other works like The Cook's Book of Intense Flavors, The Flavor Thesaurus, The Art of Flavor, Salt Fat Acid Heat, and various books devoted to spices. For acid, I'd like to try other ingredients besides tamarind and amchur. Sumac, plus some indian relative, are related to amchur; it seems that could work. Fat as mentioned indeed helps a lot too such as the often used milk, cream, and ghee though since milk isn't produced quite like it once was, I use soymilk. Other traditional fats like cashew, ground may be more effective, and other nuts and seeds (sesame) should work well too.
 
Forgot to mention, inclusion of sweeter vegetables works well. Manathakkali (black nightshade berries used in South Indian Tamil cuisine) and sweeter roots like red capsicum, carrot, sweet potato, squash, pumpkin, and particullarly purple yam. I've been trying to figure out what yams (disocorea) are common in India though I haven't found much yet. Purple yam seems to not be used much except for desserts though it works well and tastes great; maybe too sweet when not mixed with bitter. Other sweet/sour ingredients, some used in cooking, others not, I might try are apricot and two syzygiums (jambu & jamun).

I wish I could find more 500+ recipe ethnic cookbooks that would cover more ways of combining spices. There are some Indian and I've started to look through Roden's The New Book of Middle Eastern Food.
 
Amchur and sumach are certainly underused in the west - hey, acidity you can add without diluting anything with liquids!
 
Used bitter melon last night. I used to mainly use vinegar as an acid but now more tamarand and amchur. I think they work better since they are also slightly sweet. If you're making a bitter melon dish with only bitter melon and spices (garlic, onion, ginger, etc.), it can be hard to make it taste good but mixed with dozens of ingredients in a sambar like dish, you can barely taste it.
 
I guess "saute them, and build a cream sauce with bacon (or smoked tofu for us vegetarians) and lemon around it. Then put it in a lasagna, probably with alternating layers of something tomato based" completely defies the point of cooking with greens ;)
 
Indeed. It's possible all food traditions were once based on some sort of common spiritual sense of health, totemism or something else. The French tradition and even Roman by the time of Apicius, they are the products of luxury, with the upper classes no longer being aristoi (best, aristocratic) or wise, and even early French philosophical gastronomists that might have suggested health in their idea of food, all that disppeared. The idea of a restaurant being restoring too disappeared with them competing by making food taste "good" and most addictive so people return, that hasn't helped much either. Even a century ago, diet sort of resembled what it once did but no longer.

This sums it up quite nicely. :)

[video=youtube;Qo2b531x4H4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qo2b531x4H4[/video]

[video=youtube;SqDI9VRQMWI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqDI9VRQMWI[/video]
 
@paka I guess the secret with indian food is that the more luxurious the dish is, the more active time you will have procuring the ingredients and actually cooking it :)

And what is wrong with me - I am European yet watching that girl cut Roti with a butter knife REALLY had me cringe.

Now we need to find out why the japanese invented the nakiri but not the thoran method of cooking, and the indian invented the thoran and had no nakiri :)
 
I too have been curious why Indians seem to have no nakiri. A Google search long ago found a knife similar in style. I've only started investigating the history of Indian cuisine, and it's a todo to seek various parts of it. So far, since a primary goal has been in following one aspect of Asian medicines, living as long as possible [also somewhere in Greco-Roman with the term macrobios, long life (macrobiotic)], it's been mainly seeking pre-modern ingredients found in medical texts and used by those that still live in villages. It took a while to find them, and I'm still looking, since too I am not Indian and none are mentioned in English cookboks.

I don't think Indian is particularly unique in the use of 10-20+ ingredients in a dish. Indeed the greatest variety of herbs & spices, and perhaps all plants, tends to be in the tropics. Any people that were once part of the spice trade also had such customs. Meso/Latin-America likely once cooked as such as well but was surpressed by foreigners since food was once always related to religious concepts such as purity of mind & body, with numerous effects such no common use of amaranthus except for spinach. African, and some others, I haven't looked at much yet since there seem to be no cookbooks that would cover truly tradition methods and ingredients. I'm not sure why heavy use of herbs & spices, that is more than 5-10, seems to disappeared from many cuisines, maybe that is recent. I can't recall any Greco-Roman works that have been particularly helpful in figuring out their ingredients and methods. Dioscorides I've looked through a bit and need to study it.

From the Roman work by Apicius, the barley and vegetable soup seems be the only recipe that I think might resemble a staple dish, which is often legumes (beans, lentils), vegetables, herbs & spices, and occasionally a little meat, preferably wild. That also has many ingredients. From one translation:

60 g chickpeas
60 g red or brown lentils
60 g green split peas
60 g pearl barley
2 small leeks with the darkest green removed
150 g cabbage
100 g yellow or red swiss chard or spinach beet
100 g mallow leaves or a substitute such as baby spinach, pak choi,
Chinese cabbage or any suitable green-leafed vegetable
10 g each of fennel leaf and dill weed
50 g fresh coriander
800 ml water
2 heaped tsp fennel seed
½ level tsp lovage seed
½ tsp dried oregano
2 tbsp fish sauce
generous freshly ground black pepper
silphium, likely in a signifcant amount, possibly related to asafoetida
Click to expand...

Another translation lists the following: oil, dried onion, savory pork hip bones, salt, barley groats, pepper, lovage, pennyroyal, cumin, silphium, honey?, vinegar, defrutum (grape syrup), liquamen (fish sauce), chickpeas, lentils, peas, leek, coriander, dill, fennel, beetroot, mallow, cabbage, fresh herbs, cabbage sprouts, fennel seeds, oregano

Experience with mixing 10+ herbs & spices, since being in America, I don't know which peasant/village traditions still do that, and Indian being the most accessible with historical writings, and the only tradition with a fair amount of translations, I've stuck with it.
 
You will all die eventually. Life extension is meaningless. Eat what tastes good or make what doesn't taste good taste good. That is the whole point of cooking.
 
yes but I'd prefer to never need a doctor. Many traditional cultures are free of most of our common modern diseases. There are also less studied factors such as things people think are now common such as irregular/painful menstruation & morning sickness, that in this case, women, can experience at any age. Clarity of mind, productivity, energy, no feeling of heaviness after a meal, remaining thin, no aches or pains and no need for pain killers, etc., there are many things that can affect us all at any age. It also possible to remain active one's whole life, tend a garden and farm at age 100+ or not need viagra at 80+, maybe 90+. What is important to you? Attention to mixing ingredients, varying quantity, interval taken, etc. by season and moment, a combining as complex as going for taste but going for how one feels, with constant adjustment, is to me food.

The point of cooking is a modern concept rare in antiquity.
 
@Chef Doom the irony is, many bitter green things taste bitter to us because they are far from life extending, at least in overabundance and in their wild forms :)
 
I use viagra regardless of need. I need to reup my supply as a matter of fact. Thank the heavens for generic brand.
 
Very funny guys.

LifeByA1000Cuts said:
… the irony is, many bitter green things taste bitter to us because they are far from life extending, at least in overabundance and in their wild forms :)
Click to expand...
I am curious if you have any specific examples. It really is quite difficult finding all the undomesticated plants that various cultures once ate. Estimates could be true even of plant species alone, there are 250,000+ varieties, I'd guess not counting strains (like of what I've heard some examples: 30,000 of rice, 10,000+ corn, 1,000 pepper (piper)). Indeed, bitterness can be a sign of toxicity though also nutrients. Of what you can find in the market, bitterness and other strong flavors is an indication of nutrients, brassicas like kale, collard, mustard, and shepherd's purse, brussels, chicory, dandelion, alliums, lemon, spinach (quite low compared to other members of amaranthus like lamb's quarters or others far better than that), etc.. I have collected a significant amount of foraging works, ancient medical texts, and contemporary medical food science books listing traditionally eaten plants. Of one nutrient, calcium, known rates go past 900 mg per 100 g, Vitamin C can reach 100x that of an orange, antioxidants somewhere in the hundreds of times higher than the common berries, etc. Some plants like wild greens, unsure if they have significanty higher antioxidants, but part of life extension is getting all necessary nutrients with less calories.

Of toxic plants, indeed there are some even commonly eaten that might be toxic, like black nightshade. Of nightshades, even the common white/yellow fleshed potato has been found to increase inflammation, c-reative protein, and cooked in any form has been associated with increased mortality. There are plenty of other roots & tubers so I'm fine with avoiding potatoes. Eventually trying to study ever single plant, at least the ones known to have been eaten sometime ago by some culture.

If wild animals can survive alone on meat, is that because they're eating other nutritionally complete wild animals that eat wild plants? One thing I heard recently, the goat that makes Greek feta has a diet of 5,000+ plants. Wild animals will taste better, perhaps needing older ways of combining more herbs & spices.

Chef Doom said:
I prefer to go out with a heart attack brought on by a naked woman. Do you have that option in stock?
Click to expand...

I'd prefer to be able to satsify a woman at whatever oldest age is possible. What is that? I don't know. You see Chinese qigong guys pull trucks with their teeth I think it is? They have various exercises for men and women pulling weights with their genitals. They're still having sex at 80+. That and herbs such as far more aphrodisiacs that what are commonly known, who knows. The kamasutra and other texts mention things like an ejaculation as violent as a horse or elephant. Viagra isn't gonna give me that. Chimps, and who knows what other animals, they're still getting it on at 90+ and even at that age giving birth.
 
@paka Spinach and Rhubarb, when raw, have enough oxalic acid to be toxic ... native forms of lettuce are said to sometimes be so high in alkaloids that they can give you a high... and you have your betel leaves, right?

@Chef doom, paka you both bring bright light to this world - though some might regard that light as punishingly bright and blinding :)

With global warming, we can expect thai and south indian food becoming more and more popular - it is such good food for hot days.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Back
Top