Radishes - A New Way

Radishes are by far the easiest thing to grow in our garden.  They grow fast - and they'll get away from you.  Before you know it they are HUGE.  These are so big and ugly!

We eat them in salads, but mostly, we make a spicy radish dip.  We take about six of them and mince them up in a food processer along with 6 cloves of garlic.  Then we'll throw in a block of cream cheese.  Finally, we'll add salt, pepper, chili powder, paprika and some habanero pepper flakes.  That's it!  It makes a perfect dip for dipping cut up carrots into or we'll spread it on crackers or french bread.  It doesn't last long.  It has become a family favorite.

But when you have an over-abundance of them, you've got to look for new ideas.  We'll try lacto-fermented radishes, much like we do with carrots, cucumber, or cabbage.  First we sliced up the radishes in little chunks like you might do when making pickles.  Then you make a brine by adding 2 teaspoons sea salt to 2 cups water.  Then we added 1/4 of whey that's leftover from yoghurt making.  That acts as a preservative.  We add some garlic cloves to the bottom and then pack the jars tightly with the cut up radishes and pour the brine over them making sure the radishes are submerged by placing some glass canning weights on top.

We leave the jars at room temperature for 5-7 days and then place them in the fridge.  

We'll likely make more radish dip, but thought we'd add this to our radish repertoire. 

From the Garden - Spicy Radish Dip

Radishes are one of the fastest maturing crops in the garden.  You can plant them and in no time at all they are ready to harvest.  Radishes are good sliced thin in salads.  We've even pickled some.  But our favorite way to eat radishes are in a quick and easy, tasty and spicy fresh garden dip.  The bushy greens in the photo down below is our mini patch of radishes.  And they are ready - past time for being ready, actually.

The first item in the radish row isn't a radish, though.  It's a celery plant.  This is the first celery I've been able to grow from seed in the garden.  We've grown some from cuttings from a store-bought one, but this one grew from a seed.  Come to think of it, this celery would be excellent for using in the dip we're making today.

I'm going to pull out four of the biggest radishes for our dip.  There's a big, fat one right there.

I wash them off and then throw the greens to the cows, goats and chickens.  

I was about to go in when I noticed that two of our 300 onions had gone to flower.  See them?

I pulled them up as I've learned that once onions go to flower, you should pull them and eat the bulbs as quickly as possible as they don't last or store well.  I chopped off the tops of these little Red Creole onions.  I have a plan for them.

I cubed up the radishes and put them in the old food processor.

Along with the radishes, we dropped some fresh parsley, four cloves of garlic and I decided to add one of the Creole onions as a new addition to the dip.

In a bowl, we softened a block of cream cheese and added jalapeno pepper powder and more minced onion.

I sliced up some Atomic Red Carrots and Some Uzbek Yellow carrots that we had just pulled.  We'll use these for dipping into the radish dip.

We folded the cream cheese mixture into the radish mixture and stirred up read good.

Spicy Radish Dip, ready for the taste test...

Delicious!  Only thing I'd change is (believe it or not) NOT putting the onions in the dip.  It didn't taste bad.  It tasted good, but it changed the ordinarily creamy dip into a chunky dip.  The texture just wasn't the same.  Tricia and I ate this dip yesterday evening.  The bowl of radish dip with fresh carrots didn't make it 24 hours before we were cleaning the bowl.  It's time to make some more.

What to do With All These Radishes?

We grow French Breakfast Radishes in the garden.  Radishes are one of those crops you grow that is one of the fastest maturing things I can think of.  We cut them up in salads and we also enjoy them in a radish dip we make.  I highly recommend it.  The recipe is from a blog post back in 2017 you can see by clicking HERE. 

We still have a bunch of radishes in the garden.  We'll make another dip or two, but wanted to try our hand at lacto-fermenting some.  We have used lacto-fermentation in making Sauer kraut, kimchi, pickles, and gingered carrots.  Now, we'll do radishes.  This afternoon we picked a colander full.

We washed them up and scrubbed the dirt off of them with a stiff-bristled vegetable brush.

We wanted to see how much we picked.  A hair over 2 pounds.

I cut the bottom root off as well as the top.  In probably an unneeded step, but I like to follow directions, I peeled the radishes with a potato peeler.  By the way, I want to give credit, we're using a recipe from Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon coupled with one from The Survival Gardener's Blog.

We cubed up the radishes and packed them in wide mouth quart sized jars.

The recipe calls for 1 Tablespoon of salt, 1/4 of whey and then fill with water.  A little backstory on the whey.  We make the whey as a byproduct of making kefir yogurt.  Whey is what drips off, leaving the curds behind.  Whey is a natural preservative.

The whey and salt and water are added and thoroughly mixed to ensure the salt dissolves.

Then the mixture is poured over the radishes in the jar until it fills.  You want to make sure the radishes are beneath the surface.  To accomplish this, you'll need a follower.  We don't have any followers, but we improvised.  In the jar on the left, we used a crystal napkin ring to weight down a pint size lid to hold all the radishes under the fermenting liquid.  A few cubes escaped.

For the jar on the right, I used a leaf of cabbage torn a little larger than the size of the jar to push all the radish cubes down.  This worked much better!

We'll allow to sit at room temperature for five days and will then place in the fridge where they'll last for months.  Anxious to try them!  They are supposed to be tart and tangy.  We'll report back if we were successful (if they are tasty).