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Radicchio Spreads Its Wings Much more than salad, and also a very good salad

28 September 2026

Colourful radicchio leaves in close-up, ranging from pale-pink, through deep magenta with white ribs to a pale, fresh green

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A women with medium-length dark hair, cut in a fringe, looking at the camera. She is wearing a red sweater. Behind is a field of green vegetables.
Lane Selman
Radicchio, in all its glorious forms, is a vegetable indelibly associated with Italy. But when a group of growers in the Pacific Northwest of the USA decided to use radicchio to extend their growing and marketing season, they quickly realised that they knew next to nothing about the crop. Lane Selman from Oregon State University had started the Culinary Breeding Network to help those growers and travelled to Italy to learn what she could about producing radicchio successfully.

Ten years on, Lane and her colleagues have come out with a beautiful book all about radicchio, from planting the seeds to eating the recipes.

Notes

  1. Radicchio: A Celebration of the Beloved Italian Vegetable is published byTimber Press.
  2. Here’s my first conversation with Lane Selman, about The Culinary Breeding Network
  3. Here is the transcript.
  4. And the recipe for Chocolate Radicchio Cake. I’m wondering what the Italian equivalent of Dewey’s Bakery Brownie Crisp cookies might be. Gentilini chocolato?
  5. All photos by Shawn Linehan.

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One thought on “Radicchio Spreads Its Wings Much more than salad, and also a very good salad”

  • The Botanist in the Kitchen mentioned this post 3 days ago.

    Pumpkins and other winter squashes are gloriously large fruits and are therefore excellent subjects for easy botanical observation. Carving a Jack-O-Lantern or cutting up a squash for a recipe becomes an instructive dissection when you know what to look for. We walk through the necessary information in this

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Eat This Podcast has been going since March 2013. That’s a long time in podcast world. In that time, it has twice been nominated for a James Beard Award, although it remains a labour of love rather than a search for glory.

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