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Spice of the Moment
By: John Thorne with Matt Lewis Thorne
You might wonder if there is any point in spending twenty-five bucks for a tiny container of wild fennel pollen. Well, there is: It’s freakin’ awesome.
Whatever else might be said about fennel pollen, it is certainly a secret no longer. I suspect that the entire page Faith Willinger devoted to it in 1996 in her book, Red, White & Greens: The Italian Way With Vegetables, had quite a bit to do with that. Her introductory sentence is the sort of statement that publicists would kill for, all the more so since it's actually true: "Fennel pollen is one of the most exciting flavors of central Italian cooking. It is never sold commercially, which is why almost no one knows about it. Even in Sicily, where wild fennel grows with abandon and the green fronds are used in many dishes, no one has ever heard of using fennel pollen."
I know first hand about the almost-no-one-knows-about-it part, since I wasted several hours going through our collection of Italian cookbooks to see if I could find a single mention of it prior to Willinger's. And before we move on to the one-of-the-most-exciting-flavors part, it's worth noting that if anyone had written about wild fennel pollen a decade or so ago, the tone-and the import-of that mention would have been quite different. If someone decides to devote a whole page to an unknown, impossible-to-find ingredient, it's because their sixth sense says that its time has come. As with extra-virgin olive oil in the 1970's, and balsamic vinegar a decade later, at a certain moment a collective willingness to pay what previously would have seemed an extortionate amount of money becomes palpable. Palpable enough, that is, to warrant sniffing out by a food writer-and an adventurous entrepreneur.
In the case of fennel pollen, the adventurer was Ari Weinzweig, the guiding palate of Zingerman's Deli of Ann Arbor, Michigan, called by some "the best deli outside of New York City." Four years after Faith Willinger sang the praises of fennel pollen and two years after Nancy Harmon Jenkins rhapsodized about it in Flavors of Tuscany, Weinzweig, in the small Tuscan town of Panzano, dropped by the butcher shop of Dario Cecchini. An enthusiast of traditional practices, Cecchini himself hand-gathers, dries and crushes the pollen-laden, wild fennel flowers as a seasoning.
When Weinzweig asked about the possibility of purchasing the fennel pollen alone, Cecchini showed him a baby-food-sized jar, and Weinzweig decided he might as well buy two. After all, he wasn't in the neighborhood that often. Cecchini filled the little jars and presented a bill that, incredibly, seemed in the vicinity of a hundred dollars. "Not wanting to look like the ignorant American tourist I am," Weinzweig says, "I reach into my pocket to get some money, all the while recalculating the conversion. For better or worse, my original calculation is about right. Whatever this fennel pollen is, it isn't inexpensive."
No joke. At Zingerman's website a forty-five-gram container goes for $25 (over $200 a pound), and yet Zingerman has a hard time keeping it in stock. True-at $6 a gram, or almost $3,000 a pound-saffron is more expensive still, but producing saffron is so labor-intensive that you at least feel that you are paying for something else besides the failure of supply to catch up with demand.
Wild fennel, which looks very much like its close relative, dill-the same bright green, feathery leaves topped with spreading umbrellas of tiny yellow flowers-is native to southern Europe and grows profusely there. Since turning its blossoms into fennel pollen-fiore di finocchio-is no big deal, I don't doubt that Sicilian (or even Croatian) peasants are already draping the outsides of their cottages with swags of the stuff. If so, prices may well plunge in the foreseeable future-at least for those who don't require the hand-plucked-on-Tuscan-hillsides seal of authenticity.
You might wonder if there is any point in spending twenty-five bucks for a tiny container of wild fennel pollen right now. Well, yes, there is-or at least I can tell you why I did. The stuff is freakin' awesome. And, as Weinzweig tells it, the effect doesn't exactly sneak up on you:
With a certain swagger, Cecchini opens the jar and pushes it towards me to smell. I lean over to do so, but the aroma hits me long before I even get close. The smell of wild fennel pollen is, quite seriously, something else. The perfume fills the room rather quickly. Truth be told, in twenty years of cooking and traveling, I've never before, nor since, smelled anything quite like it. Its aroma is sweet, pungent, smelling intensely of everything great about fennel and then some. I haven't even eaten it yet, but on aroma alone, the stuff is amazing.
Up to now, quite frankly, the phrase "everything great about fennel" would have elicited an incredulous snicker from me. But wild fennel pollen takes that anise-drenched monotone and imbues it with a highly potent resin-y complexity. While there truly is no easy comparison, my first sniff of wild fennel pollen did remind me of my first encounter with fresh basil, when previously I had been familiar only with the one-dimensional flavor of the dried version. Then, as now, it was as if someone had flipped a switch and a black-and-white world was suddenly drenched in color. As Weinzweig says, "When I'm having a rough day, I just open the jar and stick my nose inside. I'm surprised it's actually legal."
Once I tired of sniffing the container of wild fennel pollen that I had ordered from Zingerman's, I started using it in our cooking-cautiously. Even a tiny pinch made a spectacular match with sautéed zucchini. We also liked the flair it gave to such pasta regulars as fusilli with chickpeas and spinach. And it added an appreciable depth of flavor to our butternut risotto. I went on to try it with shrimp and with pork tenderloin, with equally satisfying results.
One of the places blessed with acres of wild fennel is California, and you can buy the pollen from a company called Sugar Ranch that harvests it there (www.fennelpollen.com). There are differences, though. Bitter wild fennel is the plant that grows wild in Tuscany, whereas sweet fennel, the domesticated version, grows wild in California as an escapee from the gardens of Italian immigrants-who cultivated sweet fennel precisely because of its intensified anise flavor. (The fennel grown for its bulb, which is eaten as a vegetable, is yet another variety.) I'm not crazy about the flavor of anise, so I prefer the raw power of the wild fennel from Italy. But I did have a sample of a farmhouse Monterey Jack cheese flavored with the California pollen and found it surprisingly good, so I'm keeping an open mind.
I'm just as susceptible as the next guy to the tug of the new, especially to something that makes such a stunning first impression as wild fennel pollen. Even so, in my own opinion, fennel pollen is closer to being another ingredient-of-the-minute than a lasting influence on our cooking. When push comes to shove, it has the same limited range as any other herb, even if within that range it exercises genuinely transformational powers.
In this regard I think of oregano, an herb so familiar to us that, paradoxically, we have forgotten how good it can be. In Greece, where it is truly appreciated, it is gathered much as wild fennel is, in stalks with the just blossoming flowers still attached. These flowers are also full of pollen, and its resin-y intensity can be equally provocative. There was a short period when you could purchase such hand-gathered bunches of oregano at most specialty food stores. But interest waned-and now, usually, you have to find a Middle Eastern import store to get hold of them. Wild fennel pollen reminds us again that what we give to an herb in terms of respect, it gives back to us in potency and flavor.
John Thorne, with his wife, Matt Lewis Thorne, publishes the newsletter Simple Cooking (www.outlawcook.com). They are authors of Pot on the Fire: Further Exploits of a Renegade Cook, and Serious Pig: An American Cook in Search of His Roots.
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