Radish Recipe Round-Up
This post contains affiliate links; please click here to read our affiliate disclosure.
This is the first year we have grown radishes, which seems silly to admit since we’ve grown just about every other vegetable on the planet. I think it has something to do with the fact that radishes are an early season veggie and we are always so behind schedule!
But this year we pulled it together, and we’re swimming in beautiful radishes of two varieties - Pink Beauty Heirloom Radishes from Renees Garden Seeds and French Breakfast Radishes from Seed Savers Exchange. I always knew you could slice or shred them and put them in a salad, but I decided I needed to broaden our horizons and find some more ways to prepare our crop.
First – a bit about the humble but beautiful radish. If you’ve eaten a radish raw, you know that it has a little peppery bite to it. You want to harvest them fairly small so that they stay crispy and don’t get too soft. Chop off the greens to store them, but don’t throw the greens away! You can mix them in with your salad greens or saute them. Here’s a great article from Food 52 with tips on how to prepare radishes.
We challenged ourselves to work radishes into our weekly menu this week, and here are the five ways we are going to do it:
Shred them – yes, you can slice or shred radishes to add them to a green salad for dinner, but you can also shred them to add to a variety of other salads. For example, include them in a soba noodle salad, or add some punch to your potato salad. This Summer Side Dish recipe from The Hayes’ Homestead takes that idea up a notch with a potato salad that also includes avocado, corn, and radish!
Roast them – roasting radishes takes away some of the bite, my Instagram friends tell me. This article from The Kitchn confirms that claim. Roasting radishes, they tells us, makes them sweet instead of spicy. They’re also really easy and quick to roast (just wash them and chop them in half) and add great color when mixed with other veggies. This Roasted Radish Recipe from Taste of Home is on our menu.
Sauté them – like roasting, sautéing radishes can help take away the bite and add some yummy flavor. Nelly at The Little Rustic Baker recommends sautéing with a little bit of French butter and sea salt, similar to this Sauteed Radish Recipe from Epicurious which also makes use of the leaves in the same dish.
Chip them – one of the more unusual suggestions I got from my Instagram friends was to dehydrate radishes with some garlic powder and salt and pepper to make chips (Thanks @marbleshappyhens!). I’ve definitely eaten a variety of veggie chips and even made them myself but I haven’t ventured into Radish chips. Here’s a simple Baked Radish Chip Recipe from The Genius Kitchen. You can also try doing this in your dehydrator to avoid the added oil.
Pickle them – Ok, so this idea is last on my list because I am only slowly coming around to the taste of pickled veggies. I enjoy a sweet bread and butter pickle on a sandwich and am slowly adjusting my taste buds to the more sour dill version. Better Homes & Gardens’ simple radish pickling instructions make this sound easy, and the little bit of sugar might help my adjusting taste buds 😊. Chowhound has a recipe for Bread and Butter Radishes that adds some pickling spices to the mix. This recipe might be just the right assignment for my husband, who is much more into pickling than I am!
What’s your favorite way to enjoy a radish harvest?
