Know your Chicory
Know your Chicory - Introduction
Leaf chicory
Common chicory, Cichorium intybus, is a bushy perennial herbaceous plant with blue, lavender, or occasionally white flowers.
Various varieties are cultivated for salad leaves, chicons (blanched buds), or for roots (C. intybus var. sativum), which are baked, ground, and used as a coffee substitute and additive.
It is also grown as a forage crop for livestock.
It lives as a wild plant on roadsides in its native Europe, and in North America and Australia, where it has become naturalized.
Know your Chicory - Common names
Common chicory is also known as blue sailors, succory, and coffeeweed. It is also called cornflower, although that name is more commonly applied to Centaurea cyanus.
Common names for varieties of C. intybus var. foliosum include endive, radicchio, Belgian endive, French endive, red endive, sugarloaf or witloof.
"Chicory" is also the common name in the US (and in French) for curly endive (Cichorium endivia); these two closely related species are often confused.
Know your Chicory - Botany
When flowering, chicory has a tough, grooved, and more or less hairy stem, from 30 to 100 centimetres (10 to 40 in) tall.
The leaves are stalked, lanceolate and unlobed.
The flower heads are 2 to 4 centimetres (0.79 to 1.6 in) wide, and bright blue.
There are two rows of involucral bracts - the inner are longer and erect, the outer are shorter and spreading.
It flowers from July until October.
The achenes have no pappus (feathery hairs), but do have toothed scales on top.
Know your Chicory - Leaf chicory
Wild leaf chicory
Wild chicory leaves are usually bitter.
Their bitterness is appreciated in certain cuisines, such as in the Liguria and Puglia regions of Italy and also in Catalonia, in Greece and in Turkey.
In Ligurian cuisine the wild chicory leaves are an ingredient of preboggion and in Greek cuisine of horta; in the Puglian region wild chicory leaves are combined with fava bean puree in the traditional local dish Fave e Cicorie Selvatiche.
By cooking and discarding the water the bitterness is reduced, after which the chicory leaves may be sauteed with garlic, anchovies and other ingredients. In this form the resulting greens might be combined with pasta or to accompany meat dishes.
Culivated leaf chicory
Chicory may be cultivated for its leaves, usually eaten raw as salad leaves. Cultivated chicory is generally divided into three types of which there are many varieties.
Radicchio
Sugarloaf
Looks rather like cos lettuce, with tightly packed leaves.
Witloof
Belgian endive is also known as French endive, witlof in Dutch, witloof in the United States, chicory in the UK, as witlof in Australia, endive in France, and chicon in parts of northern France and in Wallonia.
It has a small head of cream-coloured, bitter leaves.
It is grown completely underground or indoors in the absence of sunlight in order to prevent the leaves from turning green and opening up (etiolation).
The plant has to be kept just below the soil surface as it grows, only showing the very tip of the leaves.
It is often sold wrapped in blue paper to protect it from light and so preserve its pale colour and delicate flavour.
The smooth, creamy white leaves may be served stuffed, baked, boiled, cut and cooked in a milk sauce, or simply cut raw.
Slightly bitter, the whiter the leaf, the less bitter the taste.
The harder inner part of the stem, at the bottom of the head, should be cut out before cooking to prevent bitterness.
Belgium exports chicon/witloof to over 40 different countries.
The technique for growing blanched endives was accidentally discovered in the 1850s in the Josaphat valley in Schaerbeek, Belgium.
Endive is cultivated for culinary use by cutting the leaves from the growing plant, then keeping the living stem and root in a dark place.
A new bud develops but without sunlight it is white and lacks the bitterness of the sun-exposed foliage.
Today France is the largest producer of endives.
True Endive
Although leaf chicory above is often called "endive", true endive (Cichorium endivia) is a different species in the genus, see Know your Endives.
Know your Chicory - Root chicory
Root chicory, Cichorium intybus var. sativum, has long been in cultivation in Europe as a coffee substitute.
The roots are baked, ground, and used as a coffee substitute and additive, especially in the Mediterranean region (where the plant is native), although its use as a coffee additive is also very popular in India, parts of Southeast Asia, South Africa and southern United States, particularly in New Orleans.
It has also been popular as a coffee substitute in poorer economic areas, and has gained wider popularity during economic crises such as the Great Depression in the 1930s. Chicory, with sugar beet and rye was used as an ingredient of the East German Mischkaffee (mixed coffee), introduced during the "coffee crisis" of 1976-79.
Some beer brewers use roasted chicory to add flavor to their stouts.
Around 1970 it was found that the root contains up to 20% inulin, a polysaccharide similar to starch. Inulin is mainly found in the plant family Asteraceae as a storage carbohydrate (for example Jerusalem artichoke, dahlia etc.).
It is used as a sweetener in the food industry with a sweetening power 1⁄10 that of sucrose and is sometimes added to yogurts as a prebiotic. Inulin can be converted to fructose and glucose through hydrolysis. Inulin is also gaining popularity as a source of soluble dietary fibre.
Chicory root extract is a dietary supplement or food additive produced by mixing dried, ground, chicory root with water, and removing the insoluble fraction by filtration and centrifugation.
Other methods may be used to remove pigments and sugars.
Fresh chicory root typically contains, by dry weight, 68% inulin, 14% sucrose, 5% cellulose, 6% protein, 4% ash, and 3% other compounds.
Dried chicory root extract contains, by weight, approximately 98% inulin and 2% other compounds.
Fresh chicory root may contain between 13 and 23% inulin, by total weight.
Know your Chicory - Origin
Chicory originated in the Mediterranean and became distributed throughout much of the world where it was grown for centuries as a salad green.
Its cultivation in North America began in the 1700's and ended in about 1950 when it became more economical to import chicory.
During that time, chicory escaped cultivation and naturalized populations spread throughout southern Canada and the U.S., where it is most commonly found it in the north and west.
Chicory grows abundantly besides roads and highways. It can also be found in lawns, pastures, fields, and waste places. The plant favours lime-rich soils but tolerates a variety of soil types.
Chicory is cultivated in gravel and chalk areas of England and Ireland and is also widely cultivated across Europe.
