Broccolo fiolaro

This beautiful broccoli leaf green gets sweetened in winter conditions and has mild savoury flavour.

Fiolaro is grown for it’s leaves similarly to Spigariello, and has been cultivated since the time of the ancient Romans. Today it’s sadly on the Slow Food Ark of Taste list, a living catalogue of delicious and distinctive foods facing extinction.

Today, the typical production area is the hill of Creazzo, in the province of Vicenza in northeastern Italy. Fiolaro broccoli is at risk of disappearing because currently there are only a small number of producers. It’s largely unknown outside its production area.

We are fortunate enough to have a relationship with Andrea Ghedina from Smarties.Bio, an Italian vegetable breeding and seed company whose mission is to maintain and continue to improve vegetables such as Fiolaro. Harvesting is such a relaxing activity, but this week was just extra special.

The Rosa del Veneto are proper pink and beautiful, the Fiolaro has reached a new stage of maturity and is like a whole different plant compared to the last time we harvested them, and the purple carrots are really sweet now they have experienced some frosts.

A Vicenza peasant and her bigòlo full of fiolaro. An image that deserves a memory according to Goethe who was so affected by these peasants that he chose to disguise himself in order to lower his social rank and spend more time amongst them.

This is still our first succession of Fiolaro, and our second time harvesting. The first time we all ate the first harvest of Fiolaro, the plants were still quite young and hadn’t shooted yet. They had large leaves, and had been growing through the height of summer.

Its been a few months and the plants have experienced plenty of frosts, and have now produced some wild and diverse shoots. The genetics in this open pollinated seed is pretty diverse compared to what you find in very stable hybrid populations of other brassica oleracea like broccoli or cabbage. However the plants are vigorous, big and very uniform in size, which is all thanks to the hundreds of years of seed selection by the gardeners growing on the Creazzo hill in Italy, and the continued wonderful breeding work of Smarties Bio.

These Fiolaro shoots are very reminiscent of spigarello, and its now easy to see how they are sister plants. They are tender.

Fiolaro Almond Cake

I came across this Fiolaro almond cake last year when I was first researching the plant, and looking at the regulations of importing the seed from Italy. This picture was taken by a visitor to the Fiolaro Sagra in Northeastern Italy.

I’ve made a kale cake in the past and its so good! A Fiolaro almond cake sounds so so good for winter, if I have time this week I’m going to replace the kale in the recipe below with Fiolaro and see how it turns out.

30/3/22

This piece of writing is too good not to share. It’s taken directly from the Sagra del Broccolo Fiolaro website and translated into english.

”The vegetable replicates life: just as for the poor, also for the plant there are many and they are good. A small philological investigation leads to clarify the assonance of the name broccoli with the term “brocco”, a clear judgement of the sporting language that indicates not only a pumped-out horse but, in general, a poorly gifted or incapable athlete. The common root is the Latin word “broccus”, which means “with protruding teeth”, a typical feature of old horses. In translated form, the diminutive has gone to indicate the sprout (which, in fact, protrudes from the plant) of the vegetable”