Dubious culinary experiments: Thistle chips

Wed, 20 Jun 2018 03:28:41 GMT

[public post]

I grew some milk thistles this year for no good reason other than that they're edible, pretty, easy to grow, and might attract butterflies. (Those seem like good reasons, except you have to balance that against "ow ow ow ow" and having to track the seedhead development to catch it before the seeds drop. I think it's still a net positive, though.)

I thinned out the crop several times, and most recently the plants I pulled had finally developed sizable spines, at least 1/4 inch. I wasn't sure I wanted those in my omelette, so I skillet-fried a test batch in olive oil, with salt. Unsurprisingly, they tasted like kale chips: Oil, salt, green, and the Maillard reaction (or perhaps caramelization, I really have no idea.)

There was a minor problem in that the spines were reduced in effectiveness, but not totally, such that I continued cooking and eating the whole plant in spite of periodic jabs in the mouth, because oil and salt are delicious.

I don't think I'd cook this for guests, except as part of $POSSIBLE_PLANNED_EVENT, and I'm not quite sure I'd even do it again for myself, but it was a nice proof of concept.

ETA: It's also possible to cook just the stems and the lower parts of the leaf ribs, which taste something like asparagus. You don't *have* to have a high pain tolerance to enjoy eating thistle. It just helps.

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Dubious culinary experiments: Thistle chips