Sorrel

From arugula to watercress, we've got you covered.

How to buy, store, and cook with sorrel, in season in June.

Learn how to cook with sorrel, a tangy, citrusy green that's good in salads and sauces.

How does a loin chop compare with one from the shoulder or rib? These big guys have a defined fat cap with very tender meat.

This “put an egg on it” dream dish is a must-order menu item at Sqirl in Los Angeles.

The balance of this green sauce is all in the mix. Sorrel is citrusy and bright, but can be quite sharp. Celery is cooling, and the leeks deliver structure, heat, and body.

The fillings for plachinda often include a salted fresh cheese, as well as spring onions and dill.

Spring is abundant with greens of all types, both wild and cultivated. You never know what might show up at your market in any given week. It just so happened that I was able to get pepper y watercress, wild stinging nettles, and sour sorrel at the same time. I love the idea of a watercress or nettles soup, but it always leaves me wanting acid, which inevitably turns the vibrant green soup to a drab olive. Naturally sour sorrel solves this by adding brightness without acid to balance the flavor. If you have trouble finding nettles, just use more watercress, or substitute arugula, mizuna, or dandelion.

Mixing sorrel with spinach makes an outstanding spanakopita, but the combination is nothing new. The Greeks have been doing it for a long time and it makes a lot of sense. The distinctive tang of sorrel not only replaces the lemon juice often found in spinach fillings for spanakopita, but it also balances the brininess of the feta.

{sauceless} When we found out our dear friends Katie and Parker got engaged, we packed up our pizza dough and big bag of greens from our garden and headed to their place for an impromptu celebration that's become a tradition in both our homes. Though the best pizza dough takes a little preparation {it gets more supple as it sits overnight}, a pizza topped with little more than fresh farmers' market finds can be thrown together on the fly like a grand game of Twister, with everyone's arms cutting, slicing, patting, and rolling in a tangle that is soon to become a very good dinner. Sip: Snappy and crisp Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand

Rainbow trout is a delicious option for fish-loving home cooks. It’s available year-round and won’t break the bank even when you want to feed a crowd. Have your fishmonger bone and butterfly the trout for you, leaving the tail intact and keeping the two fillets attached on the fin side. This preparation is a study in contrasts, a three-way complement to the flaky flesh of the trout. The blushing sweet-tart sauce is made with both crushed grapes and verjus, the juice of unripe wine grapes. (The French used verjus in medieval and Renaissance times in much the same way we use vinegar or lemon juice today.) Less acidic and more complex than most vinegar, the verjus’s refreshing fruitiness plays counterpoint to the salty cured Italian bacon wrapped around the trout. And finally, hidden within this lively package: rich, herbaceous sorrel cream, bringing us back to earth.

Here sorrel brings both acidity and lightness to an often heavy mixture. You can substitute watercress or spinach for the sorrel to similar effect, especially if you add a squeeze of lemon at the end. Though it has only two primary ingredients, this soup is quite complex, particularly when you begin with good stock. The best lentils to use here are lentilles du Puy or other small dark green ones. Use the greenish brown variety only if you cannot find these.

In this pure celebration of spring, Middle Eastern spices add warmth and depth to tender goat, while the season’s first tender offerings—fresh chickpeas, slender spring onions, tart sorrel—make a fabulous accompaniment. Letting the sautéed vegetables cool before adding the sorrel allows it to keep its vibrant color, and it also makes this relaxed, do-ahead party food. Prepare the side while the goat rests and be prepared to covet the leftovers. Fresh chickpeas look like abbreviated little fava beans in the pod, and, like favas, they require a two-step shelling process to get to the little green gems inside. If you can find them, it’s worth every minute of preparation. Fresh chickpeas are sweet and tender, with only a hint of the nuttiness that marks their flavor when dried. The spices can be found in Middle Eastern markets or online.

Wood sorrel, with shamrock-shaped leaves and a more mellow and elegant flavor than its cousin, grows wild across the United States. Common sorrel is easier to find, with more of a pronounced sour-lemony taste, and can be used in this recipe if foraging isn’t one of your fortes. This is a refreshing soup, simple to make, with an elusive, unusual flavor due to the herb. Greek yogurt is thicker than other types of yogurt, but draining it still yields a denser base for the soup.

Lemony sorrel brightens the flavor of spot prawns, large shrimp that can be served with the head and tail on or peeled. To remove the shell, use scissors to cut down the back to the tail tip. Like all shrimp, prawns only take a minute or two to cook, and after that can become tough. Millet provides a fluffy bed that soaks up the sauce. Start this recipe the night before serving so that the millet can soak.

Several species of salmon can be found on the Pacific Northwest coast, and morel mushrooms and lemony sorrel are plentiful in the inland woods. They make a nice combination with a good wild rice blend. Serve the soup with crusty bread.

This is really another take on the preceding vegetable soup, but it differs enough in detail to warrant a full-dress recipe. It is without question one of my favorite soups, and I usually plant a couple of rows of leeks in my garden so I can indulge myself at a moment’s notice. This is one soup in which I prefer to use water rather than stock, so that nothing interferes with the sweet, pronounced flavor of the leeks.

The slight tartness of sorrel and the richness of salmon are two flavors that Jews have always loved in their cooking. Eastern European Jews eat cold sorrel soup, which they call tchav; Greek Jews eat a tart rhubarb-and-spinach sauce over fish, and French Jews are drawn to Pierre Troisgros’s now classic salmon with sorrel sauce. Pierre told me that this seminal, simple, and delicious recipe came about because he had grown an abundance of sorrel and had to do something with it. With its subtle interplay of tartness and creaminess, this dish is sometimes made with kosher white wine and vermouth for Jewish weddings held at the restaurant.

Sorrel (Eastern European tchav) has been made a little more soigné in the hands of the French, by adding herbs and cream. Whereas Jews often substituted spinach and rhubarb to achieve the tangy flavor when they couldn’t get sorrel, and ate the soup cold, the French, until recently, ate sorrel soup hot. Austin de Croze, in his 1931 cookbook, What to Eat and Drink in France, thought that sorrel soup had come to France with emigrants from eastern Europe. This particular recipe comes from Gastronomie Juive: Cuisine et Patisserie de Russie, d’Alsace, de Roumanie et d’Orient, by Suzanne Roukhomovsky, a book I found years ago while browsing in the Librairie Gourmande, a cookbook store I love to frequent on the Left Bank of Paris. Published by the distinguished house of Flammarion in 1929, it was the first comprehensive cookbook on the Jews of France. Madame Roukhomovsky, also a novelist and poet, called French Jewish cooking cuisine maternelle. This recipe surely has its roots in her own Russian background. If you can’t find sorrel, substitute 1 pound of spinach or kale with 1/2 cup rhubarb to attain that tart flavor, as Jews from Russia did.

The almost lemony, tart taste of sorrel is very pleasing with the sweet stewed onions. Even a small amount of sorrel will transform the character of what would otherwise be a more predictable onion pie. Though expensive to buy, sorrel is easy to grow. Plants can be bought in nurseries, put in the ground and harvested leaf-by-leaf for several years. It would be worth having a few plants to be able to make this tart in a regular basis.