Burdock is such a generous plant. So many wonderful gifts to offer, edible and medicinal….One of the most overlooked delicacies are the stems (petioles) of the first year rosette. These can be destrung to remove the fibrous strings (a potato peeler works, a knife or just your fingers), chopped to bite sized pieces and then boiled in ALREADY boiling salted water for 4 minutes till tender. Then pop them into a pasta dish, or a salad, or butter them as a ‘green bean’ side dish. They also make great pickles.
We made Pizza rolls with Burdock stems as the crunch factor as our Forage to Feast with Marc Williams on August 1, 2016. Jimmy and Alison Dees were in charge of this delicacy and did a great job of preparing.
Here is the recipe for Burdock Stem Pizza Rolls
Wild Pizza Rolls
- 1 wholePizza Crust (or You Can Use Thawed Frozen Bread Dough!)
- Olive Oil
- Salt And Pepper, to taste
- Marinara Sauce
- Grated Parmesan Cheese
- Sliced Mozzarella Cheese
- Chickweed Pesto (made in advance)
- String Cheese
- Marinated Burdock stems and Milkweed broccoli
- Extra Marinara Sauce, For Dipping
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Roll out the pizza dough onto a floured surface until it’s a large rectangle. Smear with a little olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Spread the surface with marinara sauce, then sprinkle generously with Parmesan. Lay a couple of layers of mozzarella slices all over the sauce. Smear pesto all over the cheese. Lay on any other pizza ingredients (pepperoni, etc.) that you’d like.
Unwrap string cheese and lay it in a line at the top of the dough. Roll it toward you so that the string cheese winds up in the middle of the roll of dough. Slice into 1 inch pieces and place in a baking dish or iron skillet. Allow the rolls to rise for 20 minutes.
Bake for 15 minutes, until the bread is golden and the fillings are bubbly. Remove and serve immediately with extra marinara sauce.
A note to remember:
Jason and I had harvested the Burdock stems at an organic farm the week before but I did not prepare them soon enough so they were dried out and unusable. Someone brought us a 5 gallon bucketful of Burdock stems and enormous first year leaves to use and so we worked hard to destring the stems and boil them for use in the pizza. Also we used the leaves for our ‘plates’ and they were beautiful!
