Dandelions are here. Despite being commonly considered a weed, they have multitude of culinary and medicinal uses. If dandelions annoy you, frying them up might change your mind.
I’ve included instructions for a few variations, but feel free to experiment and create your own recipe.
Ingredients
- Dandelion flowers – I use snips to get as much green off as possible
- Batter – Pancake batter, tempura batter, or your own batter
- Salt – For soaking
- Oil / Butter – For frying.
Dandelion Foraging Tips
Dandelions are easy to find, but here are some tips to keep in mind.
Most importantly: Be sure to avoid pesticides and car pollution. I suggest picking from school fields.
Pick when the sun is shining. When I learning about dandelion wine, I read that dandelions are best picked around noon on a sunny day. This is when the flowers are most open, and many wine makers said they are sweeter when picked in this condition. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I follow that advice anyways when I forage flowers for any purpose.
Wear gloves. Not required, but your hands will be a sticky, yellow-stained mess otherwise. The latex from the dandelions is hard to wash off.
Trim well. Try and remove much of the green bits around the flower. Snips work well for this. Dandelion flowers are sweet, but the green parts are bitter.
Rinse them off to remove critter and dirt.
Cooking Instructions
First step: Soak the flowers in a bowl of salted water. About a teaspoon-ish of salt in 2 cups of water with a dozen flowers works well.
Let the flowers soak for at least 20 minutes. You can soak for few hours to overnight works better if you want a more salty & savory version (I do this for my tempura dandelions).
Then warm up a pan with oil or butter. I like to use a combo of olive oil and butter for frying, but you do you. For the tempura version, you’ll want to deep fry instead of pan fry.
While your oil is heating, drain the water from the flowers. You can use paper towel to remove excess moisture. The salt will likely make the flowers close a little, they will open a little in the batter.
Coat with your batter of choice. Pancake batter or tempura are my two favorites for dandelion flowers.
Finally: Fry your dandelions. For pancake batter version: cook them just like you would a pancake: a few minutes on each side. For tempura – experiment with how you place them in the cooking oil: if you place them “face down” and slowly lower them into the oil, the shriveled flowers open up and cook beautifully.
For the pancake version, ketchup for dipping creates a kid-friendly treat. For more discerning tastes the tempura version goes fantastic with a ponzu sauce.
When my kids were young, they loved this snack.