Stuffed Artichokes

DO IT FOR ART’S SAKE

I really have never seen stuffed artichokes outside of my mom’s side of the family. I remember the Frugal Gourmet having a “Jewish Stuffed Artichokes” from the Jewish Ghetto in Rome, but they were nothing like my family’s. They weren’t exactly special occasion food, but they were (and are) delicious.

I had to contact my mom for the technique. My mom and my aunt showed me how to do this about 10 years ago, but I wasn’t sure I had it memorized. (It turned out I did, but it was good to get confirmation. I would have forgotten the olive oil, though.)

Artichokes are usually pretty expensive, especially considering how little of the thistle you can actually eat. These are stuffed with a breadcrumb mixture (ingredients, to be specific) and then cooked in a technique somewhere between a boil, a braise, and a steam. Once they’re done, you peel the leaves off of the bud and scrape the breadcrumbs and edible bits of the plant off of each leaf, discard the leaf, and go back for more.

The closer you get to the choke, the more of the leaf becomes edible. The choke itself is made up of a bunch of fuzzy hairs, which you scrape off with a spoon and then eat the heart.

The really cool thing about the heart is that it contains an acid called cyanarin, which temporarily deadens the taste buds that react to sweetness, and when you take a drink of water, the cyanarin is washed away and everything (including the water) suddenly tastes sweet for a few seconds.

RECIPE

• 1 artichoke per person, cleaned (see below)
• 1/3 cup ingredients per artichoke
• Olive oil

Clean the artichoke by cutting off about 1/3 of the top and then cutting the stem close to the base. I still haven’t figured out what to do with the tips. I don’t know if they’d be good in stock. Compost them if you’re into that sort of thing, but they are certainly not edible.

Loosen the leaves with your fingers, kind of spreading them apart from the center to put space between them to stuff. Over a bowl, stuff the crevices with the breadcrumb mixture, massaging it in with your fingers. They can easily hold 1/3 cup or more of the breadcrumbs, so keep stuffing it in there until you’re sure they can take no more. You want to take extra care to get stuffing into the outer layer, since that’s where you’ll be needing the most of it because the leaves there are particularly fibrous and inedible.

Put them in a pot just barely big enough to hold however many you have, and cover the artichokes about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way with water (see notes). Drizzle some olive oil over the tops, cover the pot, bring the water to a boil, and then let simmer for about 45 minutes.

You’ll know they’re done when the leaves are tender. Take them out (I used tongs), put them in bowls, and start to eat. I use bowls because you can just discard the scraped leaves right into the bowl as you’re eating and then throw them all away at the end. It saves washing two dishes.

Eat as above (scraping the breading and tender flesh off of the leaves with your teeth, in case you didn’t want to go back and read), discarding the spent leaves until you get to the choke and then the heart. Have a glass of water ready for the cyanarin trick. It doesn’t work that well with wine, sadly.

–c

NOTES

Check the water in your pot occasionally! Don’t be like me and come back when the timer comes off to cooked artichokes and a burned pot. Some quick soaking saved my pot, and the artichokes came out fine, but I was worried there for a little while.

This is in no way a full meal. I had this with a huge salad, and I was fine. Serve this as part of some other Italian meal. I honestly can’t remember what my grandmother used to serve this with; probably something else that used ingredients, like chicken cutlets or spiedini — but those are for later posts.