Oh, radish!

I don't know why that posting title sounds funny to me, but it does. I have radishes on the brain. This is not a common problem for me; in fact, I can count the number of times I've really thought deeply about radishes on one hand. I don't like radishes whenever their presence is obvious. The best thing I've ever done with a radish is carve a mouse out of it. But this week I've been working on a radish dish for Après, and suddenly radishes seem a lot more interesting!

Here's how it happened: the other day I made some cultured butter, which I haven't tasted since last summer when I used to sell it at the Micro-Market. Of course we make butter around here all the time, but usually we don't go to the trouble of culturing it, since the cultured flavor gets lost when you use the butter for baking. Cultured butter is just about the tastiest thing in the universe. It has a slight tang, like sour cream, but with the perfect rich smoothness of butter. You make it just like you make yogurt or sour cream: you add a culture (a mixture of bacteria) to cream and let it grow, and the bacteria eat some of the milk sugars and produce fantastic flavors. In our case, we take the cultured cream and churn butter from it, and then we have cultured butter!

Since I had this cultured butter on hand, I was trying to think of a dish that would highlight it. Personally, I feel that the best thing to do with cultured butter is eat it straight up, off a spoon, but I don't think a lot of people are going to do that. I did some searches for appetizers that star butter, and I found one for radishes and butter: just spread butter on a raw radish, sprinkle with salt, and eat. Since I don't like radishes, I wasn't too excited to try it, but later that same day I was reading the blog Orangette (more on that later) and I saw a reference to exactly the same treatment of radishes and butter (apparently this is how French people eat radishes). So I got some radishes and we slathered a bunch of butter on them and ate them, and they tasted...pretty good! The butter tones down the radishes' peppery bite, and a little crunchy salt on top never hurts.

I figured I was on a roll, so I also tried another recipe for butter-braised radishes. I've never had a cooked radish before, and it turns out they're quite tasty--they lose their watery-ness and take on the hearty texture and earthy sweetness of other cooked root vegetables. The tasting crew here is divided over whether we like radishes better cooked or raw, but we are unanimous that we like them with butter! So we decided to let everyone judge for himself, and we're running an Après special called Radishes and Butter Two Ways. We hope some other people will give them a chance!