Fennel is the most criminally overlooked vegetable

I came to love fennel by way of happenstance; it wasn't love at first bite. But through culinary school, some chance explorations of the produce aisle of my grocery store and lots of relentless kitchen experiments — it became the ingredient I can't cook without. 

About a decade ago, I was inexplicably talking about my love of fennel with a room full of people at a gender reveal party when one of the partygoers then blurted out “I hate finocchio!” Finocchio, or finocchiona, means fennel in Italian. 

Now, for many years, I have seen myself as the world’s foremost defender of fennel. Keep in mind, I was born and bred in North Jersey. Fennel is inescapable here, dotting the tables of nearly every Italian-American household, often served raw as a palate cleanser. 

The aforementioned partygoer was singularly referencing fennel's raw form when she told me how much she hated it. This led to my going into a screed about all the wonderful aspects of fennel and how “it tastes so much different cooked!” — which is a line I usually use when trying to defend the oft-maligned vegetable.

But why? Fennel is magnificent no matter how it's cooked (or not). One of the most multifaceted ingredients, it's a multi-layered bulb around a dense core with sprouting stalks and frilly fronds. 

Raw, it has a crisp bite, with a licorice flavor that is somewhere between anise and the effervescence of a lemon-lime soda: refreshing, cool, neutralizing. It is the perfect bite between heavy meals. Cooked, it mellows into some like a sautéed onion: soft, loose, languorous, curling in on itself as its flavor deepens.

Atop the bulb are the fronds, which are leafy and subtly anise-flavored. They’re terrific when used just as you would with herbs. Of course, fennel seeds and fennel pollen must also be touched on when discussing fennel, but they’re not the stars of the show here.

There’s a certain Italian or Italian-American sensibility to fennel — and while it is beloved in these cultures, but it belongs to everyone. 

Somehow, though, even living in North Jersey, fennel somehow managed to elude me until my early twenties, when I went to culinary school. There, fennel initially came up as a component of an aromatic base in fish dishes, often along with leek and celery — sort of like a version of mirepoix for French fish dishes (traditional mirepoix is celery, onion and carrot)

At this point, fennel and I were mere acquaintances. The love affair was soon to begin. 

One of my culinary school exams was where two soon-to-be-obsession — frico and fennel — collided, on the same sheet tray, by pure accident. As I wrote, “I accidentally let some fennel tossed with gruyere and Parmesan go a little longer in the oven than I had initially intended.” I was sort of gobsmacked when I first tasted it, it was an ideal dish: "The vegetable was bronzed, the cheese melted and browned, perfect curlicues of crisped cheese enveloping each strand of roasted fennel.”

From then on, I made the dish near-constantly and also shared the recipe a few years back. I would make it for friends who came over and incessantly pushed them to eat it, even when it was evident that I was the only person at the table still eating the dish. I would bring it to Friendsgiving events. It felt like mine, this intertwining of fennel and gruyere, two magnificent ingredients, becoming something even better than the sum of the parts. At some point, my family said, in an unspoken manner,  “Uh…I think we’re good on fennel for a little?”

During this time, I also became fascinated with lesser-known produce and would often go to my local Fairway Market and purchase whatever ephemeral, unusual produce they had: pluots, rutabaga, celeriac, pomelo, rambutam — and, of course, I’d inevitably buy numerous heads of fennel. My kitchen was endlessly churning out dishes (some far better than others), but what I found in all of this toiling with random produce was that I always just kept going back to fennel.

My next discovery of the joy of fennel was after culinary school, during an externship at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan. I was tasked with “supreming” oranges for their simple fennel salad. The dish itself was a true parade of textures and flavors: the sheer, shattering crunch of toasted hazelnut contrasted the bite of raw fennel, the aromatic burst of fresh orange segment, all tossed and glistening in orange juice and olive oil, finished with salt and fennel fronds. It was astonishing, to say the least.

There was nothing glaring or ostentatious, just a raw, stunning preparation that was an exquisite way to start a meal. 

So what did I do from there? You guessed it: I started making that salad alongside my roasted fennel and gruyere nearly every weekend. The transformation was complete. I was the foremost fennel adorer. 

One of my favorite things to do in the kitchen is double-down. Some ingredients (Parmigiano-Reggiano, fresh mozzarella, fennel) are perfect; why not use them in multiple manners? 

When combining fennel in all of its disparate forms — raw, clean and punchy; gentle and soft and savory; bright and herbal and anise-centric — you can land on a dish that is astounding. 

Fennel has followed me from culinary school to restaurant kitchens to my own home kitchen, always revealing something new about itself (and me, too!) Here are two of my other favorite ways to showcase the odd, misshappen root vegetable — and perhaps you'll possibly start to love it, too. For the best one-two punch, serve them both in the same meal, either side-by-side or with the salad as a starter.