This introduction is designed to help you understand and manage bitter qualities in the plants that follow. It would be unfortunate if you skipped this section just because you might not be a fan of this class of flavors—I wasn’t until recently. The benefits you will gain in flavor, dietary variety, and nutrition are worth it.
I’m defining the bitter greens here as ones that, in the raw unadorned form (having no added sauce or other ingredients), range from moderately to strongly bitter to most people. These are greens and vegetables that are suitable for occasions where you want to add some character to the dish you are making. Bitter greens are often paired with milder greens (foundational greens) or complex dishes to add interest and nuance. They are edible raw and cooked, but their best uses depend on your flavor goals for whatever you are preparing. They have the potential to greatly improve a dish by using just the right amount or to destroy it by adding so much that it overpowers everything else in the dish. Most people will prefer to use them as flavor enhancers for other foods or to cook them in ways to produce more moderate flavors.
Each of the greens in this section has its own characteristic flavors and textures. Served fresh, they are excellent when used in combination salads, added to sandwiches, employed as garnishes, and made into green-based sauces. Cooked as a side dish, their flavors vary tremendously—some remaining bitter while others transform into foundationally mild but rich flavors. Cooked in more complex dishes, their qualities shine. Add them to soups, stews, lasagna, pizza, pasta, and rice dishes.
The plants covered in this section include dandelion, cat’s ear, sow thistle, and nipplewort—all in the aster or dandelion family. The aster family, the Asteraceae, have many representatives in our supermarkets—primarily lettuces. Plenty of other plant families have bitter greens, including ones mentioned in other sections of this book, so our grouping is a matter of convenience. Note that many members of the Asteraceae family, like some of the lettuces, are not bitter—including ox-eye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare) and salsify (Tragopogon spp). The plants I cover are here because they are common and important from a wild food perspective. They are great foods that should be enjoyed, so read on.
Flavors offered by bitter greens are an excellent addition to the gourmet’s arsenal of tastes. From a food perspective, the plants in this chapter are primarily cold-weather plants, providing their best eating in the early spring. Some are even good in the fall. If they are growing in your garden or yard, and if you nurture them, you can extend their availability into the summer.
Historically, while many peoples ate bitter greens, they typically did not eat them raw and unadorned in their full bitter glory. In American culture prior to World War II, country folk and immigrants ate all sorts of wild greens, including the plants in this section. But they would eat them cooked and/or smothered in substances like hot bacon grease. In fact, this is the classic way to eat “wilted greens” in North America: Take a mess of wild greens and pour liberal amounts of hot bacon grease over them, then add the chopped-up bacon, diced hard-cooked egg, and whatever else strikes your fancy. People striving for healthier diets might ask, “Where are the greens under all that?”
Today, many people get hardening of the arteries just hearing the words “bacon grease”! These added foods and preparations transformed the greens into a whole different flavor experience than the lone bitterness of the raw greens.
Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest added eulachon grease (a fish oil) to greens and fruits with strong and/or unusual flavors. Mediterraneans added generous amounts of olive oil and lemon juice to their greens. And in both these groups, most of the bitter greens were cooked before these dressings were added.
Today, because we know so much about dietary-caused diseases and because our lives are so sedentary (we have to force ourselves to exercise), many more people are interested in eating fresh raw fruits and vegetables covered in less animal fats and calories. The benefits are better health; the downside is that bitter and other harsh flavors formerly concealed are exposed.
Taste is more complex than most people think. Most people I talk to classify foods as bitter or not, or they give a simple scale of intensity. In reality, there are thousands of bitter-flavored chemicals in plants, and our taste buds probably have hundreds of ways of sensing those chemicals. Since each of us has a unique array of taste buds, that explains why different people can disagree on whether a food is bitter or not. Some people can taste certain bitters in certain foods while others may taste something different in that same food.
If you were fed raw dandelions as a child, then you would be more likely to have developed a tolerance for their bitterness and some taste connections to your brain’s pleasure centers. But people trying them for the first time as an adult do not have this advantage. If you are determined, as an adult, to eat raw unadorned dandelions for philosophical, health, or machismo reasons, you will probably tolerate more bitterness with time and practice. Your body adjusts somewhat. Mine has. But if you still want no bitterness in your foods, then that can be arranged.
The only way I can enjoy bitterness is if it is managed into pleasantness. So how exactly do you manage bitterness? Here are the ways I’ve discovered:
Gather the greens at their prime
The biggest mistake novices make is just consuming whatever plant they find whenever they find it and expecting great results. If you gather greens at their prime, you will experience better flavor and texture, and you’ll have an easier time managing what bitterness it does have. The plant chapters in this book will help you understand and find leaves and other edible parts at their prime.
Turn the greens into a flavoring
Spearing a forkful of mixed greens in a salad is one thing. Spearing a forkful of nothing but bitter greens is a whole different experience. One way to take the intensity out of leaves is to chop them into shreds and distribute them throughout a mixed salad or some other food.
Your chopping is doing two things here: first, you are making small pieces, and second, you are diluting their intensity by mixing them with other foods. Instead of a slap-in-the-face hit of bitterness, this adds a mild bitter bite throughout a more complex medley of flavors.
When making a salad, bitter greens are typically mixed with milder greens to dilute the bitterness. The degree of bitterness of the greens I’m using will determine the degree of dilution I’ll try to achieve. Real bitter greens may only make up a sixth of a mixed salad, where mildly bitter greens could be as much as a third of a salad. The goal is not to get rid of the flavor but to use it to its best advantage.
A very effective way to dilute bitter greens is to combine them with foods rich in protein, fat, and/or carbohydrates—the macronutrients. Greens cooked with meat, salad dressed with oil or fatty fruits like avocado, or greens cooked with pasta or potatoes are excellent ways to dilute bitterness. These macronutrients provide calories that mild greens alone do not. Those calories can absorb a lot of bitter flavor.
Mask the bitterness
Fat is the main ingredient for doing this. This is why many of the old-timers (like Euell Gibbons) poured hot bacon grease over their dandelions. Aside from the dilution factor that added fat provides, fat can mute and/or even change the flavor of different bitters. Fat flavored with bitters it has absorbed can provide a melded flavor that is often better than each one tasted separately. Fat may also coat the tongue, serving as a sort of shield or mask for taste bud receptors, reducing their exposure to the harshest forms of bitterness. My fat of choice is cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil.
Engage ALL your taste buds
Diluting bitter greens with mild greens helps to soften bitterness. But if you want to maximize the proportion of bitters to other foods in your dish, then engage more of your taste buds. If bitter taste buds are the only sensory organs firing signals to your brain, then that is all your brain will focus on. If you engage sweet, sour, salty, and umami taste buds, the brain hears a symphony rather then one note. Fruity vinaigrettes add sweet and sour to a salad. Smoked salmon shreds add smoked, salmon, umami, and salt flavors as well as protein to dilute the bitterness. Bitterness, while still there, would only be one of many sensations competing for your brain’s attention.
The first four management practices above also apply to cooked greens.
Heating
There are thousands (millions? billions?) of different bitter or just unpleasant substances in the plant kingdom. Each has different physical and chemical properties. They all react differently to processing techniques we throw at them. Some bitters are volatile and will evaporate with heat in the escaping steam. Bitters in other plants will remain and break down into non-bitter substances. Others leach into the cooking water. Others are just persistent, unaffected by heat, and you have to live with them. Heating and boiling will not universally remove bitterness. You have to customize your behavior to what the plant demands.
Cooking will destroy a small proportion of nutrients—mostly the water-soluble ones; some will be lost in the cooking water. When I cook, my goal is to minimize loss and maximize flavor and texture. Cook things as little as necessary to make a delectable food. If the food is too bitter, you won’t eat any of it, wasting ALL those nutrients. If you are worried that your body is going to go into fits of deprivation over a 5 percent loss of some nutrients that are cooked out, then eat 5 percent more greens.
Leaching
Just as fat-soluble bitters are absorbed in fat that you might add to a dish, water-soluble substances are absorbed in water. In both these cases, the process of extraction is called leaching. Water-soluble bitters may leach out of a plant and into any surrounding water. Fat-soluble bitters may leach out of a plant and into any surrounding oil. Leaching can happen in cold water but is more effective under two conditions: first, if the greens are cut into small pieces, then there are more open areas for the bitterness to escape; second, the heat and agitation caused by boiling water speeds up the removal process. The greater the volume of liquid to the mass of greens, the more bitterness that escapes into the water. With some greens, leaching is not useful because they lose all their flavor. Your goal is to manage bitterness, not destroy all flavor. Many bitter wild greens, including dandelions, reveal a wonderfully rich flavor after being leached properly.
Since you will gather at different times during the season from a variety of locations that experienced a variety of growing conditions, the degree and tenacity of bitterness may vary, even if you know what you are doing. So your job is to taste things before you commit them to recipes, particularly if you are planning to share your food with others. Following a recipe using a bad ingredient only gets you a bad result.
In my experience, the greens in this section, particularly when eaten raw, can initially result in a more laxative effect than other greens. This makes sense because some of the bitters that may be beneficial in small amounts tend to be mildly toxic in large amounts. Sesquiterpenes and terpenes are two such classes of chemicals. Your intestines have to decide what to absorb and what not to absorb, your liver has to metabolize these substances, and your kidneys have to excrete them. So the first few times that you eat a bitter wild green, you may have softer stools then normal. Your body will adjust gradually as you eat these greens more and more. This is not something to worry about. Just be aware that softer stools are a normal thing when you are new to this.
Bitter greens can be nutritional powerhouses packed with nutrients and phytochemicals. Of our four plants, only dandelions and sow thistle have been studied to any extent. Both are high in calcium, iron, zinc, and copper. Dandelions are also a great source of riboflavin, folic acid, beta-carotene, and vitamin E. Sow thistles are a great source of omega-3 fatty acids and are the highest source for manganese I’ve found for any green plant.
Bitter greens tend to be great carriers of phytochemicals, of which sesquiterpenes and terpenes are members. There are many reports these days about phytonutrients—substances in plants that may have protective effects against cancer, heart disease, and some of the effects of aging. This is promising stuff. And while the bitter greens certainly have their share of phytochemicals, it is clear that the non-bitter greens and just about all other plants do too. If you want phytochemicals, go ahead and eat bitter greens, but also eat non-bitter greens, fruits, nuts, seeds, and legumes. One of the nutritional benefits of wild foods is that they increase the variety of the plant part of the diet and, hence, the variety of phytochemicals in the diet.
The bitter greens that follow add a wonderful contribution to the overall diet. You can make the best use of them by making them taste as delicious as you can in ways that suit you. Using the techniques above, you should be able to experiment and improvise with bitter wild greens you read about here and ones not covered in this book. Appreciate wild greens for whatever they bring to the table and use them to your advantage, bitter or not.