Nigel Slater, TV cook, bestselling cookery author and food columnist for The Observer, has joined the RHS grow your own campaign.
In this series, Nigel focuses on the best produce for growing and cooking.
Nigel's Asian vegetable recipes
Thai style brassica stir-fry
Choy sum with oyster sauce
Asian vegetables
Nigel Slater delights in the spicy flavours of the Asian vegetables he grows.
Of all the plants that have eluded me in the vegetable patch, it is fleshy-stemmed pak choi (Brassica rapa var. chinensis) that hurts most. I know others who seem to grow this with ease. But then, it has the juiciest stems of any of the Oriental greens, making it exceptionally tempting to garden herbivores. I think of it as the canna lily of the vegetable patch. Luckily, other Oriental greens – mizuna, mibuna and hot mustard greens (Brassica juncea) – have all been successful somewhere in my garden or cold frame. From March onwards I start mizuna, ‘green in snow’ and mibuna, the leaves of which I use mostly for salad, in shallow trays of potting compost, then transfer them to the garden only once they are showing two pairs of leaves. I protect them with an open-ended cloche. They appreciate good air circulation and will rot if kept in too humid a situation. I would also advise any potential grower to pull out all the stops when it comes to slug control, the average garden gastropod being apparently quite partial to a Chinese takeaway. I use both copper rings and organic slug pellets.
The brassicas we associate with Chinese or Southeast Asian cooking are among my favourite in the kitchen, and not always easy to find in the shops unless you live close to a Chinese or Asian grocer – a sound reason to grow our own. The sorts that appeal to me are: fleshy-stemmed pak choi with its spoon-shaped leaves and those such as choy sum with its tight yellow buds; the blue-green-leaved gai lan; and the hot leafy mustard greens. They have much similarity to many of our own leafy green vegetables but with the bonus of hot or mustard notes and exceptionally tender stems.
Oriental greens such as young mustards germinate easily. A seed tray of mizuna is often up within a couple of weeks of sowing and their serrated leaves are ready to pick for a salad in a further two or three. If you leave them growing for four to six weeks longer you will have leaves sturdy enough for a stir-fry. The same goes for purple-leaved mustards such as red giant, which are extraordinary in both flavour and colour, being heavily mottled and veined with deep purple and having a cabbage flavour with notes of hot mustard.
Oil or water?
In the kitchen these greens are split into two: those best for use in a salad and those steamed or fried. A leaf’s suitability for one or the other has as much to do with its maturity as its cultivar. Young pak choi and mustard greens, for instance, will almost dissolve in the searing heat of a stir-fry and are more suitable in the salad bowl. As mustards age, larger leaves can become too hot to eat raw in large quantities so they are better used as a cooked vegetable, when heating seems to temper their pungent notes.
When used in a salad, young mustard leaves add a lively note. Most of these peppery leaves are best mixed in with other, milder leaves, including some that are sweeter or cooling to offer some sort of contrast. I like to use approximately one part young hot leaves to three parts milder ones such as lettuce ‘Little Gem’ or Batavia types. Chinese broccoli, like choy sum and pak choi, is mildly flavoured and requires rich, water-retentive soil and plenty of sun, but it is fairly quick to grow and plants can produce several crops, branching once the lead stem is cut out. I have found these to be rather greedy vegetables and thirsty, too – they grow best when pampered by a gardener who is generous with the hosepipe. In many ways they are similar to calabrese or headed broccoli, but they have fleshier, more tender stems which are eaten in their entirety. In the kitchen they are usually steamed. I like to serve them with ginger, garlic and soy sauce.
All these greens are good with the ingredients we most associate with Chinese or Thai cooking: garlic, ginger, spring onion, soy sauce, nam pla (Thai fish sauce), chillies and oyster sauce. The leafier greens with particularly juicy stems such as gai lan and pak choi can be quite mild in flavour and often need the contrast of rather salty or hot seasonings. Fleshy greens and pungent flavourings – it is as if they were made for one another.