Finocchi Gratinati

Italian fennel bulbs braised until sweet, laid under béchamel and parmesan, and baked until the top blisters

Origin: Florence, Bologna & Northern Italy

From the journey of Fennel.

This is the dish that turned fennel from a spice into a vegetable for most of the world. Once Italian growers had selected a bulb worth eating, the question was what to do with it, and the answer arrived from the north: braise it, cover it in béchamel and grated cheese, and put it under a hot oven until the surface blisters. It is a contorno, a side dish, and it belongs to the Sunday table and to the winter. Cooking is what makes fennel sweet. Raw, the bulb is crisp, watery, and assertively aniseed; braised or roasted, the aniseed recedes and a genuine sugar comes forward, because the same long gentle heat that softens the fibres also breaks down some of the inulin the bulb stores. A fennel that has been boiled briefly and drained tastes of very little, whereas one cooked slowly in butter and its own liquid tastes of something quite different from what went into the pan. The béchamel is northern Italian rather than French despite the name, or at least the argument about who had it first is old and unresolved: Italians credit a Florentine salsa colla carried to France by Catherine de' Medici's cooks in the sixteenth century, and the French credit Louis de Béchameil at the court of Louis XIV. The Medici story is repeated everywhere and rests on very little, and the sauce is probably older than either claim. The fennel bulb travelled with Italian emigration and is now sold as a salad vegetable in countries that have never used the seed, which makes this one of the more successful pieces of vegetable breeding in European history: a plant selected in Tuscany and Emilia in the sixteenth century and on supermarket shelves worldwide by the twentieth.

Ingredients

Fennel

  • 4 fennel bulbs, about 1kg, trimmed and quartered lengthways

Braising

  • 50 g butter
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 150 ml water or light stock

Béchamel

  • 50 g butter
  • 50 g plain flour
  • 600 ml whole milk, warm
  • 0.25 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
  • 1 tsp salt, or to taste
  • 0.5 tsp white pepper

To finish

  • 80 g Parmigiano Reggiano, grated
  • 30 g fine dried breadcrumbs
  • 1 tbsp fennel fronds, chopped, to finish

Method

  1. Trim the fennel, keeping the fronds. Cut each bulb lengthways through the root so the quarters hold together.
  2. Melt the 50g of butter in a wide pan, lay the fennel in cut side down, add the water and salt, cover, and braise over a low heat for twenty-five minutes.
  3. Turn the pieces once halfway. They are ready when a knife goes into the thickest part with no resistance and the edges have gone translucent.
  4. Do not hurry this. Braising is what converts the raw aniseed sharpness into sweetness, and fennel that is merely blanched will taste thin under the sauce.
  5. Uncover and let any remaining liquid cook away, so the fennel is not wet when it goes into the dish.
  6. Make the béchamel: melt the butter, stir in the flour, and cook the roux for two minutes without letting it colour.
  7. Add the warm milk a little at a time, whisking smooth after each addition, then simmer gently for eight to ten minutes until it coats the back of a spoon.
  8. Season with nutmeg, salt, and white pepper, and stir in half the parmesan off the heat.
  9. Heat the oven to 200°C. Arrange the braised fennel in a single layer in a buttered dish.
  10. Pour the béchamel over, making sure everything is covered, then scatter the remaining parmesan and the breadcrumbs across the top.
  11. Bake for twenty to twenty-five minutes, until the surface is blistered and deep gold and the sauce is bubbling at the edges.
  12. Rest for ten minutes before serving, which lets the sauce set enough to lift a portion cleanly, and scatter the chopped fronds over.

Notes

Cut through the root so the quarters hold their shape, and braise properly rather than blanching; the sweetness is made in the pan, not in the oven. Cook off any braising liquid before the béchamel goes on, since a wet gratin is a thin one. Warm the milk before it meets the roux, which makes a smooth sauce far easier. The fronds are worth keeping and scattering at the end for the fresh note against a rich dish. Sliced prosciutto or a little pancetta laid between the fennel and the sauce is a common variation and turns the dish from a side into a main.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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