What’s in season: Welcome to the dark side — the black Spanish radish

Black radishes STORMY O'ROURKE PHOTOS

By AMY SOWDER

When Scott O’Rourke was a teenager, his future looked bleak.

“I got in trouble a lot as a kid and was constantly in a lot of detention centers,” said the West Harrison native turned organic farmer, husband and father of two girls.

“The last one I was in was my first dive into the farm world,” he said about Together for Youth, formerly Berkshire Farm Center & Services for Youth with a 2,000-acre campus in Canaan, N.Y., offering residential treatment, foster care, group homes, detention services and community-based programs.

“I made the best out of it, working in the kitchen, the administrative offices and the farm. The guy who ran the farm took me under his wing — and I took off with it,” O’Rourke said on a recent fall afternoon while training his new border collie-German shepherd puppy named Bear on Deep Roots Farm, which he runs with his wife, Stormie, in Copake.

The farm is labeled organic by the USDA, the Northeast Organic Farming Association and Real Organic Project. It also tries to farm in a regenerative way, using cover crops and tilling as little as possible to maintain soil health and sustain the natural cycle of life.

Stormy and Scott O'Rourke

Dark, dusty and hidden underground, the black Spanish radish isn’t the showiest prize of their 100-plus varieties of organic vegetables, fruits, microgreens, herbs and cut flowers. It doesn’t win the beauty contest in its own radish category compared to the much-adored watermelon radish with its pale green exterior and red-to-magenta starbursts inside.

The snowy white flesh of the black Spanish radish’s ping-pong-sized orbs is covered in coarse skin that can be mistaken for dirt, causing market-goers to pass them by. 

That would be a mistake. This coal-colored radish has a serious bite. “It’s almost like horseradish. It’s very, very peppery. I tell people it’s like biting into a black peppercorn,” O’Rourke said. “The heat doesn’t linger like with a jalapeño. It’s more like wasabi, where it burns quickly up front and goes away right away.”

This frost-hardy radish is best planted in late summer and early fall. It grows in full sun, ideally in 50- to 75-degree temperatures, to maintain its sharp flavor and crisp texture.

Deep Roots Farm seeded this radish in August and started harvesting it in late October.

“It’s the ultimate storage crop,” O’Rourke said. “It stores until August of next year.”

The ancient cruciferous root vegetable is believed to have originated in the eastern Mediterranean and Syria. Ancient Egyptians cultivated the black radish and considered it sacred. It became one of the most widely grown and relied-upon winter crops across Europe in the Middle Ages.

While the black Spanish radish’s popularity dipped in the 20th century, it was historically used in traditional medicine and today is prepared in herbal supplements and considered a specialty health food.

“If you slice them into circles, you still get that black border,” O’Rourke said. Salt them to tamp down some of the heat if that worries you, or try pickling them.

Roasting this radish robs it of the sting, replacing it with the cooking method’s signature sweetness. Keep it simple with some olive oil, salt and pepper, or roast them whole, then peel and mash them. Try slicing them thinly to make radish chips. These radishes are great in potato and egg dishes.

Once you purchase your black radishes, you can store them in … well, your root cellar. Or wrap them in newspaper and keep them in the fridge.

Deep Roots Farm sells black Spanish radishes and many other foods Saturdays at the John Jay Farmers Market in downtown Katonah and TaSH Farmers Market in Tarrytown. The O’Rourkes offer CSA pickup starting with an on-farm pickup at Deep Roots Farm, 1639 Route 7A, Copake; Folkways Wine, 3 Front St., Croton Falls; and Yorktown Dental, 206 Veterans Road, Suite 7, Yorktown Heights. 

Gourmet and specialty grocery shops and local restaurants within a 100-mile radius also buy their crops, like Yellow Monkey Market in Cross River, Harvest Moon Farm & Orchard’s shop in North Salem, Salinger’s Orchard in Brewster, and Tarrytown Local, a new restaurant, grocery store and bakery that mills its own flour in-house, using grains sourced from regional farms.

“We’re pretty hyper-local,” O’Rourke said.

This family stays close to its roots. O’Rourke even sometimes revisits that Together for Youth program to talk to the teens as an alumnus — to show them what’s possible when you dig deep into your passions and go for it.

Visit deeprootsfarmnyorganic.com for more information.