Fiddlehead fern safety

May 16, 2015 1:46 PM

I want to make this fiddlehead fern recipe. However, it only recommends boiling/blanching the ferns for 1-2 minutes, whereas government safety websites (and plenty of others) seem to recommend boiling for 15 minutes or steaming for 10 minutes. What should I do?

I have never boiled a vegetable for 15 minutes, well, ever, since I would expect that it would turn to complete mush. Are ferns different? I'm thinking about steaming them instead (easy for me to do), since I suspect that will preserve their texture better especially since I am going to stir-fry them after and I don't want them to end up with a plate of green mush. Is that the way to go here?

(If I had to pick food safety vs. food quality, I guess I'd err toward food safety, since this would be a really bad time for me to get food poisoning and having had a really bad foodborne illness, I'm in no hurry to repeat that. But I'm curious if maybe there's a good middle ground here.)

posted by andrewesque to Food & Drink (8 answers total)

Given that no one's been able to pinpoint why people have gotten sick from fiddleheads, I think that the government sites skew heavily towards overcaution.

That said, I made stir-fried fiddleheads recently, and there's no way that a minute or two of blanching followed by a quick sautee would have cooked them enough for my taste. I ended up steaming them for about seven minutes, then sauteeing until they were golden, and I felt like that was a reasonable compromise--they were tender, but still had a bite, and held together just fine.
posted by MeghanC at 2:19 PM on May 16, 2015

I kinda suspect that the recipe is using smaller, younger ferns than the government has in mind -- part of the government page says "steam them for 10 to 12 minutes until tender." If it takes 10 minutes of steaming to tenderize these ferns, they're probably pretty stalky, and while 15 minutes could be overkill, there's no chance that 2 minutes is enough. Split the difference and let texture be your guide. 15 minutes of boiling is bog-standard advance for denaturing botulinum toxin and, consequently, most other foodbourne toxins.
posted by Sunburnt at 2:32 PM on May 16, 2015

I have eaten fiddleheads a few times and never cooked them for 15 minutes. Somewhere around 5-7 minutes if I had to guess how long I cooked them.
posted by O9scar at 3:11 PM on May 16, 2015

My feeling is, if you plan to blanch fiddlehead ferns for 15 minutes, you should just eat a different vegetable. 7-8 minutes of steaming still gives decent texture though IMO.
posted by goingonit at 4:12 PM on May 16, 2015

Chiming in with a recommendation to err on the side of food safety. I work at a private school with a cafeteria which served a fiddlehead salad a few years back. The staff thought they could treat the ferns like asparagus and so just blanched them very lightly. Cue hundreds of students, teachers and staff RUNNING to the health centre and washrooms within an hour.
posted by elkerette at 4:29 PM on May 16, 2015

I made a different fiddlehead NYT reciepe earlier this week that called for a five minute blanching (I thought that was a long blanch but it was correct to just blanch) it came out well.
posted by cestmoi15 at 5:46 PM on May 16, 2015

Update: I decided to err on the side of safety (I'm finishing up a thesis in a master's program, so really not when I want to risk digestive disorders) and steamed them for 10 minutes, then stir-fried according to the recipe. They were on the soft side when I finished steaming, but still quite tasty when I finished making the dish. In the future I'd likely cut the steaming time a bit to the recommended 7-8 minutes if I'm not feeling so nervous about it.
posted by andrewesque at 7:34 PM on May 16, 2015

We just had some tonight - we boiled them for 5 minutes and then sauteed them in butter for another 5 minutes or so. I guess I should wait another few hours to confirm that we didn't die, but they sure were tasty!
posted by microcarpetus at 5:22 PM on May 17, 2015