Perfect Fruits and Vegetables – Baby Bok Choy with Oyster Sauce
Fruits and vegetables at big, corporate supermarkets usually look flawless. Think of picture-perfect apples and tomatoes, straight green beans all the same size, impeccable heads of lettuce, and flat snow pea pods with nary a twist, turn, or bump indicating a maturing pea inside. But in the garden, this is rarely the way fruits and vegetables grow. Simply look at what is sold at small farm stands or farmers’ markets. Their baskets are filled with items that would never be offered for sale at huge chain supermarkets, even though these items are almost certainly fresher and tastier.
Supermarket produce is bred for appearance and ease of transport rather than flavor, helping with sales. Red Delicious apples, for example, look beautiful when you’re shopping, but bite into one and you are rewarded with unparalleled blandness. And most supermarket tomatoes, although they sometimes look ripe and tasty, have no flavor and terrible texture. A red, “ripe” tomato should never be crunchy.
Even with modern genetics manipulating the appearance of our fruits and vegetables, it doesn’t all grow into textbook specimens. What happens to all the imperfect produce harvested around the world?
Some goes to local, privately-owned supermarkets, which are usually smaller in size. These stores have fruits and vegetables that are just as good, although they may have bell peppers with uneven lobes, apples that are asymmetrical, avocados with an external scar or navel oranges that are smaller and don’t meet an adequate size requirement, for example.
Vast quantities of edible food are discarded, some, because it didn’t have marketable good looks. Fortunately, there are now companies that specialize in selling misfit produce that would otherwise get discarded, helping to reduce food waste.
In my garden much of what I grow is delicious and healthy but would never make the grade for supermarket sales. Yet on occasion my harvest is faultless in appearance. Such was recently the case when I grew bok choy for the first time.
I had low expectations. I didn’t know if it would grow at all, let alone mature to an edible state. If it did, I thought it would be stringy in texture and irregular in appearance.
I planted seeds inside in late winter, for transplant to the garden in early spring, hoping to get a jump on my harvest. They germinated beautifully and began to grow into tiny versions of full-grown bok choy. Several weeks after moving them into the garden they matured into attractive heads, baby size, but beautiful. Deep green leaves and lighter green, bulbous stems, they looked exactly like ones I would buy. I was overjoyed with the result.
I harvested and cooked them, steamed with oyster sauce and topped with crisp fried garlic. They were delightful; an example of perfect fruits and vegetables harvested from my garden, which would easily hold their own against any produce sold in the supermarket.
Baby Bok Choy with Oyster Sauce
Baby bok choy are as easy to cook as they are to grow in the garden. Some varieties are bred to mature at a small size, while others grow to full size before producing flowers. This recipe will work with either size. Smaller bok choy work beautifully whole, as the stems will cook through in about the same amount of time as the leaves. If you use larger ones, cut them in half lengthwise from top to bottom through the base, and if using fully mature specimens, separate the thicker stems from the leaves, cut the stems into bite size pieces, and give them more cooking time than the leaves. Bok choy, no matter the size, needs to be washed carefully to remove all sand and soil that may have gotten wedged within the head.
15 minutes, serves 2
2 Tbsp. oyster sauce
1 Tbsp. soy sauce
1 Tbsp. Shaoxing rice wine
2 Tbsp. vegetable, canola, or avocado oil
2 cloves garlic, peeled and thinly sliced
1-inch piece of ginger, peeled and sliced into coins
4 to 8 baby bok choy, depending on size
1 tsp. sesame oil
- Mix together oyster sauce, soy sauce, and Shaoxing rice wine, along with about 3 tablespoons of water in a small bowl and set aside.
- Heat oil over medium in a skillet large enough to hold the bok choy and with a tight-fitting lid.
- When hot, add thinly sliced garlic and fry, turning frequently, until just starting to turn golden. Remove garlic chips to a paper towel-lined plate and allow to cool.
- Add ginger to the pan and cook, sizzling, turning once or twice, for about a minute.
- Add the bok choy and sauce and toss to coat. When simmering, lower heat to medium-low, cover, and steam, flipping occasionally, until the stems are easily pierced by a sharp knife. Remove bok choy to a serving plate and if necessary, turn heat to high to reduce sauce and thicken slightly. Spoon sauce over bok choy, drizzle on sesame oil, and top with fried garlic chips.
