On the Plate: Mario Batali’s Edible Garden
Posted in Around the Garden, Mario Batali's Edible Garden on July 14 2011, by Anthony Sasso
Mario Batali’s Edible Garden in the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden features the celebrity chef’s favorite ingredients. In Batali’s Berry Patch; the Otto Pizza Garden; and the Babbo Beets, Beans, Garlic, and Greens Garden, kids and families can learn all about the benefits of vegetable gardening and using fresh produce in daily meals. We asked the chefs at Mario Batali’s restaurants to give us some insight into how they love using the ingredients being grown at the Garden. First up, Anthony Sasso Chef de Cuisine at Casa Mono tells us how he likes to use strawberries (as featured in Batali’s Berry Patch), and Chiogga beets (as featured in the Babbo Beets, Beans Garlic and Greens Garden) in a simple summer salad.
In New York, we get pretty excited about the first culinary signs of the season. Winter, spring, summer, and fall are pretty well defined in the Northeast. So as soon as a fruit or vegetable makes its debut at the local farmers market, chefs are instantly motivated to come up with new ideas and get their hands on what’s in season before anyone else. In the spring, after long cold months of winter squash and mushrooms and potatoes (brown, brown, and brown), that means we get to look forward to ramps, asparagus, snap peas, and anything else green!
Similarly, there are a few things that offer hints that summer has arrived (besides ice cream trucks on every corner), like strawberries. Strawberries have a way of popping up (especially the wild ones) after the first few consecutive days of really warm weather. In New York, that means towards the middle or end of June. And I think I speak for most chefs when I say that we have a hard time coming up with unique ways to use them creatively in savory dishes. Strawberries are sweet and tart, beautiful to look at, juicy, and small enough to use whole, yet they are usually given to the pastry kitchen to be used as a topping for sundaes, as a condiment to shortcake, or cooked down with sugar until they become jammy for cheesecake. I have used them before by pureeing the fruit into a sauce to dress poultry, or simply mixing them with balsamic and sherry vinegar as an accompaniment to our house-made charcuterie.
This year though, we wanted to leave them uncooked and intact, so I started to play around with raw strawberries. I sprinkled them with just a touch of sugar (this lets the berries sweat out their juicy interior) and lemon juice and paired them with our baby beet salad, in which we use Chioggia beets as the main ingredient. This heirloom beet variety has that same great earthy taste as red beets, but tend to be a little bit sweeter and are quite a sight to behold when peeled and cut in half. Inside they have a colorful swirl pattern that best resembles a trippy Grateful Dead bumper sticker (sorry, I’m from Woodstock). Their greens are really delicate and can be cooked down as a nice side dish. The stems are crunchy and make a great snack, or a surprise addition to a crudité platter. They’re easily one of our favorite vegetables at Casa Mono because of how versatile they are. I suppose beets embody the “nose to tail” ethos of the garden, meaning you can use every part in the kitchen.
So when you taste the two together, the match is pretty surprising. The beets are firm and rich and the juicy strawberries lend great sweetness. We pair them with a thickened Greek-style yogurt spiced up with Shiso (Perilla) leaves and garnish it all with summer squash blossoms and basil leaves. A trip to the garden can turn into the perfect summer lunch.
