Recipe: Celeriac Ceviche from Tobias Camman’s Groenvoer Cookbook

Food snob Tobias Camman hates meat substitutes and dishes in which vegetables are seen merely as plate fillers. With his book Groenvoer, he proves that vegetables can steal the show. His recipes are varied, special and extravagant, while also being suitable for getting every avid meat eater to enjoy eating greens.

Tobias: “Yes, ceviche is made with fish, and no, this isn’t fish. But I had to call it something to make it sound a little more interesting. Basically, this is just a plate of sweet-and-sour vegetables with some nachos, but that won’t fill your restaurant. Sometimes it really is all about the story. In this recipe, the celeriac (if you paid close attention in my previous book, you’ll know this is my pet name for this otherwise rather ugly vegetable) is treated with just as much love as a ceviche, so I think it’s perfectly entitled to the name. We serve it with homemade corn chips and a fresh lettuce and cucumber jus.”

How to make celeriac ceviche with corn chips and lettuce and cucumber jus

• We start with the celeriac. It can go into an oven preheated to 160 degrees, skin and all. Roast the celeriac for 1 hour and 45 minutes, then let it cool completely.
  Peel the celeriac and cut it into 1 cm-thick slices. Cut 20 perfect cubes from them and use the rest for soup or purée.
• The ceviche marinade is also called tiger’s milk and is made as follows: put the mirin, rice vinegar, olive oil and nori flakes in a bowl. Stir well.
• Add the celeriac cubes and marinate for 2 hours in the refrigerator. Toss occasionally.
• Next, we continue with the jus. Put the lettuce, cucumber, white onion, jalapeño, green tomato, apple cider vinegar, avocado and olive oil in a measuring jug. Blend until completely smooth with an immersion blender.
• Pass through a sieve and season with salt, plus some extra vinegar or jalapeño if you want more punch. This really requires some fine-tuning because the balance is very personal and ingredients don’t always have the same flavour.
• Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.
• Mix the pan (the cornmeal, that is) with water, half of the chimichurri herbs and some salt. Knead everything well into a compact dough. It’s true that it has a very strange texture. It’s compact, but at the same time falls apart so easily—the terrible property of gluten-free dough.
• The next steps will drive you absolutely crazy, but perseverance pays off.
• Place the dough between 2 sheets of baking paper and roll it out between them until it is wafer-thin.
• Remove the top sheet and cut circles from the dough with a small cutter (2 cm in diameter). Carefully loosen the circles with a small knife and place them on a baking tray lined with baking paper.
• Brush some oil over the chips and sprinkle all the circles with the other half of the chimichurri herbs. Slide the baking tray into the preheated oven and bake everything until golden brown, about 9 minutes.
• Then slice the radish into wafer-thin slices with the mandoline and immediately toss them into the ice water so they stay nice and crispy and curl up nicely. Remove from the water and set aside in the refrigerator.
• Slice the onion just as thinly with the mandoline and drizzle with lime juice. Massage the juice well into the onion with your fingertips and set aside in the refrigerator for later use.
• Run the mini cucumber lengthwise over the mandoline, using a slightly thicker setting.
• Marinate the cucumber in a mixture of the water, sugar and apple cider vinegar. After an hour in the marinade, you can shape it into beautiful rolls.
• Arrange the cold ‘ceviche’ beautifully on the plate with all the other components. Pour the jus at the table. 

Title: Groenvoer
Author: Tobias Camman
Price: €32,99
Publisher: Blossom Books Bold­

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