Hibiscus has gained buzz recently for its healthful reputation and potential medicinal properties, but chefs long have prized the flower’s full flavor, deep red color and its heritage as an ingredient used around the globe.
“I’ve used it hundreds of times over the years,” says Joshua Skenes, the 29-year-old chef of Saison restaurant in San Francisco, who most recently offered a hibiscus granité. Before that he prepared a hibiscus-seasoned squab.
“Hibiscus is kind of tart and floral,” he says. “It goes well with the unctuous, meaty bird. It is a good contrast.” He included both dishes on eight-course tasting menus that sell for $70.
For the squab he seasons the bird with hibiscus salt that he makes by grinding equal amounts of sea salt and dried hibiscus leaves in a mortar and pestle. The floral salt also seasons a red fruit and vegetable salad that he teams with the bird.
The salad is composed of watermelon steeped in hibiscus tea as well as fresh wild huckleberries, red mountain spinach and caramelized chicory. For the tea he steeps dry leaves for about 15 minutes in water that is brought just to a simmer and is then removed from the heat. He strains out the leaves and sweetens the infusion slightly with local honey.
He turns that same infusion into the granité. Once cooled, he freezes it and just before service “forks” it by scraping the mass with a fork. He layers the granité with Muscat flavored sabayon and little strawberries macerated with Meyer lemon and Japanese sugar.
Michelin-star-winning French chef Pierre Gagnaire, who is scheduled to open Twist next month in Las Vegas at the Mandarin Oriental in CityCenter, served a “hibiscus jelly carousel” dessert at a press event where he offered possible items that may show up on the opening menu.
He poured hibiscus jelly on the base of the dish and topped it with a linzer cookie, white almond paste, preserved grapefruit, a crispy fig, black-currant paste and a tandoori apple cube. Gagnaire prepares the floral purple gel with grapes, lemon juice and hibiscus that he warmed over low heat in a bain-marie for four hours. His method develops a clear and deep color, he says, but the flavor doesn’t become too strong or acidic.
Twist will be Gagnaire’s first restaurant in the United States. At his Hong Kong restaurant Gagnaire recently offered a poached apple with hibiscus and pepper.
Silk Road restaurant at the Vdara, which is also scheduled to open next month in Las Vegas at CityCenter, plans to highlight a hibiscus cocktail named The Kiss of Pear-suasion, says chef Martin Heierling. For the drink Heierling places a candied hibiscus flower into a chilled flute, adds some sugar syrup that the flowers are packed in, as well as pear vodka, elder-flower liqueur and Champagne.
“We give it a very gentle stir” and garnish with a lemon peel, and the flower floats in the lower portion of the glass, making the drink easy to consume without the flower getting in the way.
Tampa, Fla.-based chain The Melting Pot also offers a Champagne-based cocktail with a whole candied hibiscus and touch of sugar syrup for special events like New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day. During those promotions, four-to-six-course menus with the specialty drink are priced from $80 to $125, which varies because 141 of the chain’s 145 stores are franchised and the menu and pricing ultimately are determined by the franchisee.
Still the operators often elect to serve the drink. “There is a lot of enthusiasm surrounding these flowers,” says Shane Schaibly, Melting Pot’s manager of culinary development. The hibiscus “really adds the ‘wow’ factor.”
“They have a very, very beautiful, magical deep red color that is deeper red than cranberry,” says chef John Gray, of restaurant John Gray Downtown in Cancún, Mexico. He buys dry hibiscus from central Mexico and parts of the Yucatan Peninsula where hibiscus tea is a traditional beverage, and infuses vodka with the flowers.
“It has a bit of bitterness to it,” he adds, “almost like cranberry does.”
To control the bitterness, he strains the flower out after one night. He adds approximately 7 ounces of the petals to a liter of alcohol.
He mixes hibiscus vodka with cranberry juice and orange liqueur, and tops it with a twist of lime for the Martini de Flor de Jamaica, a Cosmopolitan-like cocktail that can be served straight up or on the rocks for about $10, he says.
The Chicago Tribune recently called hibiscus the next “in” ingredient, noting that it’s tart taste and rich color mean it may follow in the footsteps of the previously popular cranberry and pomegranate.
Hibiscus is called jamaica in Mexico and goes by other names in other languages. There are hundreds of kinds of hibiscus that vary in color and size. Most varieties are edible.
But it might not be a good idea to cook up any type growing in a garden. They are related to rose of Sharon and okra, which has a small blossom that is shaped like a hibiscus and varies in color.
“I try to not get worked up about the look of a plate, but it’s important that it comes to the table looking pretty,” says chef Peter Kelly, who garnishes a crisp sweetbread dish with the whole candied flower as well as wild huckleberries, frisée and green-peppercorn dust. That appetizer sells for $13.50 at X20 Xaviars on the Hudson in Yonkers, N.Y.
“Hibiscus is unusual,” but most anyone who orders sweetbreads already has an adventurous palate, Kelly says.
“There is a lot of intrigue with hibiscus,” he says. “It even cures illnesses.”
In fact, a study of the flower’s health benefits has just been accepted for publication in a health journal. The double-blind, placebo-controlled study found three cups of hibiscus tea a day “significantly” lowered blood pressure, according to Dr. Diane McKay, a scientist studying antioxidants, and her fellow scholars at Tufts University.
Men’s Health magazine has also cited data indicating that hibiscus tea lowers blood pressure.
Still, McKay says, hibiscus’ heath benefits are nothing new. It’s just the first time they has been documented by U.S. experts. For hundreds of years hibiscus has been “consumed worldwide—from the Middle East to Europe to Thailand,” she says.— [email protected]
