Capers are your buds – and your berries ~ Healthy Recipes

Thursday, May 26, 2016

Capers are your buds – and your berries

Capers are briney little green buds that come in jars — but there’s much more to the caper story. Other parts of this Mediterranean plant are edible, too — the berries that develop after the buds have bloomed are good substitutes for green olives in chicken dishes and cocktails. You can even eat caper leaves in salads.

Still, the stars of the bush are the tiny buds, which you sometimes see scattered over a bagel with lox. Beyond brunch, capers are useful whenever you want to add a whack of brine to your cooking: Their complex salty flavor is shaded with mustard and lemon.

Where to Find Capers

Capers flourish throughout their native Mediterranean, but the main exporters are Turkey, Morocco, and Spain. You might also find Italian capers on a gourmet grocery shelf. Like olives, capers are better cured than fresh. They can be dry-cured with salt or wet-cured in a salty vinegar solution. The latter are more affordable and much easier to find: Slender, vinegar-filled jars are usually stocked in the pickle section.

When shopping for capers, look for bottles with little sediment. Tender buds vary in size from small as a pea to big as a marble. Conventional wisdom holds the smaller capers are better, but many cooks prefer the stronger flavor of the slightly larger buds. Once opened, a jar of capers will last for a few months in the refrigerator.

Cooking with Capers

In some instances, you may want to rinse capers before using them in a tartar sauce, potato salad, or atop scrambled eggs. Even after rinsing, capers are quite salty, which undercuts some of their other nutritional attributes, such as a decent dose of fiber and Vitamin K. But applying a two-calorie bud to a dish is a relatively healthy way of perking up flavor. Capers are great in place of salt, especially when color’s called for: Consider strewing them over pasta, or using them as a garnish for deviled eggs. The possibilities are endless:.