Rebuilding Radicchio

Even in the Veneto, the epicenter of radicchio, the crop is always changing.

Photography by Shawn Linehan.

It’s a foggy winter morning in Veneto. Mist pours in from the Adriatic Sea, filling the flat landscape like milk in a saucer. Farmer Nicola Rosato is awake, showered, dressed, has already consumed at least one Winston cigarette, and is standing in the break room at his family’s farm, cheerfully making dozens of tiny coffees in miniature cups. He doles them out, one by one, to a blinking, bleary-eyed group of jet-lagged travelers from the Northwestern corner of the United States. We’re 22 farmers, chefs, food advocates, and journalists, all part of the Culinary Breeding Network, a Portland-based organization that connects seed breeders with everyone who cares about food. And we’re all here for one reason: radicchio.

It’s a curious vegetable to become obsessed with. Most Americans’ experience with radicchio starts and ends with that dry, burgundy, vaguely bitter leaf that occasionally makes an appearance in faux-Euro bagged salad mixes. On the grocery store shelf, it’s often uninspiring: A wilted, softball-shaped presence easily confused with a petite red cabbage. But that common round radicchio called radicchio di Chioggia is just one of radicchio’s many guises. Getting to know its other forms feels a little like discovering the retiring admin at your office actually moonlights in off-Broadway musicals. Who knew?

Italians, it turns out. Northeastern Italy is the epicenter of the world of radicchio. In these Adriatic provinces, radicchio flourishes, protected by E.U. laws that describe the unique relationships between plant, place, and culture developed over centuries. In addition to the requisite Chioggia, northeastern Italy grows dozens of other types of radicchio, many so obscure that just a handful of farmers grow them — of which Nicola is one.

Coffees finally distributed to his satisfaction, Nicola guides us to the courtyard outside a packing shed, where he’s arranged an impromptu display of some of his farm’s crops. The familiar red, spherical radicchio di Chiogga is here, of course, but it’s joined by a number of its more exotic siblings. Green and red speckled castelfranco looks a little like a head of escarole might after painting its walls fuchsia with an overloaded roller. The dusky pink blossom of rosa di Gorizia is a perfect facsimile of a rosebud, right down to the elegant curl of the tips of the petals.

Football-shaped Treviso precoce is sturdy and upstanding, with creamy white ribs standing out in high relief against the deep burgundy of the leaf. Treviso tardivo, on the other hand, is the Treviso clans’ black sheep, a precoce gone wild, with a tousled, curling shape. Nicola picks up a pale lime green Castelfranco specimen, explaining how he originally got the seed from another farmer, who says his family had been growing it for 100 years. “Ha un sapore più selvaggio,” says Nicola, a “wilder taste.”

By many estimates, radicchio has been cultivated in northeastern Italy since the 15th or 16th century. But even here, in the cradle of radicchio history, the plants farmers grow aren’t static. That’s because radicchio and other chicories, like all living things, change from one generation to the next. If you don’t buy new seed every year — and many small market growers don’t — that means to grow radicchio is to breed radicchio.

“Chicory is an outcrosser, maybe an obligate outcrosser, which means it’s particularly prone to genetic degradation. You have to corral them constantly,” says Anthony Boutard of Ayers Creek Farm, in the slightly exasperated tone parents use to describe their children’s most troubling behaviors. Anthony and his wife Carol farm in Gaston, Oregon, on approximately the same line of latitude as the Veneto. Anthony is with us in spirit, if not in person, since the journey’s organizer, Italian farmer Myrtha Zierock, spent some formative time working at Ayers Creek Farm. In other words, there is no “finished” when it comes to varieties, only constant maintenance, rebuilding, and reinforcing in the face of the only inevitable: change.

Classical plant breeding hinges on the same principles as Darwinian evolution. Plants pass their traits on to their offspring, so the plants that are the most well-adapted to their environment will reproduce more abundantly, shaping the characteristics of generations to come. In the case of a farm, that environment includes a uniquely potent evolutionary force: the farmer. And the differences between individual farmers can be dramatic.

Nicola sweats every detail. He says it took him 12 years to develop a Gorizia type he felt satisfied with. Before being sent to market, each head is individually trimmed, soaked in cold water to encourage curl, and hand-fluffed before being carefully packed in a single layer in wooden crates, each head placed to maximize its beauty. “It is the eyes and the heart that is most important in selection,” says Nicola, gently cradling two huge mauve rosebuds in his hands like sleeping kittens.

Selection is one of the central components of plant breeding. At the end of a season, farmers select which plants they want to save seed from. Because offspring resemble their parents, selection is a powerful tool for making sure the next generation will have the qualities a farmer wants — like, say, a crisp contrast between burgundy leaf and white rib, or a leaf that makes just the right sound when you snap it back. Nicola says just 10% of his plants make the selection cut each year.

In an Instagram-powered age, Nicola’s obsession with morphology has paid off. His radicchio sell for as much as 25€ a kilo, and are shipped as far away as Dubai. “It’s like the difference between Nike and Gucci shoes,” says Nicola. As a result, he guards his seed stock as fiercely as a couture house protects next season’s designs, joking that he worries about other farmers sneaking into his fields at night to steal his genetics.

But at Azienda Agricola Pitton outside of Udine, farmer Andrea Pitton takes a far more laissez-faire approach. Andrea grows three varieties of radicchio on his 18-hectare organic farm, including a castelfranco-type that he cultivates as an “evolutionary population,” or a genetically diverse community of plants that’s sometimes called a landrace. Instead of allowing only a few plants each year to go to seed, Andrea simply removes unhealthy plants and allows all of the healthy plants to cross-pollinate freely with one another. The result is like shuffling the deck of genetic cards, resulting in a diverse range of colors, shapes, and textures free from the choosy eye of the farmer. “I like doing it this way because each year, it’s like a gift,” says Andrea.

Andrea says his customers sometimes furrow their brows when they see that his radicchio isn’t uniform. Instead of seeing that as a drawback, he views it as an opportunity. “I want to have a conversation with people who buy my vegetables,” says Andrea. “I want to communicate that uniformity is not always a good thing.”

That’s because a field full of crops that are too genetically similar is vulnerable. In the short term, it’s vulnerable to disease, which can spread rapidly from plant to plant when all are equally susceptible. And in the long term, too much genetic uniformity can make a variety less resilient in the face of climate change. Andrea echoes the other growers we visit in describing an extremely challenging growing season in 2019, with drought followed by too much rain falling all at once.

One of the most surprising things about Italian agriculture, especially for Americans, is just how uniform most crops are. At an open-air market, it can be difficult to tell the difference between vegetables from one stand and the next. The combination of a centralized seed system, a still (somewhat) traditional culinary culture, and the calcifying influence of the DOC/Presidia system have resulted in a produce landscape that is high quality but homogenous. In other words, Italians just expect their Treviso radicchio to look like a football — and if it doesn’t, there must be something wrong with it.

Seen from this perspective, Andrea’s interest in diversity makes him an outlier in modern Italy. Yet Andrea actually sees his evolutionary population of chicories as also a return to an earlier, more traditional way of farming. “When contadini [farmers] were selecting seeds, ‘contamination’ like this was normal,” says Andrea. “Because they would eat everything. It was normal to be diverse — and to have diversity between one farm and another, between one place and another.”

That same mindset is beginning to take hold in the Pacific Northwest, too. Over the past near-decade, Anthony and Carol have bred a tardivo-type radicchio uniquely suited to the western Oregon environment, the Boutards’ aesthetic vision, and even their individual culinary preferences.

“When we started growing these chicories, we were ignorant about the mystique and hype surrounding them,” says Anthony. It turns out that the waterlogged winter soil and dreary, dark conditions of the Willamette Valley were close enough to the Veneto to keep radicchio happy. After almost a decade, he’s gotten the Arch Cape chicory — his name for their tardivo type — just about dialed in. He describes it as a particularly “relaxed” chicory, at least when compared to its continental cousins.

“Look no further than the blades, and you will see a chorus of reds, including crimson, ruby, carmine, cerise, claret, burgundy, rose, fuchsia, and ox-blood,” he wrote in a recent essay. “Some of our heads have very narrow, strap-like blades, and others expand into a spoon shape. Such playfulness is an anathema to the Treviso growers. We would be drummed out of the consortium and forbidden to use the name.” Nevertheless, Arch Cape is well suited to the Gaston climate, creates a head without the labor-intensive forcing process many Italian growers rely on, and is “fully adapted to digital salad eaters like the Boutard family” — in other words, easy to eat with your hands.

Satisfied with the state of his Arch Cape crop, Anthony has recently turned his attention to a Catalogna-type chicory he says has “devolved into a genetic mess.” On a visit to the planting, we walked between the rows. Anthony pointed out the plants with flaws — leaves too thin, too scalloped, too spade-like; plants with disorganized structures, floppy stems, strange coloration, puny size. Hairiness is ruthlessly excised. “There’s nothing worse than a hirsute chicory,” Anthony says with disgust. He also points out the good ones — plants with the right architecture, the right broad-yet-elegant leaf shape, a certain vigor and orderliness. “I like them to look like dolphins swimming,” he explains.

To maintain their varieties, Anthony and Carol make selections themselves, but also enlist their field workers, giving them a “design brief” that describes exactly what the farm is looking for when it comes to chicory — or purple corn or beans. The work never ends. “A precious heirloom is not your grandmother’s china; it’s a living plant,” says Anthony. “You’re always selecting for your conditions.”

Even when a variety is “finished,” opportunities still linger. Occasionally, an off-type Arch Cape arises with a yellow, freckled leaf. “It looks almost exactly like the cobra lily, an insectivorous plant indigenous to the south coastal area of Oregon,” says Anthony. “Every time I see one of those plants, I think how much fun it would be to draw out that trait and develop a new chicory that I would name ‘Darlingtonia,’ the genus name of the cobra lily.”

It hasn’t happened yet, but those genes aren’t going anywhere — they’re there, slumbering, just waiting to be selected when the time comes.

Cooking with radicchio

For a leaf, radicchio is surprisingly versatile. It can be eaten raw, braised, roasted, grilled, sautéed, baked, gratinéed, and even pickled. In the United States, it’s most often enjoyed raw, often in a salad made in whole or in part from radicchio, which has two benefits: It allows us to appreciate radicchio’s startling beauty more or less intact, and it tends to be less bitter.

In Portland, Oregon, Nostrana has served its eponymous Insalata Nostrana since opening its doors 15 years ago. It’s a garlicky, anchovy-laced riff on the Caesar, with radicchio standing in for romaine. Owner Cathy Whims says she’s heard the same thing from customers over and over again: “Oh my god, I hate radicchio, but this is delicious!”

Cathy says the salad’s success is no accident. A long soak in ice water tempers radicchio’s bitterness, while still leaving plenty of flavor to stand up to a robust dressing. Then, the subtle sweetness of Parmigiano-Reggiano balances the pungency of the other ingredients, while focaccia croutons layer in crunch.

If you’re interested in finding radicchio, you’ll probably need to step outside the conventional grocery store for the good stuff. “People should ask around at farmers’ markets, or look at alternative grocery stores and ask them in the produce aisle,” says Cassie Woolhiser, the force behind Chicory Week, a weeklong festival of all things chicory in Seattle, Washington. In the Pacific Northwest, radicchio is usually in season from about September to March.

If you want to minimize bitterness, Cassie suggests choosing a variety that’s not dark purple, and shopping when the temperatures have dropped, since hot weather tends to make radicchio more bitter. “Sugarloaf is so mild, tender, and sweet. It’s like the iceberg lettuce of radicchio,” says Cassie. “Find that, or find a castelfranco or varigata variety, and make it into a salad. I definitely follow the ‘Soak it, then spin it, then dress the shit out of it’ rule.”

However, if you’re one of the many who’ve learned to embrace radicchio’s sometimes-bitter edge, make like an Italian and try cooking it. Just be sure to choose the right variety. “I think the reason we don’t often cook radicchio in this country is that the most common radicchio is the round one, and it gets especially bitter when it’s cooked,” says Cathy. “Trevisio, tardivo, even castelfranco are much better cooked, and don’t get so bitter.”

Cooked radicchio pairs particularly well with rich, salty, and fatty flavors, where any bitterness serves as a welcome foil. The Boutards recommend quartering their Arch Cape chicory and roasting it in duck or goose fat, then finishing it with a little squeeze of lemon. Cassie says it’s also a great addition to a savory sausage and lentil stew, where radicchio’s bitterness strikes a chord with the earthy lentils and fatty sausage.

Of course, as with so many things, sometimes the best way is the simplest. “My honest to god favorite way to eat radicchio is as a salad on top of pizza. That’s how I got my dad to eat it,” laughs Cassie. “It’s sort of the hamburger of Italian food.” Consider it permission to order takeout.