Baby Vegetables Are Big on Flavor

I have just returned from San Francisco--a.k.a. Chow Town--and I am counting on the sweet memories of the great heaps of A-1 grub I ate there to sustain me through the rest of this column.

It’s tough, after you’ve scarfed your way through North Beach like a giant pasta-eating caterpillar, to throttle back to the point where you can even think about such oddities as baby vegetables.

But, sooner or later, I’m going to have to face up to the fact that I’m back home, in the land of the twig-and-root lunch, the entree-as-minimalist-art and The Incredible Shrinking Dinner Plate. Back in the land of “California Cuisine,” the food trend that most closely resembles a famine.

Up in Baghdad, you routinely tuck into acres of cannelloni in cream pesto sauce, mounds of 40-clove garlic chicken, Louisville Slugger-size shanks of osso bucco and garden salads that need to be negotiated with a machete. Here in Lotus Land, every dish is less than the sum of its parts; they take more time to read about than they do to eat. Of course, baby veggies are naturals for this haiku- type cuisine.

And--just in case you don’t think that life imitates art--Renee Shepherd says some varieties of baby vegetables have only been around for less than a decade, the better to accommodate the little clots of California chefs who think an appetite can be satisfied by something that covers a plate the way a Toyota covers Jupiter.

Shepherd, the president of Shepherd’s Garden Seeds, one of the country’s larger seed companies (with headquarters in the Northern California town of Selton), said that the mini-veggies have represented “a phenomenon that’s only been around for about three to five years, mostly in the restaurant trade.”

With the advent of California cuisine, she said, more and more professional chefs began to search for vegetables to use more as artistic trimming on a plate than as actual food--something for color, texture or emphasis rather than a source of actual calories.

But irony never sleeps. Where the chefs saw cunning little culinary brush strokes, diners--undoubtedly starving after trying and failing to savor an entree composed entirely of subatomic particles--found a source of concentrated flavor.

Yes, Shepherd said, baby vegetables pack a wallop. Most of them, she said, tend to be either “succulent and tender” or blessed with a “fragile and delicate flavor.” They won’t exactly fill you up, but they will let you know that you’re not eating rice cakes.

Take the baby turnip, for example. Shepherd said that the one most in use is a Japanese hybrid called Market Express that is picked when it’s the size of “a large marble.” And if the word “turnip” causes your face to pinch, you’ll be pleased to know that this turnip is sweet and mild.

This is no accident. Most varieties of baby vegetables, Shepherd said, are specifically bred to either gain a high flavor early in their development (so they can be harvested before they grow to a normal size), or to stop their growth early on but retain all the flavor of a mature plant.

Of all the varieties, cherry tomatoes are perhaps the most well-known. Big in flavor, small in size, they’re the staple of most salad bars. But it’s good to remember that cherry tomatoes look nice and proportional on a bed of Tom Thumb lettuce--about the size of a fist, crisp and, Shepherd said, just about the perfect individual serving size.

And the Short ‘n Sweet carrot variety: just what the name says, with the added zing that comes from developing a mature concentration of sugars at an early age. And Little Ball beets, about 1 1/2 inches in diameter, but possessing a more tender and delicate flavor than their larger cousins.

Unfortunately for restaurateurs, all this fragility and delicacy of flavor means that the plants are also physically fragile.

“They have to be picked at their tender best,” Shepherd said.

Happily, this is fortunate for home gardeners, who have what Shepherd called “a particular edge” when it comes to growing and harvesting baby vegetables. They can be planted and tended in a small plot of ground or in a planter--they are planted and picked at roughly the same time of years as their larger counterparts--and the home gardener can yank them out of the ground and have them in the pot in minutes.

One final caution from Shepherd: Baby veggies cook fast. Steaming works particularly well, she said, with maybe a little herb butter thrown in.

Oh, heck--throw in a lot of herb butter. And a steak. A big one. Think of it as the meeting of two artistic schools: maximalist and minimalist.

If we’re lucky, it’ll start a trend.