Flowering Bok Choi

Spring is in the air. The blossoms on the callery pear trees are at their beautiful peak and Yuno’s farm has returned to a somewhat smaller stand in for the duration of construction in Union Square. This thrilling vegetable is not flowering broccoli, as I first guessed, but flowering bok choi (look at the leaves). They call it “over-winter bok choi”

Flowering Bok Choi

Trim the bottoms and cook in liberally salted water for ten minutes. Drain and dress with oil and salt.

To preserve the pristine beauty of the blossoms I tried to do as little as possible to cook the bok choi, and this may have been a mistake. I was fooled by the slender stems into thinking that this might be another vegetable suitable for one-handed cooking, like this lovely yu choi, but the stems, while slender, are pretty tough.

Even so, I urge you to try this if you can find it. Tricky as it is to describe the variations in flavor between different strains of bok choi, I would say this bunch at least was sweeter, milder and more flowery than any I have tasted. I had never seen this before, and I bet Sweetnicks hadn’t either.