Nice Spread: Artichokes & Goat Cheese

Travels in the dip/spread continuum

Artichokes rank among my most favoritest vegetables. Apart from how cool they look, and the fact that they’re the unopened flowers of a kind of thistle, their distinctly complex flavor (notoriously unfriendly to wine pairings) fascinates me, especially when cooked in certain ways. They’re even good raw, shaved thinly, but they really shine when they catch a bit of browning.

I’ve tried growing them, though it’s not easy in this climate. I may try again, since I do like growing as much of my own food as possible. As a kid I would eat whole jars of artichoke hearts with a fork (much to my mother’s annoyance) and today I buy big 1kg containers of them because I am an adult and do what I want. They work in lots of applications, including my favorite way to eat them: on bread.

When I lived in Rome, I became an ardent fan of carciofi alla romana, where small, tight artichokes are trimmed, stuffed with herbs, and braised. They are vastly superior in every way to French-style boiled whole heads (though barigoule is good) and I like them more than Rome’s other great artichoke dish, the deep-fried carciofi alla giudia, for which the Jewish ghetto (my old neighborhood) is rightly famous. My unorthodox spin on carciofi alla romana borrows a little from the fried version, and I believe (with some validation from people who know about such things) that’s it’s better than the original.

Hot artichoke dip is nothing like either of these, except that it also amplifies artichokes’ particularly potent form of vegetable umami in an extraordinary way. It’s one of my weaknesses; confronted with a bowl of it at a party I can’t stop eating it. This post is not about that, but rather a way to achieve something every bit as addictive with much less effort and healthier ingredients.