You Should Put Kohlrabi in Your Pizza
Life taught me very little to expect February, the worst month, but this one was especially bad. It’s important to enjoy the bright spots as they appear, even tiny ones, and while this month is rife with micro and macro crises, I was finally able to eat kohlrabi pizza after weeks of working on the schedule. This was the culmination of my February.
Kohlrabi is a strange kind of root vegetable that is not even close to deserving of praise. Like other members of the Brassica oleracea species, it is a cabbage variety bred to maximize certain characteristics – in this case, a round, plump stem – and therefore can be grown more or less all year round. It is a hardy crop, delicate in both texture and taste – a rare combination that makes it a favorite ingredient in cuisines around the world, especially Kashmiri and German. (My Austrian stepfather grew up eating kohlrabi and was so thrilled when my mom received a CSA box full of giant purples; she has never seen one like this before in her life.) Depending on your location, kohlrabi is almost always “in season.” But in an ordinary American supermarket, it is rarely found. I found mine at an Asian grocery store with a particularly good food section.
If you’ve never tasted kohlrabi before, imagine a daikon radish in a broccoli stalk suit. In taste, it is closest to the second, but sweeter and softer. Like broccoli stalks, the fibrous skins of kohlrabi don’t soften much when cooked, but peel them off and you’ll find crispy, juicy, daikon-like flesh that works for a wide variety of culinary uses. If you’re lucky, you may have a large bunch of leaves that you can and should use like kale or kale. Kohlrabi greens have a broccoli rapini flavor, no harsh bitterness, and I was shocked that I only had a few tiny leaves.
As you’d expect, kohlrabi is well salted and makes a great pie, but those who love radishes and broccoli stalks know that frying makes them sing . Kohlrabi, being relatively sweet, transforms completely in the oven. The edges are caramelized, the inside is soft and tender, and the flavor is concentrated into something much sweeter and more complex than you might expect. Perhaps this is what prompted Sarah Minnick, recently appointed chef of Lovely’s Fifty-Fifty in Portland by James Byrd, to start adding fried kohlrabi chunks to her pizza: “Basically, this is the most tropical flavor since pineapple,” she said in his interview. recent post on Instagram . Since then, I’ve been thinking about kohlrabi pizza at least once a day.
My preferences for pizza are: red sauce is one of my love languages (in other words, most white pizzas can get lost), I prefer vegetables to meat, and I’m a hundred billion percent a pineapple supporter. Since I love kohlrabi too, I was eager to toss the fried cubes into the pizza and see if it really was tropical . Since I can’t stay alone, I decided to make a second pie with shaved kohlrabi salad, goat cheese and olive oil. Raw asparagus pizza is exempt from my general ban on white tarts and I thought kohlrabi would behave in a similar way.
My results confirm that kohlrabi is ideal for pizza, whether raw shaved or diced and fried. Surprisingly, the tart topped with raw kohlrabi was my favorite – the edges are charred in the oven, which is always a plus, and the simple lemon olive oil dressing was perfect with the goat cheese. I finished it off with a little grated aged Gouda cheese, cilantro and garlic-chili butter; my taste tester and I breathed it in. As for the fried cubes, they went well with my other fillings of choice (leftover walnut pesto , goat cheese, red chili and crimini mushrooms) but didn’t taste better than pineapple. Kohlrabi is the sweetest at a very young age, and I suspect that the samples I bought an Asian supermarket in Philadelphia in mid-February, may not be as sweet as supersvezhie local varieties used by Sarah Minnick.
Regardless of how you feel about pineapple pizza, kohlrabi can be your new favorite topping. If you want to give it a try, you will need:
- Your favorite pizza dough recipe (I’m using the 22 hour version of this recipe , which has half the salt and some sugar)
- Pizza roasting dish (I use a preheated cast iron skillet)
- Sauces, cheeses and other fillings of your choice
- 1 small to medium kohlrabi on a 10-12 inch pie (no more than half a pound each before peeling)
- Olive oil, salt and pepper
- Lemon juice (optional)
To make kohlrabi, remove and retain all the leaves, cut and discard the stems, then carefully cut off the end of the root, then use a sharp peeler to remove the skin. Kitchn has a great tutorial on how to cut kohlrabi for visual learners.
After peeling the onions, cut the kohlrabi into cubes or slices as you like. For the toasted topping, I chopped mine into about ½-inch cubes, sprinkled it with olive oil, salt and pepper and sautéed at 425ºF for about 15 minutes. For the raw topping, I used a vegetable knife to glue the pulp into a bowl filled with olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.
The rest is really up to you. I used the toasted cubes like pineapple and laid out the raw salad on a base of olive oil and goat cheese chunks. Make sure to rip the leaves and add them before cooking – they will get super crispy in the oven and I wish there were more in my kohlrabi.
I am already planning my next kohlrabi pizza adventure. Next time I’ll definitely pick my favorite combination: pineapple (well, fried kohlrabi), pickled jalapenos and pepperoni with red sauce and lots of mozzarella. As for the raw pie, I think using a pesto base and sprinkling it with ricotta and parmesan straight out of the oven would be tricky. Luckily, I have a six-pizza dough in my freezer in anticipation of the next emergency – and given that a full week of February has yet to go through, I guess it won’t be long.