The other day I went to the market and I noticed a vegetable completely unfamiliar to me – a small dirty root like thing. As always, my gut reaction for a food I don’t know was “MUST HAVE IT” and asked the seller to give me a few of those things. She said: “You mean the chervil roots?” I nodded knowingly. Might be that I have lived a very ignorant life for not knowing chervil roots, but here we are.
At home, I began to do research on what you can cook with those things, and learnt that you can use them just the way you’d use potatoes or sweet potatoes and that they have similar taste like chestnuts. Although I was tempted to make root chervil pancakes or gratin, I first wanted to know what chervil root actually taste like. So I boiled them in salt water until they were soft.
What came out was indeed a weird mixture of tiny potato, turnip and carrot with a chestnut flavour! I like it! They’d definitely go well as a side to meat, fried things, or anything else. For my experimentation purposes I just ate them with a make shift yoghurt sauce with herbs.
Many recipes I looked at peeled the chervil roots (like potatoes), but since I’m a pro-potato-skin enthusiast I saved myself from the hassle of peeling them.
Stay tuned for more chervil roots adventures!
PS. Technically, the full name of these roots is “root chervil roots” as they are the roots from the root chervil. But that’s just plain stupid.
