It’s hard to be scared of celery — or rutabaga, radicchio, eggplant, or okra — when it makes your eyes spin. “You’re going to laugh,” said Selengut, who started looking at the products while teaching a Misunderstood Vegetables cooking class and writing a related new cookbook.
Laughter is second nature to Selengut, a tall, edgy and very funny New Jersey native who inexplicably hated tomatoes as a child. Working in fine restaurants after graduating from a culinary academy in Seattle, Selengut was often the only woman on her shifts, a gay woman who faced nagging questions about her qualifications from male colleagues. “I tried to be one of the guys, and I ended up using humor to get in with those guys, and I ended up loving them as a band of brothers, depending on who was there.”
She moved on to working as a private chef and teaching, podcasting, doing improv comedy and writing cookbooks. In her words, she has made a career out of “taking the inaccessible and breaking it down for the novice.”
For misunderstood vegetables, this means disarming cooks to open their minds—along with their vegetable dips, pies, and pasta sauces.
Which vegetables are misunderstood?
In the years Selengut has asked students this question, that has meant any vegetable they’d pass in the grocery store without ever thinking to buy. At the individual level, this decision depends on the culture and background of the students. Mostly. (Apparently no one understands rutabagas.)
Other contenders for the title of “misunderstood” are vegetables that people dislike once they’ve tried them because they were poorly prepared, or vegetables for which only one preparation comes to mind. (Think tomatillos. Most students hit a dead end after “salsa.”)
Selengut has plenty of practical advice for all of these categories: For those who vilify beets as “metal dirt balls,” for example, she suggests adding flavors that offset their sweet, earthy soil. “Just like you wouldn’t want a margarita without lime juice, you have to have that balance,” she said.
She combines beets with acidic ingredients, creaminess and crunch, like with a brilliant crimson hummus, mixing roasted beets with tahini, garbanzo beans and lemon juice, topped with a fragrant, crunchy pistachio dukkah.
It’s not always that simple because food depends on context as well as taste. “My misunderstood vegetables may not be yours,” Selengut said. Indian students tend to appreciate eggplants and local Italians usually recognize radicchio because they are common in their respective cuisines. Textures are a problem for many American cooks; as Fuchsia Dunlop points out when writing about Chinese food, Western tastes tend to reject the textures that are popular in Chinese dishes. (Dunlop calls “slipperiness” and “slipperiness.”)
Slime is a turn-off for many diners trying okra — but, again, context is everything. Southerners often know that its flaky texture can benefit stews and gumbos by adding thickness and richness, or know how to cook it in ways that remove the mucilage. Add its complicated history: “Ships carrying enslaved Africans brought okra to America; it is a legendary food that cannot be separated from the complex and brutal way it arrived on our shores,” Selengut writes.
Such understanding begets more understanding, and Seleng began to realize an important consequence: human empathy and vegetable empathy are not so far apart.
“It’s human nature to put people into categories, to separate them, to say they’re ugly, to say they don’t know that kind of person or wouldn’t want to know that kind of person,” she said.
If a student finds nettles horrible and hateful because he was stung by the wild greens on a spring hike, for example, Selengut can show him how blanching deactivates the sting. “They’re the most delicious thing” when mixed with pesto or mixed with potatoes in a stinging nettle, she said. Haters become evangelists.
How is that different, she asked, than someone meeting someone who’s gay for the first time and realizing, “Oh my God, they’re actually funny and they’re wonderful, and they’re wonderful”?
Here are some common vegetables that Selengut says are misunderstood, with her suggestions on how to increase your understanding:
Radicchio, “revered” in Italy, is generally misunderstood in the United States because it usually cannot be chewed on its own like romaine lettuce or arugula. It takes some preparation, Selengut said, especially for “super tasters” who may react more negatively to it.
“Yes, it is very bitter. So how do you use that bitterness?” Selengut said. “Think of it as bitters, and what do bitters do in a cocktail? They create depth.”
- Radicchio is a member of the chicory family and comes in several varieties. If you’re looking for a milder version, try the yellow-green Castelfranco instead of the more common Chioggia red.
- A fruit or balsamic glaze helps balance its flavors, as do the creamy ingredients.
- Soak thin strips of radicchio in water for 30 minutes to tame its bitterness.
- Grill or bake it to add sweetness and complexity—but don’t burn it, which will add more bitter notes!
Although some people love eggplant, many others see it as “a snail making love to a worm on my plate,” Selengut writes. The snail keepers, she says, fell victim to improper cooking techniques.
“To me, eggplant is the fish in the vegetable world,” Selengut mused while at the farmer’s market. “There is a window of perfect readiness.” Go too far and it gets “snotty”; pull too soon and it’s dry as cotton.
- Eggplants come in so many different sizes, varieties, and other variables that it’s difficult to provide cooking time. Instead, look for visual signs of doneness — when they’re “caramelized, fragrant, tender, and looking almost wet in the middle, without any white or light spots of undercooked flesh.”
- Different varieties have slightly different qualities: Italian aubergines are denser and slightly more aromatic than the larger and more common black globe aubergines, while long and light Japanese aubergines cook quickly and small green Thai aubergines they are better lightly boiled.
- Due to their high water content, eggplants need a lot of space while cooking.
- For the same reason, cook them at a high enough temperature to evaporate the moisture quickly so that they are cooked rather than steamed.
Selengut calls rutabaga “the superfood no one talks about,” perhaps the most overlooked and underrated vegetable in the produce department. It’s cheap, extremely rich in vitamin C, and also full of fiber, potassium, and other nutrients.
- Look for firm, smooth-skinned roots that feel heavy for their size.
- Use a sharp paring knife to peel them before use.
- Store up to two months in a cool place.
- Rutabagas take longer to cook than other root vegetables; bake or boil for 10 minutes separately before adding them to a mixed batch.
- Swap them with some of the potatoes in mashed potatoes or gnocchi for more flavor and nutrients.
Okra wins the sad prize of being the most misunderstood vegetable of all, in Selengut’s eyes – “historically, culturally and culinary”. She gained practical insight into it by learning to “use slime for good, not evil”—and a deeper appreciation by studying its history and talking to experts like culinary historian Jessica B. Harris. (Harris himself called okra the “Rodney Dangerfield of vegetables” because of the lack of respect it commands.)
“I can learn to appreciate something culinary when I learn something historical. Things taste better when I get the context,” Selengut said.
- Choose smooth, brightly colored pods without brown spots.
- Use as soon as possible; do not allow pods to soften or brown.
- Do not wash the okra pods until you are ready to use them, and dry them thoroughly after washing.
- Most of the commonly recommended methods for reducing okra’s gelatinous texture—cooking whole, soaking in vinegar, drying overnight—don’t have the desired effect. What works, Selengut says, is cooking at a high temperature that allows plenty of air circulation around the pods and cooking with acidity.
- Looking for an okra substitute? Try cactus paddles.
