“What is that thing?” The members of Paisley Farm’s winter CSA were lingering at DBA bar in Williamsburg Brooklyn, where they’d each just picked up a box of potatoes, carrots, beets, onions, squash –  the first CSA pickup of the winter season. Sitting on the table in front of us, among pints of Six Point ale and mugs of bourbon-laced hot cider, was a long, pale, and… well… phallic-looking root. None of the guesses we threw at it seemed right. It wasn’t a parsnip. It wasn’t a potato. Some kind of turnip maybe? Finally we gave up, finished our drinks, donned our hats and gloves and hoisted our boxes of vegetables into the January cold.

Once at home though, a quick Google search on “root vegetables” solved the mystery: a daikon radish. Karol, who coordinates the Williamsburg CSA pickup for Paisley, was relieved to have this thing identified, but knew she needed to share this information quickly with the rest of the CSA members. “Your challenge now,” she said to me, “is to find some use for this daikon, and post about it on Dave’s Kitchen.” I accepted the challenge. Honestly though I had no idea what to do with this thing.

Daikon is actually not so unfamiliar to anyone who has eaten sushi or banh mi. It often comes as a garnish of fine threads with the former, and pickled, with carrots in the latter. My first thought for Karol’s Daikon Challenge was to create some kind of banh mi-inspired dish – a salad of watercress topped with pickled daikon matchsticks, perhaps, with a side of cilantro-spiced pork meatballs. Using the daikon merely as a garnish, though, or even as a salad-topper, wasn’t likely to use up very much of it, and I had a vision of a hundred half-used daikon radishes moldering in the crisper drawers of a hundred CSA members. No, I’d have to look deeper to find a dish that puts this odd root onto center stage.

With some further investigation I found that daikon sometimes goes by another name: mooli. Mooli, it seems, is a Hindi word for ‘radish’ (sometimes appearing as ‘muli’ or ‘moolangi’), and it’s found surprisingly often in the indices of Indian cookbooks or on Indian recipe websites. Mooli Paratha is a skillet bread stuffed with cooked radish. In a  Madhur Jaffrey cookbook I found “Phool gobi aur mooli ka achaar”: cauliflower and white radish pickle.  On the Indian cooking blog Mahananda there’s a short discussion of the health benefits of mullangi, and a $2 download of a recipe for daikon dal (proceeds go to support a school in India). But maybe most appealing – and certainly easiest – was this recipe I found for aloo muli – potatoes cooked with radish.

The recipe is quite simple: cook a chopped green chili (I used a jalapeno) in a small amount of hot oil, then add equal amounts of diced daikon and potato, with ground coriander and tumeric. Stir to combine, lower the flame, cover and cook for 10 to 12 minutes. I was not using a non-stick skillet, so I added just a tablespoon or so of water to keep the mixture from sticking. Unfortunately I didn’t have the radish greens the recipe called for, so I simply did without (though when I make this again I might add chopped spinach or kale to make up for them)

The textures and flavors of the radish and potato were nicely complementary, and the subtle spiciness of the radish stood up nicely to the bolder jalapeno and turmeric. I served the aloo mooli with Mark Bittman’s red-lental dal, along with a very simple and delicious salad of grated carrot tossed with toasted mustard seeds (also taken from Madhur Jaffrey), and some crispy mini papadums.

Aloo mooli is a dish I’d make again, and not just out of obligation to use up a CSA daikon. For this dish I’d actually seek out a mooli of my own. Karol, I consider the daikon challenge well met.

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