KO EN ES PT FR JA ZH Greek Side dish⏱ 40 minEdit history

Horta (Boiled Wild Greens with Lemon and Oil)

Name: Horta (Boiled Wild Greens with Lemon and Oil)
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 25 min
Total time: 40 min
Yield: 4 servings
Cuisine: Greek
Ingredients: 1 kg wild leafy greens; 1 tbsp salt; 60 ml extra virgin olive oil; 1 lemon; 0.5 tsp salt; 1 clove garlic; 100 g feta

Wild leafy greens boiled and dressed with nothing but lemon juice and olive oil. It breaks the usual blanching rules: twenty minutes, not twenty seconds, the cooking water kept and drunk, no ice bath, no squeezing, oil on while hot. These are tough wild greens, and the aim is bitterness talked down.

Ingredients

4servings

The greens
wild leafy greens · vlita (amaranth leaf), dandelion, chicory, chard, spinach; about half survives trimming1 kg
salt · for 3L of cooking water1 tbsp
The dressing
extra virgin olive oil · be generous; here the oil is an ingredient, not a seasoning60 ml
lemon · juiced, with half kept for the plate1
salt · to finish0.5 tsp
Optional
garlic · sliced thin and stirred into the oil1 clove
feta · to serve alongside100 g

Steps

Wash the greens in several changes of water — wild greens carry grit at the root and three changes is not too many. Cut away the thick woody stem ends but keep the fine stems: the stems are the texture of this dish.
⏲ 10 min
Bring 3L of water to the boil in a big pot with a tablespoon of salt. Why the volume matters and why the lid stays off are in Blanching Vegetables.
⏲ 8 min
Stems first. Give the stems three minutes before the leaves go in. The rule about not cooking different thicknesses together still applies here.
⏲ 3 min
Fifteen to twenty minutes, uncovered. This is not blanching. The bitterness of wild greens has to leave into the water, and tough stems need that long. A thumbnail should go through a stem with no resistance.
⏲ 18 min
Lift them out. No ice bath, and do not squeeze them. Just let them drain in a colander. Hot leaves take up oil; cool them here and the oil sits on the surface instead.
⏲ 2 min
Keep the cooking water. Poured into a cup with a squeeze of lemon it is what Greeks call the zoumí. Blanching usually discards the water from bitter greens — in this dish that water is half of it.
Spread the greens on a plate and pour the olive oil over while they are still hot. Then the lemon juice, then salt. Reverse the order and the acid kills what green is left, faster.
Let it come down to lukewarm before serving. It tastes clearer at that temperature than either straight from the pot or fully cold. With bread and feta it is a meal.
⏲ 10 min

Variations

Sautéed. Some cook the boiled greens on in olive oil with garlic (horta tsigarista). They take up oil differently that way, so use a little less.
What it goes with. Grilled fish, feta, olives, bread. In Greece it is also a meal on its own.

More detail and the reasons why (3)

The season picks the greens. Vlita (amaranth leaf) in summer, dandelion and chicory in winter, wild fennel and even nettle in spring. In Greece horta is not the name of a plant; it is the name of whatever was picked that day.
Very bitter greens. With dandelion or chicory many households boil once, throw that water away, and boil again in fresh water. They do not remove the bitterness entirely, because it is part of the point.
Hortopita. Boil the same greens, squeeze them dry and bake them in filo and you have the pie. That version does need wringing out — the same reason the pastry in Spanakopita must not get wet.

Tips

Giving up on green is correct. Long cooking releases acids that strip the magnesium out of chlorophyll and the colour goes olive. That is what horta looks like. Horta that arrives bright green is undercooked.
You drink the cooking water. The bitterness and the minerals went into it, and in Greece it is drunk with lemon.
Lemon after the oil. Oil coating the leaves first means less of the acid reaches the tissue. Keep the order and it holds its colour better half a day later (Balancing Flavour).

More detail and the reasons why (4)

This dish inverts the usual blanching rules. Spinach is normally blanched for twenty to thirty seconds, shocked in an ice bath and squeezed thoroughly, and the water from bitter greens is discarded (blanching vegetables). Horta inverts all four. Not a contradiction — different material. Those rules exist to leave tender leaves bright green; these greens have woody stems and real bitterness, and the aim is flavour, not colour.
Why you do not squeeze it. Hot leaves absorb oil; cooled ones only carry it on the surface. So you drain and stop there. Sigeumchi Namul is the opposite case and must be wrung out — it uses very little sesame oil, so leftover water makes the seasoning slide off. Same kind of leaf, different amount of fat, different handling.
Oil last, and plenty of it. A good extra virgin is best kept off the heat and used to finish (cooking oils). Here the finishing oil is the only oil there is, so the quality of it is simply the flavour of the dish.
Half of the trimmed weight survives. A kilo of wild greens becomes about 500g once the woody stems and tired leaves are out, and boiling shrinks it far more. Reckon 250g raw per person.