my CHOKE disappeared in my ARTI(choke)!

[sunberst]

you are all going to laugh at me.

my artichoke history
i have eaten artichokes countless times. my mom would always make artichokes & i would love dipping the leaves into a sauce working my way to the heart. however, i have never cooked an artichoke myself before. at least not a whole artichoke. only ones from jars. last night i decided to tackle this seemingly easy process.

my cooking experience
i consult my better homes & gardens cook book, it said to cut the stem down, cut an inch off the top, cut off sharp tips, brush cut edges w/lemon juice. bring as pot of salted water to a boil, then submerge artichokes in water, cover & cook for 20-30 minutes. i have a lot of other pots & pans going on in my kitchen. the grill is going. the broiler is on, and all the burners are taken up. so i was busy with everything else for dinner, i forgot to check on the artichokes at 20 minutes. i do remember about them at about 32 minutes. so i take them off. figured they would be fine since it did say "20-30 minutes". well i turn them upside down on paper towels to drain, and they are big green mushy things. i try to remain positive. the whole entire thing is soft. it was hard to scrape the meat off the leaves, because i was eating the leaves along w/it because it was just melting. i decide to get to the heart & see if it was worth eating, and well, there was no choke. i know what they look like. i have removed them before. they are purple and fuzzy/sharp. there was NOTHING inside. ???

i am so mad. i am now on a mission to master the art of cooking artichokes. i will go through a zillion artichokes until i can get it just right!

my questions
1. did my choke really disappear (disinergrate), or do they make "choke less" varieties?
2. also, for my next experience, do you season the water with anything else besides salt? i only had a couple of leaves, but they tasted really bland.

okay, go ahead & laugh now, i lost my choke.

[MaryH]

So sorry about your choke. Were they the small ones (called baby artichokes?) If so, I've had the same experience, apparently they are heartless. Now if it was a normal size artichoke, I don't know what happned. Can't say I've ever heard of a heart "disappearing or disintegrating", but you never know.

[sunberst]

i thought about this as well. but they were not babies. regular sized ones.

[Svadhisthana]

Here is the transcript of the "Good Eats" artichoke show. http://www.goodeatsfanpage.com/GEFP/index.htm I hope you find some useful info there. You may want to check the TV listings for foodtv on Sept. 1, they are doing a Good Eats marathon and they may air the episode again.




o.k. that didn't work. On the side of the page there is a menu. Click on episode guide, then click on "by Food Topic" and that will take you to artichokes.

[sushibones]

I can't help you with the disappearance of the choke, but not having a choke should mean that when you were done with the leaves, all that was left was the heart. Right? So how is this a problem?

When I cook my artichokes, I do not cover them with water. I stand them up in a pan so that they are snugged together and close to the sides of the pan, and put in enough water to come a couple of inches up the artichoke. This usually requires cooking more than one at a time (darn! ). If you are cooking just one in a pan which is much wider than the artichoke, then the artichoke tries to float on its side. I know other people steam them, but I'm not sure if that means using just a little water, or putting them on a rack of some kind above the water. I've never made them that way. You also want to cook them until they are just tender. I check by pulling a leaf out and eating it. Overcooking will make them mushy.

I season both my artichokes and the water. When the artichokes are in the pan, I put thin slices of garlic in between the leaves (usually 1 large clove/artichoke), sprinkle salt over the top, squeeze about half a lemon over the tops of the artichokes, put the peel in the water (cut in pieces if you like) along with a bay leaf and several slooshes of tabasco. Since I've started doing this, I almost always just eat my artichokes plain and skip the sauce.

There were several threads a few months ago discussing cooking methods and various recipes and sauces. You can do a search for "artichoke*" and just search the titles. There will be plenty of information for you there.

[sunberst]

thanks sushibones for the tip.

i am *thinking* that i really must of over cooked it, and well the choke dissolved. (i mean these were pretty well cooked, even the little stump of a stem was super soft, oopps.)

i just found this very odd that it could dissolve like that. i think i am the only weirdo out there that has done this.

i am going to try again this weekend. i need to master this.

i was really embarassed thought because dbf has never ever had an artichoke before. so now i hope i didnt scare him away from them forever!

[sunberst]

oh sushibones, are you still there?

one ?- do you stand them up with the stem part upwards, or the top upwards. and do you cut an inch off the top of them as well?

[sushibones]

Sunberst—

I have never bothered to cut the tips off. I cut the stem off close to the base, and sit the artichokes on their little bottoms with the leaf tips pointing up. If you put them tip down, all the garlic would come out.

I bring the water to a boil, turn down to a simmer and cover. I usually buy HUGE artichokes (3 fit snugly into my dutch oven). It takes at least 30 minutes for those to be done. After the 30 minutes I just keep eating leaves until they are done the way I like them.

Rereading your original post, I'm somewhat confused. As you get closer to the center of the artichoke, the leaves get smaller and thinner until there's just very small ones together with all the poky parts of the leaves in the center. If you pull those off, the choke is left and is just a little fuzzy fibrous section which can be pulled or scraped off the heart (looks kind of like a crew cut). I don't know that there is any way it could dissolve. The choke sits just on top of the heart, which is what is left after you've pulled the leaves off. The heart is the base the leaves are attached too. Did you have that base even if there was no choke? It almost sounds as though you were using an artichoke that was missing its outer leaves, or otherwise trimmed in some way. There is no way you could eat the outer leaf no matter how overcooked it was. However when you get to the center leaves, the entire bottom inch or so can be eaten because the leaves are so thin and tender. I know some recipes call for removing all the outer leaves, cutting off the pointy tips, and removing the choke before cooking, leaving a pale imitation of an artichoke. I, however, prefer mine in their natural state, and to eat every delectable morsel from every delectable leaf.

[Ohioan]

Sushibones, I'm so glad you asked these questions, because I was wondering myself, when I read sunberst's original post. The choke of an artichoke can't possibly dissolve; it's nothing but insoluble fiber. And I think we could cook a normal globe artichoke for a year without softening the outer leaves enough to chew them up!

Sunberst, are you really reeeeally sure you had a grownup artichoke that hadn't been previously trimmed (i.e., choke cut out and outer leaves removed)?

Anyway, I too use the cooking method Sushibones describes, except that I put the garlic cloves into the cooking water along with a very light drizzle of good olive oil (no lemon, salt, or tabasco), and then I use what's left of the cooking liquid as a dip for the leaves.

Cheers,
Phoebe

[sushibones]

Oh Phoebe? Do you then eat the garlic cloves that were in the cooking water? Surely you must. That's why I like sticking the garlic slices in the leaves. A little bit of heaven as you pluck the garlic off the leaf and pop it in your mouth. Oh look, here's another one.

[Ohioan]

Originally posted by sushibones
Oh Phoebe? Do you then eat the garlic cloves that were in the cooking water? Surely you must. That's why I like sticking the garlic slices in the leaves. A little bit of heaven as you pluck the garlic off the leaf and pop it in your mouth. Oh look, here's another one.

Hee hee hee. Actually, I kind of mash some of the cooked garlic cloves into the oil-and-water with the back of a spoon. That way I know I'm getting lots of garlic in every bite!

BTW, your lemon and tabasco additions sound good. I think I'll try that next time I make artichokes -- which, after this message exchange, is going to have to be this weekend.

Cheers,
Phoebe

[sunberst]

i know you think i am crazy, but my mom happened to stop by that night, and she saw "my artichoke mess" as well, and said she had never seen anything like it before!

i have eaten artichokes probably 100 times in my life. i know how to eat them, what the choke looks like, etc. i grew up on eating these things.

this was just my first time actually cooking an artichoke.

i bought large, whole artichokes from meijers. the leaves squeaked when rubbed together, they didnt smell too woody, and were nice green- no brown age spots. i brought them home, cut the stem down to the base so they sit nice, cut an inch off the top of them, trimmed any sharp tips of the outer leaves, then i placed in the boiling water. i didnt weigh them down, or keep them snug like sushibones, so they kinda flipped on their sides & bobbed around.

ohioan,
yes, it was a grownup artichoke. the outer leaves were still intact, lots of them in fact, and the leaves were sorta tight, so there is no way the choke could of been removed.

the outer leaves that were very, very tough just 30 minutes earlier got so, so soft after i cooked them. you could use a fork to cut them. they were as soft as the heart should be. it was scarey. i have never seen the hard green outer leaves get so soft.

the color even changed to what i call, a "dirty green" color. even the little base of the stem that was left was mushy. in fact, the stem sorta fell right off. that is how soft it got. i could of took my fist, and lightly hit it, and the whole artichoke would of collapsed and squashed down. it was so bizarre that just 30 minutes earlier it was very, very hard.

so i realize that this is unedible, but i pull off tons of layers of leaves to get to the heart to see if i can save that, and there was no choke. (i swear!)

i talked to my grandma about this, and read various threads on cooking arti's, and i re-read the better homes & gardens recipe i was using- and i think i have found the answer to why mine turned out that way.

first, i had the entire pot filled with water & i never turned the heat down after it returned to a boil. i forgot. so they were boiling rapidly for 30 minutes in a full pot of water instead of simmering in only 2 inches of water.

try it, and your choke will disinergrate as well! you can actually take a potato masher and mash the whole artichoke, leaves, choke, stem & all because it is so mushy. gross.

[sushibones]

Thanks for the update, sunberst. After all the suggestions that Phoebe and I were throwing at you, I'm sure you were sitting at your computer yelling back at us, "But I know what an artichoke is supposed to look like!!"

That is just way too weird, although I can certainly see that the texture of the artichoke would change drastically after being boiled for 30 minutes. I know there have been times when I tried to take an artichoke out of the pot with tongs, and everything started to fall off of the base. Even with that kind of overcooking though, I wouldn't have thought the outer leaves would get so soft. As for the missing choke, maybe you just had an artichoke anomaly. You could write it up in a scientific journal! However, the absence of the choke, while strange, shouldn't mean there was no heart. It should be there, just seriously overcooked and mushy and not worth eating either.

Maybe when artichokes are cheap again Phoebe and I could try to reproduce your results. That would be really hard for true artichoke lovers though. (Not reproducing the results, just foregoing the chance to eat an artichoke in the interests of scientific inquiry.) At least you know what not to do next time.

[sunberst]

i do appreciate your suggestions sushibones & phoebe!!! especially the addition to tucking garlic into the leaves. you have been very helpful. i am going to try again this weekend, if i find some nice looking artichokes in the store.

the heart was still there, but it was hard to distinguish because it was very mushy. it all sorta blended together. it went in the garbage (i was so sad).

if you want a scientific experiment- boil the heck out of it for 30 minutes. maybe i should ask mr. alton brown to do an artichoke experiment in the name of science...

[Ohioan]

Okay, I can see that this is going to be the feature event for a future CL Reunion. Sunberst, Sushibones, and Phoebe gather around an operating table -- I mean stove -- dressed in their best scrubs (hand-embroidered, of course), masks and gloves on, brows furrowed with concentration. The great lights beam down on them as the hushed audience in the viewing balcony tenses up. The flame goes on under the pot. The three Weird Sisters -- I mean participants -- wait for the precise moment of boiling water and deposit the artichoke in the pot. Time seems to stand still. The minute hand barely moves on the clock in the operating kitchen. Finally, Sunberst gives the signal. Cautiously, Sushibones lifts the tongs, while Phoebe holds the artichoke dish ready. The tongs make contact. A green object emerges from the water....



I'll fill in the rest after the experiment is completed.

Cheers,
Phoebe

[sushibones]

I can hardly wait, Phoebe. I briefly considered doing my own experiment, but when I went to the store, artichokes were $3 each. Some were quite lovely. Some were definitely the kind you would want to use if you wanted to boil the heck out of them to see if they disintegrated.

Science marches on.

[Ohioan]

Do you suppose we should turn this over to the CL test kitchens? Or would The Journal of Thermodynamics be more appropriate?

Hey, and how about a feature on artichokes in some future issue of CL?

Cheers,
Phoebe

[sushibones]

And the new improved variety: chokeless!

[sunberst]

you guys are too cute.

[Lynn B]

Just have to say, I am scratching my head AND LOL over this thread!!!!!!!!!

The Mystery of the Disintegrating Choke... sounds like a Nancy Drew book!!!

Lynn

[Beth]

Or a new cookbook novel for Jan what's her name....