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Feature Articles

What are Leeks?

Meet a Not-Too-Famous Onion

Discovering What We Don’t Know About Leeks

Alien Encounters:

Drumming Up Inspiration for Strange-Sounding Vegetables

A Week of Leeks:

Get to know Leeks, 7 Easy Ways

In Every Issue

Why We Love It

Partners in Flavor and Season

Leek Season

Vegetable Boosters

Picky Eater Tips

Money Saving Tricks

News from the Farm

Cooking School

Cooking Classes:

White Fish and Leeks en Papillote

Roasted Leeks and Butternut Squash Salad

Buying the Best

Storing for Flavor

Prepping Tricks & Tips

Cooking Basics

Recipes, Recipes, Recipes

13 Easy Recipes: Make

Leeks a Mid-Winter Favorite

Discovering What We Don't Know

that We Don't Know About Cooking Leeks

After 40 years in the kitchen and 20 in the healthy cooking business, I’m always amazed at how much I learn after reading what others are doing and trying. The frizzled leek idea in this story is a perfect example. Since learning about it, I’ve had so much fun experimenting with this one, easy technique.

Want to Have More Fun Cooking?

If cooking feels a bit dreary, choose even just one article or recipe to find out something you didn’t know. It doesn’t take much to put the pizzazz back into meal making.

And if you haven’t done so already, join Vegetable a Month for a hit of pizzazz every month of the year.

Are there things you didn’t know you didn’t know?

...Patience & Watchfulness

Want to try frizzled leeks? Here is our economical adaptation of this technique. Find our how we roasted and added garlic for even more low-calorie, good-for-you flavor.

Top squash or pumpkin soup with frizzled leeks for an extra burst of flavor, nutrition and color.

Frizzled leeks make for easy elegance in Roasted Pear Crostini.

Not until moving on to some more modern recipes did I see leeks sauteed at all. Julee Rosso uses leeks liberally in many non-classic dishes and sautes them frequently, but only over medium heat for three to five minutes--just enough to take the edge off, but not enough to brown them to a crisp like I did. There's the watchfulness part.

To round out my investigation I headed to the Internet where, after a bit of sleuthing, I found definitive answers in four separate articles. The best explanation came from Executive Chef Andrew Zimmern, for HGTV.com. In a recipe for frizzled leeks, he directs the cook to put finely sliced leeks into cold oil over low heat. As the oil heats up, the leeks gradually brown (or frizzle.) Although foods are rarely, if ever, added to cold oil, chef Zimmern justified the unusual procedure here "because hot oil will burn the sugars in the leeks, turning them black." Ah ha! Hitting the books had solved the mystery of why my leeks tasted like burnt sugar.

So I gained some valuable lessons learning to cook leeks: First, that sometimes it’s a good idea to hit the books, just because we often don’t know what we don’t know. Countless times I’ll think there’s nothing to be gained by cracking a book, only to find critical, key information staring me in the face when I do.

Secondly, the key concepts I learned about leeks are patience and watchfulness. As you’ll find out in the Cooking Basics section, the cooking methods for leeks are all over the map. Cooking slowly and carefully is the unifying principles that make sense of them all.

People learn to cook in different ways: some by books, some by experience. The former route avoids a lot of frustration, prevents costly failed experiments and leads to faster success. But the latter route is the one I seem to frequent the most.

Learning to cook leeks is a case in point. Thinking of leeks as big green onions, I always fried them, like a green onion. The finished dish would have bites of harshness that coincided precisely with my fried leeks. So I began to think that maybe leeks shouldn't be cooked by the basic sautéing method that involves fairly high heat.

But neither was I thrilled with the results of my longer, moist-heat cooking methods, with results that were slimy and texture-less. Might as well be eating baby food, was my thought.

In search of some resolution, I reluctantly hit the books. And there it was, all the stuff I didn't even know that I didn't know.

Like patience. Perusing the recipes in my classic cookbooks, it became clear that leeks aren't high-heat, fast-cooking saute material like regular onions. Classically, they are cooked with a liquid (very often butter or cream!), over low to medium heat, for a fairly long time. There's the patience part.

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Frizzling Leeks