About Gourmet Vegetables
_________________Euro Gourmet has worked tirelessly to assemble the best European vegetable varieties. We offer a variety of fresh, frozen, canned and marinated vegetables and both Italian and French imports.
Heart of palm, or palmito, is the inner core and growing bud from a palm tree. Harvesting is labor intensive, involving removal of the bark and tough fibers from the tender inner core. Hearts of palm are an attractive ivory color which does not oxidize or discolor when cut. They are tender yet crisp, with a sweet, delicate flavor many find similar to artichoke. A popular salad ingredient, they are essential in Millionaire’s Salad, where they join artichoke hearts, olives and pimentos. France is the world’s top importer of hearts of palm. Native peoples in South and Central America have eaten hearts of palm for thousands of years, and they are still important in Latin American cuisine. During the Depression in the 1930’s, heart of palm was known as “swamp cabbage” in Florida, where it was a food foraged by the poor. This story of a food beginning as common, and therefore spurned, before becoming a prized gourmet delicacy is also the story of lobster–when the first Europeans settled the New England coast, lobsters were plentiful and simply washed ashore. Thus they were considered food for the common people. In Nova Scotia, they were in fact plowed into the fields as fertilizer rather than eaten, in many cases.
Radicchio, or Italian chicory, is a leaf vegetable, usually red leafed. Radicchio has a bitter peppery flavor and is a popular salad ingredient, or it can be roasted or grilled, which mellows the flavor. Italians often served it grilled with olive oil or as a risotto ingredient, whereas in the US it is more commonly found as part of a raw salad. The Italians do use it in the traditional tricolore salad, along with endive and arugula. Radicchio is a popular winter vegetable in Italy, available November through March, and best after the first frost. Euro Gourmet carries both the early (precoce) and late (tardivo) varieties of Radicchio Treviso. The precoce forms a tight, romaine-like head. The long layered red leaves of the tardivo appear almost like chrysanthemum petals. The tardivo has a stronger flavor than the precoce. Castelfranco, named for the region in northern Italy near Venice where it originates, is another variety. It is a beautiful radicchio that looks like a flower, its creamy yellow rosepetal like leaves stippled with red, boasting a tender texture and a comparatively mild flavor.
Another member of the chicory family is puntarelle, another winter leafy vegetable with leaves like dandelion leaves surrounding a bulb of hollow shoots. The shoots have a celery-like crunch and a flavor reminiscent of fennel, with the chicory bitterness. In Italy, primarily in Rome, where it is best known, puntarelle is classically used in salad dressed with a robust anchovy and garlic dressing. Chefs slice the shoots very thinly, then soak them in ice water for several hours. This reduces the bitterness somewhat and also curls them attractively. Puntarelle can be hard to find even in Italy outside Rome, but Euro Gourmet imports it fresh from Italy.
Moving on to spring vegetables, we supply two wild vegetables, ramps and fiddleheads. Ramps, ramsons, or wild leeks, are a member of the onion family found in eastern North America from South Carolina to Canada. Ramps have smooth broad leaves and a bulb like a scallion. Both the leaves – when tender in the early spring–and the bulbs can be eaten. Their flavor is like a cross between onions and strong garlic. There are several regional ramp festivals in the spring, particularly in Appalachia. Ramps can be used raw or cooked, and traditionally are used to flavor scrambled eggs or homefried potatoes.
Fiddleheads are another popular North American wild spring vegetable, particularly in New England and eastern Canada. European settlers learned to eat them from Native Americans. They are the curled sprouts of ferns which appear in April or May and are harvested right away, within an inch or two of the ground. Called fiddleheads due to their resemblance to the curved ornamentation at the end of a violin, they are eaten cooked (boil for at least 10 minutes or steam for 20) and said to taste like a combination of green beans, asparagus and artichoke. They can be used as you would use asparagus in recipes. In North America fiddleheads are picked from ostrich ferns, although they come from other types of ferns in other parts of the world where they are eaten. In Asia they are often cooked in rich spicy coconut sauces, and they are also eaten in Australia and New Zealand, where they were an important part of the Maori traditional diet.
Ramps and fiddleheads often appear at the same time as morel mushrooms, so these three are often featured together in spring dishes.
Wild asparagus, sometimes called Bath asparagus, is common in Italy, Spain, and France, as well as over much of the US. It has thinner stalks than cultivated asparagus, resulting in a greater differentiation of the tips. Another, albeit cultivated, spring delicacy is white asparagus, also called spargel. Grown in covered beds or under mounded soil, these asparagus spears do not develop the chlorophyll that makes the more commonly seen asparagus green. Particularly beloved by Italians, Germans, the French and Dutch, white asparagus is considered to be a bit tenderer and milder than the green variety. It is slightly woodier and needs to be peeled before use.
Sorrento lemons (in Italian, ovale di Sorrento) are of course a fruit, rather than a vegetable, but they are another of the stars of Euro Gourmet’s offerings or rare fresh produce. The soil and climate of the Sorrento peninsula in Italy are unmatched for producing spectacular lemons with a fine balance between citric acid and sugar, creating a sweeter juice than your average supermarket lemon. The thick bright peels contain high levels of essential oils for an intense aroma. The zest from these peels is used to make limoncello, the sunny lemon liqueur the Amalfi coast is famed for. Locals in the region eat these lemons out of hand, peels and all.
As well as fresh seasonal produce, Euro Gourmet stocks fine frozen vegetables. Many of these varieties are hard to find, such as frozen artichoke bottoms, free of chokes and leaves, which can be used like little tart shells or cut up into dishes, fava beans and flageolets. These latter, with a delicate flavor and creamy texture, have been referred to as “the caviar of beans”. A favorite and important French variety, they are small, tender bush beans, similar in appearance to lima beans. Parisian carrots, which are grown round rather than cut, are frozen within four hours of harvest, providing a tender, non-woody, sweet carrot with an appealing shape. We also offer frozen cut salsifis, a root vegetable with a unique oyster flavor.
A very important element in our vegetable product range are tomatoes. You might think a canned tomato is a canned tomato, but these canned San Marzano variety plum tomatoes will change your mind. Grown in the rich volcanic soil at the foot of Mt. Vesuvius in the sunny valley near Naples, they are low acid, firm and meaty, without many seeds and more flesh. These are the tomatoes of choice for making pasta sauce. We have imported peeled whole tomatoes, cubed, sauce, and paste, as well as cherry tomatoes. We also stock sun-dried tomatoes.
CLICK ON THE LINKS BELOW TO LEARN MORE ABOUT SPECIFIC PRODUCTS AND THEIR RICH HISTORY:
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