Bring the garden on to your plate with Edible Flowers
There’s a saying among chefs: We eat with our eyes first. The more beautiful a salad or a serving of fresh fish, the more tempting it is to consume—particularly with a fresh bloom or two as a sparkling garnish.
But flowers in our food are not just to look at these days. In Executive Chef Patrick Dore’s kitchen at the Fairmont Waterfront Hotel in Vancouver, BC, chefs and mixologists are using edible flowers to enhance everything from specialty cocktails to desserts.
Chef Dore’s team takes their blooms from the hotel’s rooftop garden, which provides nectar for 400,000 honeybees in hives that yield an average of six hundred pounds of herbal honey each fall. Colorful pansies and Johnny-jump-ups are mixed with seasonal salad greens, and sweet and savory flavors like citrus, cucumber, and licorice come from blooms that are safe to munch.
“We use lavender to infuse our honey,” says Dore, “and we make flavored butters with chive, garlic, and calendula flowers. Using edible flowers is about harvesting what’s at its prime in the garden.”
Although edible flowers are frequently found in the grocery produce department, they can be expensive and so fragile they should be eaten the day they’re harvested. For best quality, grow your own, says Cathy Wilkenson Barash, author of Edible Flowers: From Garden to Palate, a Julia Child Cookbook Awards nominee.
“Edible flowers are dual-purpose plants that can be included in any type of garden—formal, cottage, or mixed border,” says Barash. “They turn ordinary family food into something fit for a special occasion. Since it’s never wise to eat a flower from a florist, nursery, roadside, or that has been treated with a pesticide, you can be absolutely certain of their organic origin if they come from your own supply.”
Here are some of Barash’s favorite edible blooms:
Nasturtiums: Pop the entire flower into your mouth. You’ll first get a sweet essence from the nectar followed by a bold, peppery tang. Add nasturtium flowers to good white wine vinegar. Let the mixture sit in the dark (light will fade the color) for several weeks. Strain the flowers out, pour the vinegar into a clean glass bottle, and use it to make a flavorful salad dressing. You can also make a unique martini by steeping nasturtiums in vodka.
Dandelions are generally thought of as weeds, but the flowers are edible when young. There are varieties that have been bred for their size and leaves, which will make a lovely addition to the spring garden. Native Americans dipped the entire young flower in egg, then cornmeal, and fried it, which turns the slightly bitter flower into the flavor of a mushroom.
The yellow or orange petals of daisy-like calendulas can be used like saffron, but you need to chop and cook them with oil to bring out the color and flavor. Sauté some chopped onion in a bit of olive oil, add chopped calendula petals, rice, and boiling water or broth. The result is a beautiful side dish that looks like (and could be made into) Spanish paella. Sprinkle calendula petals on the cream cheese icing of carrot cake for added pizzazz.
Squash blossoms have a mild vegetable flavor similar to zucchini or yellow squash. Traditional in Mediterranean cuisine, all squash flowers are edible. Stuff with flavored breadcrumbs or ricotta cheese and sauté them for a lovely first course. “Zucchini seem to grow from small tasty fruits to baseball bats overnight—you can never keep up with them,” says Barash. “Eating the flowers is sort of like birth control for the plants; the more flowers you eat, the less zucchini you have to deal with!”
‘Lemon Gem’ and ‘Tangerine Gem’ marigolds (Tagetes tenuifolia), with their fernlike foliage, are the only edible marigolds, with a citrusy-tarragon flavor. When you pull the petals from the flower, break off the right-angled portion; it is bitter. Marigolds add spice to something as common as deviled eggs.
Most herb flowers are safe to eat; their flavor is milder and sweeter than the leaves. Try growing dill, fennel, arugula, basil, chives, cilantro, garlic chives, and mustard.
“When harvesting and storing edible flowers, remember to pick them like fruit: in their prime, in the cool morning hours,” the author says. Cut with stems in place and keep them in water or wrapped in damp paper towels in the refrigerator until it’s time to create your culinary masterpiece.
