Hop

Hop is the strangest plant in this collection because the two edible parts are complete opposites. The spring shoot is a mild, tender vegetable that tastes of green asparagus with a faint bitterness, and it is a spring delicacy in exactly the way that hop cones are an autumn one. The cone, three months later, is nothing like it.

The bine, the tips and how much to take

Hop is a herbaceous perennial that dies to the ground each winter and pushes a dozen or more fast-growing bines in spring from a crown the size of a bin lid. The bines grow 10–20 cm a day in May, and the top 20 cm of each one — soft, pale green, with tiny folded leaves — is the crop.

Take the tip of the bine, not the whole bine. Cutting a bine at the base removes the year’s growth for that bine entirely; taking the top 20 cm leaves everything below it to keep growing. Work along a hedge as you would with bramble: a bit from each bine, and never more than two tips from any one plant.

The wild bines in a hedge are usually too high to reach by July but in late April they are at chest height and easy. That is also the moment the tips are at their best: the stem should snap crisply and be entirely solid inside, with no hollow.

Cooking the tips, and the bitterness

Hop shoots are bitter, mildly, and the bitterness is in the same resins that make beer bitter. It is not a defect — it is the reason the vegetable is worth eating — but it does mean the tips need one minute in salted boiling water before they go into anything else. That single minute takes off the raw edge and leaves a clean, pleasant bitter note behind.

After blanching, treat them like asparagus: dressed warm with butter and lemon, or cooled and dressed with a mustard vinaigrette and a poached egg on top. They take very well to cured pork — a couple of slices of bacon cooked off in the pan and the blanched tips tossed through the fat is the standard Belgian and Flemish preparation and it is very hard to beat.

Because the crop is small — a good bine gives maybe three or four usable portions across the season — hop shoots are a garnish rather than a bulk vegetable. That is fine. They are the thing you bring out in April to surprise someone.

Cones, lupulin and what they are actually for

By September the female cones are fat and papery and the yellow lupulin glands at the base of the bracts are fully formed. Rub a cone between your fingers and smell: a good one is intensely aromatic, resinous and slightly citrus. A brown one smells of hay, and the lupulin has oxidised to nothing useful.

The classic non-beer uses are all bittering, and all work. Ten dried cones in 500 mL of vodka for three weeks make a hops bitters that is genuinely useful in an old-fashioned. A handful in a muslin bag dropped into a bath is the old insomnia remedy — the sedative effect of hop aroma is one of the better-supported bits of herbal tradition, and it is pleasant regardless. And the young cones, pickled in a 3 % brine in June before the lupulin develops, are a genuine delicacy that tastes of nothing else.

Dry the cones at 40 °C for four hours, then store in a dark jar with as little air as possible. They oxidise quickly and lose their aroma within about three months at room temperature — keep them cold and dark if you want them next spring.