Lettuce & Chicory

Amazonian Chicory

[Eryngium foetidum]
This is not a chicory but Culantro in the Parsley family.

Catalogna Chicory

A mildly bitter chicory popular in Italy and widely available in the USA. There are also cultivars with red stems, and sometimes white ones will show red streaks. Chicory is generally used raw to pep up salads with fairly heavy dressings, but can also be cooked and will then be milder. The photo specimen was 16 inches long and weighed 13 ounces.

Chicory Root

Chicory Root has long been an adulterant in coffee, and sometimes a substitute. In East Germany, Mischkaffee, a mixture of chicory, sugar beet and rye, was used during a coffee shortage before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Chicory root is used industrially for extracting inulin, now being promoted as a "prebiotic" in the health food market. Some beer brewers use roasted chickory to make their stout more "stout".   Photo by Rasbak at nl.wikipedia (seriously color balanced), licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike v3.0 Unported - attribution required .

Belgian Endive - White

This very bitter chicory is pulled from the field and the green top cut off. Replanted in darkness the roots grow new leaves which lack green chlorophyll and are also much less bitter. This process explains the rather high price, but the flavor/texture combination just can't be found elsewhere and is essential to some recipes. The photo specimen was 5 inches long and weighed 4-3/4 ounces.

Belgian Endive - Red

Curly Endive / Frisée

A plant from India (Cichorium endivia) valued as a salad green. The Curly variety has fairly narrow leaves with ruffled edges while on the Frisée variety the leaf is both curly and very deeply cut making it quite frizzy. Of course there are many cultivars ranging from one extreme to the other.

Escarole

Escarole is less bitter than most chicories and has broad light green leaves and a very flat head. It is commonly used as a salad green but more mature heads may be cooked as a green side dish. The photo specimen was 13 inches across and weighed 13 ounces.

Radicchio

A moderately bitter chicory that looks like a head of lettuce in the field. In Italy they have also an all white version but in the US the spherical red and white Radicchio di Chioggia variety is most common but an elongated red and white Treviso variety that looks like a big red Belgian endive is also seen. This is a fairly expensive lettuce because of the production method. In the field they are green. To make them purely red and white they are pulled from the ground and put in water in a dark room until the chlorophyll has faded from lack of light. This is labor and capital intensive and a lot of outer leaves are lost in the process resulting in the high price. The larger of the photo specimens was 4 inches diameter and weighed 9-1/2 ounces. Details & Cooking.

Radicchio Treviso

This is simply an elongated variety of the regular round Radicchio di Chioggia. It tastes the same and can be used the same unless leaf shape is important to your application, but it's likely to be even more expensive. The photo specimens was 7 inches long, 2-3/4 inches diameter and weighed 7 ounces. Details & Cooking.

Butter Lettuce

These are very tender loose leaf lettuces often packed in individual plastic containers to protect them from damage. Of the two main varieties, Bib Lettuce is the smaller and considered the more flavorful, but Boston Lettuce is a suitable substitute. Packages I've seen in Southern California do not use either designation but simply call the contents "Butter Lettuce". The package often includes roots and a hydroponic growing matrix to extend shelf life.

Green Leaf Lettuce

Iceberg Lettuce

Crisphead is actually the correct name, but nobody calls it that. This head lettuce is the darling of the lettuce industry and the fast food chains. It's easy to handle and stands up well to processing and shipping abuse. The fast food people like it because it's easy to shred, bulks up a salad well and stays crisp and bulky for quite a while after shredding.

This lettuce was originally (and still is) grown in Salinas, California. It was put on trains, packed with ice and shipped as far as Maine year round, thus called "iceberg lettuce". It was very much welcomed during New England winters.

Crisphead lettuce contains a lot of water and is 1/5th or less nutritious as loose leaf lettuce. It has rather little lettuce flavor or bitterness but can be useful for recipes that call for lettuce wedges and such or where texture is more important than flavor or nutrition. It's also easy to store in the fridge compared to leaf lettuce. The photo specimen (left), a medium size one, was 5-1/4 inches diameter and weighed 1 pound 9-5/8 ounces.

Mâche Lettuce

Not actually lettuce, but a member of the Valerian family.

Red Leaf Lettuce

Romaine Lettuce

The second most common lettuce in America after Iceberg and the sturdiest of the leaf lettuces. It's shape and stiffness make it relatively easy to handle but it does have quite a bit more lettuce flavor than iceberg does. It is called for by many recipes where the leaf shape and stiffness is desirable. The photo specimen was 13 inches high. It is often used as a foundation layer on a platter with the featured items placed over it.

Ruby Lettuce

A-Choy

This is the only common leaf lettuce in China, and is actually the crown leaves from Stem Lettuce (see next paragraph). It is popular in stir fries in Taiwan, and is always cooked - raw salads are not eaten in China due to unsanitary growing conditions. This lettuce is now widely available in markets serving a Chinese community - well, it is here in Southern California anyway. It is much like a romaine lettuce, but more bitter

Stem Lettuce

This lettuce is grown mainly for its stem, which is peeled and sliced or diced and used in stir fries. It is also often pickled. The flavor is fairly mild, much like a slightly bitter cucumber, so it's usually paired with stronger flavored items. The photo specimens were about 17 inches long (not counting leaves), 1.6 inches diameter and weighed about 8 ounces each. The form shown with a crown of leaves is how it is generally sold, but you'll notice the tip with the young more tender leaves has been removed. It is sold separately as A-Choy (see above). The older leaves still attached are like Romaine leaves but tougher and more bitter, but they do stand up better to cooking. The Chinese do not eat raw greens for reasons you'd probably rather not dwell on.   Details and Cooking.

Tribute Vegetable

This is Stem Lettuce, shaved and dried. It is called "Mountain Jellyfish" because it is crunchy, like jellyfish, when rehydrated. "Sound Vegetable" comes from the same crunchiness. "Tribute Vegetable" is because someone once served some to a Chinese emperor, and the emperor liked it, demanding more as tribute. It is much liked in stir fries, once rehydrated. The photo specimen was purchased from a large Asian market in Los Angeles (Alhambra) for 2016 U.S. $0.50 per 6 ounce package (on sale - expect higher).   Details and Cooking.

Wild Lettuce

This is where it all came from, a wild plant with a bitter milky sap. When the plant matures it will "bolt", sending up a central stalk topped with a group of small dandelion-like flowers. The bitter sap is a mild opiate, particularly when the lettuce bolts. The photo shows leaves of very young plants, the leaf margins become deeply cut, ragged and pointy looking.

While wild lettuce is much stronger, other loose-leaf lettuces have similar properties. Some years back I observed that the loose-leaf lettuce in a friend's garden had bolted. Connie remarked that it wasn't as good as before but they were still using it. They were also wondering why they were falling asleep right after their salad (served at the end of dinner in their household).

My pigeons used to rip into the wild lettuce, then go and flake out on the roof, often lying upside-down. Unfortunately they can't do that anymore - there are too many hawks now.