13-05-2025
Radishes are this summer's hottest vegetable. These four recipes prove it
Crunchy, juicy, peppery, there's a lot to love about radishes – and we love them more than ever. Ocado is reporting a surge in sales of 18 per cent for all radishes, with searches for pickled radish up 33 per cent compared with last year.
More impressive still is the 180 per cent year-on-year search growth for watermelon radishes, a green and white variety that's a type of daikon, a large Asian radish. With a vivid magenta core underneath the outer layer, they are a gift to the visuals-obsessed TikTok generation, but they taste good too – crunchy and more coarsely textured than the small pink radishes in the supermarket produce aisle. Peel them finely, slice them wafer-thin and spread them on a plate with sliced cucumber, crumbled feta and a sprinkling of olive oil for an early summer salad.
The classic lipstick-pink radish looks great on camera as well, and thousands of TikTok videos are reimagining this classic salad staple in completely new ways: blended into butter, braised with miso and roasted like a potato.
They are much loved by gardeners too, as they are an early crop, during the so-called hungry months of March to May, when there's little home-grown produce around. 'It's the first sign that something's happening', says Jan Ostle, a radish fan and chef at the Michelin-starred Wilsons Restaurant in Bristol.
Ostle's wife, Mary Wilson, grows six varieties on the farm, including the elongated pink and white breakfast variety, slender white icicles, purple orbs and black-skinned 'Spanish' radishes, which need peeling to remove their bark-like skin. Look out for unusual kinds in farmers' markets, or check out the mixed bags sold in Sainsbury's and Marks & Spencer that feature breakfast, white and purple radishes. Bunches of leafy breakfast radishes are available from Natoora, via Ocado.
Radishes at Wilsons come fresh from the plot, leaves still attached, with a hillock of whipped ibérico pork fat, or finely sliced like frosted glass to eat with raw scallops.
They are fantastic with seafood, in part because of their spicy heat. 'If you pick them really fresh, they can be super peppery,' points out Ostle. 'So grated, salted radish with some raw fish is a really delicious thing, and it has sort of wasabi vibes going on.' Try Diana Henry's buckwheat galettes with hot-smoked salmon and grated radish, on the same theme but with cooked fish.
Creaminess makes sense with the cool crispness. At London's hip restaurant Lita, chef Luke Ahearne serves them with whipped cod's roe, taramasalata style, while at The Sportsman, in Kent, Stephen Harris includes new potatoes, also at their prime right now. Or try Mark Hix's vegetarian version, with a beetroot dip.
Citrus pairs well with the spicy heat of radishes. Legendary food writer Elisabeth Luard, author of the classic tome European Peasant Cookery makes them into a salad with orange segments and black olives, while Diana Henry pairs pickled radishes with watermelon grapefruit and a hot chilli and lime dressing.
Don't save them just for salad. TikTok is right: they are great for cooking too. Ostle cooks different coloured radishes separately, in an emulsion of butter, lemon juice and water (shake two tablespoons of butter and one tablespoon each of water and lemon juice in a pan over a low heat until combined). 'You can cook them until they're tender. The colour seeps out, turning the cooking liquid bright pink, purple or red, depending on which radishes you use.'
If you can get radishes with leaves, grab them: they have to be harvested by hand making them more expensive than the standard bags of rosy marbles. But the peppery leaves are good eating. Luard chops them to add to a potato salad or wilts them with spinach and chard, or they can be left on for braising. Ostle dresses radishes in a radish juice in a sort of nose-to-tail preparation that is, he says, 'properly verdant and green and peppery.'
Roasted, sliced or smashed in chilli butter, there's not much you can't do with a radish – including bucking a culinary cliché. Disdainful of the ubiquitous pomegranate seeds, Luard scatters tiny pink and white cubes of diced radishes over dishes instead. 'The colour and flavour is more interesting,' she decrees. The humble radish goes radical.
