How the Pacific Northwest is leading a radicchio renaissance

Radicchio is really having a moment right now: it’s been called the ‘it girl’ of winter, offered as an alternative to roses for Valentines Day, and has been showing up on menus around the country.

“It’s not new in Italy, but it’s new to us,” says Lane Selman. “We see it a lot of times shredded and put into a bag salad mix, but now the heads are becoming more and more popular.”

Selman is the founder of the Culinary Breeding Network and for more than a decade has been an evangelist of sorts for the bitter winter vegetable.

“Ten or 12 years ago, I was working on a project that was just all about the marketing and promotion of winter vegetables,” she said. “We want to support our farmers year round, not just the sexy time when everything is available.”

Radicchio has an extended growing season that helps farmers combat something known as the “hunger gap” — that time between late November and early March when there aren’t a lot of options for what farmers can grow and sell. Selman says that makes radicchio the poster child for eating local produce in the winter, especially since it comes in a stunning array of colors and varieties.

“It’s very beautiful and just pops in this winter time when things can be more dull,” she said.

Radicchio’s young history

Radicchio has only been grown commercially in the US since the 1980’s, when bagged salad mix came on the scene. And even then, only the Rosso di Chioggia was available, the round, deep-purple variety which could easily be mistaken for cabbage to the untrained eye.

Even in Italy — the birthplace of radicchio — its history is relatively short.

“All the Italian grown chicory have a super young story, less than a hundred years,” said plant breeder Andrea Ghedina of Smarties.bio, an Italian seed company that specializes in native plant varieties, including chicories.

For centuries, chicory grew wild across Europe and the plant’s large roots were often used for medicinal purposes. By the 18th century, the roots were being roasted as a coffee substitute in the Prussian Empire, but it wasn’t until the early 20th century that farmers in Italy started selecting varieties that were less labor intensive to grow.

Ghedina joked there was so much variability in those early populations that “if they wanted to make it blue and squared, they could.”

Nowadays, radicchio comes in an array of colors and shapes, but that too is a part of some very recent history.

Getting serious about the seeds

“Radicchio is pretty important if you need to eat something fresh in the winter,” said farmer Siri Erickson-Brown. “If you’re dedicated to local produce in the Northwest, there aren’t a lot of other options.”

Erickson-Brown and husband Jason Salvo own Local Roots Farm in Duvall, WA and have been growing radicchio since they started farming in 2007.

At the beginning, it was kind of a guessing game with a lot of seed packets not even displaying the correct image of the radicchio variety on the packet. But the pair did have a slight advantage compared to other US growers, said Erickson-Brown: “Having spent time in Italy, we’re like, ‘Oh, well, it’s supposed to look like this, so this isn’t ready to harvest yet, because it hasn’t done that.’”

“We had sort of cracked the code,” Salvo explained. “Through some combination of having seen it in its native environment, then speaking a little bit of Italian and meticulous record keeping.”

As the years went on, growing radicchio got easier thanks in part to better quality seed.

“Since we’ve been commercially growing radicchio, the thing that’s changed the most has been the advent of these improved seeds,” said Erickson-Brown. “[They] have only really become available to US growers in the last 10 years.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by seed producer Brian Campbell, “There was a long time where it was just really poor quality seed.”

Campbell owns Washington-based Uprising Seeds with partner Crystine Goldberg and since 2021 has helped to bring high quality radicchio seeds to the US market through the Gusto Italiano Project, a collaboration they created with northern Italian vegetable breeders at Smarties.bio and the Culinary Breeding Network.

“The majority of the [radicchio] seeds we sell are from Smarties, which I think has changed the game,” said Campbell. “It’s just a lot easier now for growers to produce good crops and have them true to type and uniform.”

Those seeds include a delicate “millennial pink” variety called Rosato, a new variety called Bandarossa which has a purple midrib instead of the classic bright white and a petite, mustard yellow one called Yellowstone.

Along with these higher quality seeds, the climate of the Pacific Northwest — comparable to Italy’s Veneto region — has allowed radicchio to really take root here.

Bitter is Better

One thing fans and skeptics alike can agree on: radicchio is bitter. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

“I’m not a huge bitter lover,” said Chef Dani Morales. “But I do like that there’s different levels of bitterness in [radicchio] varieties.”

As the executive chef of Portland’s De Noche, Morales said she didn’t start experimenting with radicchio until she worked under chef Matt Sigler at the Italian restaurant Il Solito.

“I used it in California mostly for salads, but I saw Matt using it for a lot of different things,” Morales explained. “He would char it, make a puree out of it and fill it in pasta… I was like, ‘Wow, that’s really cool. I would never expect to do that with a lettuce or green like that.”

As Morales grew in her career, she started paying more attention to the different varieties of radicchio. A few months after starting at Lilia Comedor, she began tagging along with Executive Chef Juan Gomez to the local farmers market every Saturday.

“I wanted to be able to help more with the dishes, but I felt like as a chef, I needed to see more of what was in season,” she said.

Morales made friends with farmers at the markets and started learning about different varietals, brainstorming on how she could use them.

“We’ve done a duxelles of radicchio, and that’s a very French technique done with mushrooms, but I did it with radicchio and then turned it into a huarache,” said Morales. “There’s just so many different ways that you can use it.”

Now, leading her own team at De Noche, Morales uses a mix of Northwest ingredients and Latinidad flavors to bring out another side of radicchio’s potential–her take on a classic Caesar salad.

Morales explained that while the Caesar salad has Italian roots, it was actually created in Mexico.

“It was 4th of July during prohibition [and] there was an influx of Americans coming to Mexico,” she said. “[Caesar Cardini]’s restaurant was so full that he started running out of food, so he made a salad that they made in the old country from Italy–it all comes from working with what you have in the moment.”

Morales gives a nod to the salad’s origin story in her version, the Castelfranco Ensalada Cardini, which uses charred Castelfranco radicchio tossed in a black garlic dressing, and topped with salsa negra, crumbled Grana Padano and locally made corn nuts.

Over the past decade, radicchio has made its way to the center stage of our dinner plates, with the help of strong Italian roots and devoted Pacific Northwest farmers.