Specialty Winter Vegetables to Captivate the Cook

Stroll through any farmers market and what’s more likely to catch your eye: familiar long, tapered orange carrots or tiny, thumb-sized globes? Large, white orbs of cauliflower or cute little heads in cheery shades of purple, orange or lime green?

Name a winter vegetable and there’s bound to be at least a few offbeat variations in size, shape and hue. Whether such options captivate the cook, please the palate or are just plain crazy depends on your own sensibility. But to me, there’s something especially enticing about vegetables whose colors and forms are out of the ordinary.

What’s more, you don’t have to depend on specialty growers to grow them. Most of these attention-getters are just as easy to cultivate as their conventional kin. Some are heirlooms; others are modern hybrids. The key difference is that few are available as transplants. Instead, you’ll have to seek seed at local nurseries or on the internet. But these gems are worth the effort. They’ll be beautiful in your garden and beguile guests at your table.

The Basics

In the winter garden, edibles are most often harvested for their roots, leaves, buds or flowers. Regardless of the crop, they require a minimum of four to six hours of daily sunlight—on the days that the sun does shine. Fast drainage is even more important. Your cool-season vegetables may rot in cold, constant wet.

Roots

Loose soil is essential for beets, carrots and radishes, since you’ll be literally plucking them from the earth.

Heirloom Chioggia beets bear charming alternating rings of red and white, just like Christmas pinwheel cookies. They’re mild, sweet and quick to pick. They originated in Chioggia, a coastal city in northern Italy, more than 150 years ago.

Mild Golden beets are bright yellow-orange through and through. Unlike red beets, they don’t bleed color during cooking or pickling. They’re tasty sliced and served fresh in salads, or steamed or roasted.

Thumbelina carrots are sweet, round nubs that mature to the size of a small lime, and are easy to grow in shallow soil or containers. Parmex is even smaller. At an inch wide, it’s popular in European farmers markets and delivers a loud crunch.

Full-size carrots come in a rainbow of colors, with some emitting a nearly metallic glow. Purple Dragon grows six inches long. Its glistening purple exterior contrasts with an orangish-yellow core. Cosmic Purple grows seven to eight inches long. Atomic Red reaches 8 to 11 inches long, but doesn’t reveal its bright scarlet skin until it’s cooked.

Snow White is pure white all the way through, except for a slender light-green core. Jaune Obtuse du Doubs is a stubby heirloom with pale yellow flesh. It was used to feed livestock in France in the late 1800s, but is enjoying popularity with humans today.

Radishes are easy and sweetest during cooler weather. Easter Egg comes in red, white and purple. French breakfast varieties, such as D’Avignon and Fire ‘N Ice, form three- to four-inch-long cylinders with red tops and white tips. Heirloom Red Head or Roodkopje has similar coloring, but forms a one-inch ball.

Watermelon, aka Beauty Heart or Chinese Radish, forms two- to four-inch balls in an unassuming pale green to white. Its interior is colored an improbable bright pink.

Leaves

Some cooks seek the largest cabbages possible. I prefer dainty minis that can be consumed during a single meal, rather than left to languish in the fridge. Pixie neatly fits the bill, forming a compact head five to six inches across.

Chinese cabbage, a broad group that includes bok choy and celery cabbage, also comes in diminutive sizes. Toy Choi forms slender, upright white stalks and smooth green leaves only four to five inches tall, while Little Jade grows about twice as tall.

In coastal gardens, kale is often a dusty green. But a jolt of winter cold turns the stems and veins of Redbor and Red Russian to dark pink, and their leaves to deep lavender. Both are a beautiful contrast to Dwarf Blue Curled Vates, which bears tightly ruffled leaves in a nearly turquoise blue-gray.

Radicchio, or red chicory, is pretty from the get-go. Its coloring intensifies with cold, too. Red Verona forms cabbagelike balls of thick, tightly packed reddish-purple leaves with white veins, while Treviso has similar colors, but grows upright, like Romaine lettuce. Verona’s leaves carry more bite than Treviso’s, although cooking brings out the bitterness in both.

Even if you don’t eat it, grow Swiss chard for its crazy cavalcade of colors.

Bright Lights and Neon Glow bear stems in vibrant shades of yellow, pink, red, orange, purple and white, all with dark green, crinkly foliage. Golden Sunrise and Pot of Gold are an intense yellow to yellowish-orange. Flamingo and Magenta Sunset bear hot pink stalks and ribs. Peppermint Stick is pink with white stripes. Italian Silver Rib bears silvery-white veins and ribs that are more broad than most.

Buds and Flowers

Romanesco broccoli is undeniably beautiful, and the culinary world has appreciated this Italian heirloom since the 1500s. It forms a dense head of chartreuse, swirly spiral cones, looking somewhat like a mad cluster of starfish or a million rocket ships about to explode. While it’s termed a broccoli, its mild flavor leans toward cauliflower.

Colorful mixes of cauliflower are a vast improvement over the rather uninspiring, traditional whites.

Orange or Cheddar cauliflower owes its hue to extra beta-carotene. Purple of Sicily forms full-size white heads that look like they’ve been oversprayed with bright purple paint, while the florets of Violetta Italia drip with electric purple. When cooked, both Italian heirlooms turn bright green. Green Macerata is from Italy as well. Its apple-green heads are just as fresh and pretty in the garden as they are steamed, or presented raw on the plate.