Radishes have a nice, bitter bite and are a perfect quick appetizer when paired with butter and salt. Supposedly it’s a French thing, but I first had this simple pleasure when visiting friends who hail from East Texas. The Williams-Sonoma recipe looks like what my friends served and has only three ingredients: whipped butter, radishes and sea salt.
I like simple, and I like sea salt, but I think the butter is better on a radish when it is kicked up a bit. With garlicky pesto. It’s more like an Italian thing.
Ingredients (serves 4-6 as an appetizer)
- 12 radishes
- 1 tbsp. pesto (click here for the Glover Gardens Nutty Pesto recipe, use your own, or a good-quality purchased one)
- 1/4 cup softened butter
- 2 tsp. coarse sea salt
Instructions
Wash and trim radishes of roots, leaving the stems on. Mix pesto and butter. Put sea salt in a small dish. Arrange radishes, pesto-butter and salt on a platter and serve.
This super-simple, super-fresh, super-garlicky, super-good appetizer is just right when you’ve got a big, heavy piece of meat roasting on the grill. But it’s also really good as part of an autumn dinner in advance of a hearty soup accompanied by crusty bread.
Copyright 2016, Glover Gardens Cookbook
It’s true that here in France we absolutely LOVE eating radishes + salted butter + delicious baguette. Mmmm. I LOVE your idea of making pesto butter to go with the radishes. We will have to give that a try the next time we host an apéritif! 🙂