Oh, how I love samphire season. Soft-serve van ice cream aside, is there any flavour quite so redolent of the British seaside?
With its crisp texture and clean salty spritz, samphire is best matched with other delicate summer treats and can transform a simple fish into a dinner party dish.
To prepare, first remove and discard any twig-like bits, then rinse thoroughly in cold water and pat dry. Generally, you will want to blanch it in boiling water (added salt is not necessary due to its intrinsic sea-saltiness) and then toss with melted butter. It’s good enough to eat on its own as a starter, but usually it’s found alongside grilled white fish or sea food.
It’s a perfect match for crab: plunge into cold water once blanched, then drain and spread over a plate. Gently toss white crab meat (saving the brown to spread pleasingly on toast) with a little virgin rapeseed oil and lemon juice and lay on top (you can make this look fancy by spooning it into a small baking ring, then removing it carefully). Dust with freshly ground pepper and top with chopped chives and, if you can get your hands on some, a couple of pretty purple chive flowers. It’s surprisingly good alongside steak, too.
I like to serve it with tagliata — steak, marinated in lemon juice and rosemary, then seared in a very hot pan and sliced very thinly into strips. Normally draped over a bed of leaves, it can be draped instead over your blanched samphire, tossed first in olive oil and lemon juice.
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At the other end of the food scale, blanched samphire makes an excellent addition to a substantial salad: try combining it with puy lentils (cooked and vacupacked are fine here), steamed sweet potato, and mixed leaves, tossed in an olive oil and sherry-vinegar dressing pepped up with crushed garlic and flaked salt, and carefully dot large spoons of ricotta over the top. Dust with black pepper.
Alternatively, it would make an appropriate replacement for French beans to bring a bit of the sea to a vegetarian nicoise, marrying beautifully with the hard-boiled eggs, olives, tomatoes and new potatoes that make up the rest of the dish.
Finally, for an easy bit of restaurant style on your plate, try using it as a stuffing for delicate fish: melt unsalted butter in a large frying pan, and toss samphire in it, along with a third of its weight in chopped hazelnuts, until the nuts just start to colour. Pack as much as you can into the gutted cavity of a larger fish, like sea trout, for example, then wrap firmly in foil. Bake in a medium hot oven till just opaque (this should take about 15-20 minutes for a 1kg fish to feed four). Unwrap, scoop out the wilted but delicious samphire and nuts and divide between plates. Then carefully lift the flesh off the bone to lay on top, and spoon over the buttery juices.
Cooking for Real Life by Joanna Weinberg (Bloomsbury, £25) is out now