Florence Fennel and Oranges salad

[Pancrazio]

Fennel and Oranges salad

This is my favorite way of eating oranges during winter.
This recipe is used mainly in Sicily, but nowadays you can find good oranges everywhere in italy, and fennel is also widespread. Dunno, if it is used even in USA, but anyway... here it is.
This is very simple but as with everything very simple, the single most important thing is the good quality of your ingredients.
So, just take a florence fennel bulb,
one orange (i use navel oranges; the sweeter, the better),
olive oil (use the best olive oil you have, we use 2 kind of olive oil in every house here, and for this recipe i use the best),
salt,
pepper.

Wash the bulb and cut it in little chips. Unpeel your orange and separate the segments, then break them by hand in 2 pieces. Try to keep the juice inside the segments, but is important that you break them by hand because a little of juice will give flavour to the fennel. Put salt and pepper. Mix everything with a fork. Put 2 tablespoon olive oil on it and mix once more with the fork. Buon appetito!

[fruitlovers]

I'll have to try it! We have fennel here, but what is Florence fennel? Is that a particular fennel cultivar? Can you give some idea of proportions you use. How many grams of oranges to grams of fennel?
Grazie, Oscar

[nullzero]

Oscar,

Can find some nice Italian seeds of fennel here; http://www.italianseedandtool.com/category/italian_seed_and_tool.vegetable_seed.fennel/

[Pancrazio]

Hi Oscar! You can use fennels for seeds (seasoning) and as vegetables. I didn't know, before writing this message, if there was a word in english to describe exactly the fennels used as vegetables. So i looked at wikipedia. And according to wikipedia:

"The Florence fennel (Foeniculum vulgare Azoricum Group; syn. F. vulgare var. azoricum) is a cultivar group with inflated leaf bases which form a bulb-like structure. It is of cultivated origin, and has a mild anise-like flavour, but is more aromatic and sweeter. Florence fennel plants are smaller than the wild type. Their inflated leaf bases are eaten as a vegetable, both raw and cooked. There are several cultivars of Florence fennel, which is also known by several other names, notably the Italian name finocchio. In North American supermarkets, it is often mislabelled as "anise"."

There is also a picture:



So i assumed that the word to describe fennels as vegetables was "Florence fennels"! Wrong assumption, it seems!

Anyway, this is exactly the kind of fennel you should use. Maybe may seems obvious, but you know, i didn't wanted someone using this:





Regarding proportions: i use a single orange, and a single raw fennel bulb. Ideally you may want it to make 50%/50%, but personal preferences have a role here. Personally, i find that a perfectly ripe orange goes marvellously well with salt, oil and fresh pepper, so i tend to use a bit more orange than fennel, but, as i said, is a matter of preferences. Let me know if you like it.