The Step You Shouldn't Skip When Cooking With Fresh Horseradish

Nearly everybody knows the taste, and especially the smell, of horseradish. It's spicy and it's very pungent. Usually though, when people think of horseradish, they're thinking of the prepared condiment, which also contains vinegar, sugar, and spices. It's a common way to spice up chicken salads and can be a substitute for the more expensive wasabi. On its own, horseradish is a plant that's part of the Brassicaceae family (more commonly called the mustard family) with edible roots which become eye-wateringly spicy when chopped or grated.

If you decide to purchase some fresh horseradish root at the grocery store, you should keep a few things in mind while preparing them in the kitchen to get the most out of their intense flavor. First and foremost, you need to cut off the core of the vegetable after you're finished peeling it. This thick part of the root is too difficult to grate because of how many fibers it contains, and it's tasteless at best and bitter at worst. There isn't much to do with it besides throwing it out or composting it. You should also remove any green portions which you might find beneath the peel, because these are too bitter to work with, and not the spicy parts you're interested in grating.

Once the core and any unseemly bitter pieces are gone, you can take your peeled stalks and grate them up — for softer foods like condiments, they'd be placed in a food processor and pulsed, but they'll be just fine grated as a garnish for other foods. While you're tearing apart the horseradish like this, the pungency from the horseradish is likely to clear out your sinuses and possibly even make your eyes water. This is because it contains oils and chemicals like isothiocyanates, which it releases when chopped as a defense mechanism. Just like the capsaicin in chili peppers, humankind eventually developed a taste for the spicy burn. Even so, it's strong enough raw that prepared horseradish sauce is often diluted with vinegar.

What can you do with all this finely grated horseradish? As a garnish, it's a great wasabi substitute (wasabi is also in the mustard family of plants) so it can easily go into dishes like wasabi mashed potatoes or into the sauce or rub of briskets and salmon. Or you can also use it to make your own, homemade horseradish sauce, because prepared horseradish you make yourself often has a bigger kick than store-bought jars of the stuff.