How much Sliced Fennel is in a Bulb?

It can be maddening to start making a new recipe and not understand how much of an ingredient to purchase at the store. Sometimes they give you a quantity of fennel in volume (2 cups), sometimes as a weight (8 ounces) and still others the fennel is given as a produce description (1 medium fennel). But what are they really talking about? So how much is in a fennel bulb? In order to help make cooking easier we did some experiments to help tell you exactly how many fennels you need to buy.

To answer How many fennels in a cup we went to the local market to check out the produce section. After surveying the available vegetables we discovered that 2 small to medium fennel bulbs weigh about 1 pound; these have about 2 inches of top stock attached. We decided to use 1 medium fennel bulb for our calculations.

We then started preparing and slicing our sample and found it took about 2/3 of the fennel bulb to reach the 1 cup mark. The 1 cup of sliced fennel bulb weighed about 3 ounces (90 grams).

Did you know that by itself fennel has a sweet, mild licorice flavor but when used in cooking it imparts a light, bright spring-like quality to foods. So even people who say they don't like licorice find they enjoy fennel when prepared in a dish. For a zing of flavor, a few feathery fennel leaves are often chopped and added to fresh salads, soups and vegetables or saved and used as a garnish. India is the largest fennel producer in the world.

Next time your recipe calls for a cup of sliced fennel you'll feel confident knowing how many fennel bulbs you need. You can also use our conversion tool below for any custom how many fennel bulbs in a... measurements you need.

Custom Conversions for Fennel Bulb

One Fennel Bulb Equals

• There is 1 ½ Cups (356 mls) of Sliced Fennel in a Fennel Bulb

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How to Store Fennel Bulb

General How to Store Fennel Info

Fennel is best used fresh; the anise flavor diminishes during storage. Fennel freezes and cans poorly. Long storage causes the stalks to dry up, begin to rot, turn brown, or become fibrous, while the interior turns pulpy.

Short Term Fennel Storage

Fennel bulbs will keep in the crisper section of the refrigerator for a week.

Fennel leaves will stay fresh for 3 to 4 days max.

Fennel Long Term Storage

Stored in a root cellar, fennel will hold for about 2 weeks.

Fennel Bulb Recipes

Sous Vide Fennel Fondant Recipe

My next experiment was with a sous vide fennel fondant and it turned out great. The recipe is very simple and very tasty, and is easy to make vegetarian.

Sous Vide Orange-Saffron Fennel Confit

Fennel cooked sous vide becomes very tender in just 60 minutes and retains the majority of its flavor. This recipe adds orange zest, cloves and saffron to the bag before cooking for more interesting flavor levels. Cooking the fennel with a large dose of olive oil confits the fennel, the excess olive oil can be used on other dishes or in vinaigrettes.

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What is the Produce Converter?

One of the biggest hassles when cooking and working in the kitchen is when a recipe calls for "the juice of 1 lime" or a similar measurement. Often times when cooking people use bottled juices, pre-sliced vegetables and other convenient cooking time savers. Produce Converter will help you convert the "juice of 1 lime" and other similar recipe instructions into tablespoons, cups and other concrete measurements.

Produce Converter can also be used to figure out how many vegetables to buy when you need, for instance, "A cup of diced onion." You can use our easy conversion tool to figure out exactly how many onions you need to buy at the store in order to end up with the amount you need for your cooking.

We hope you enjoy Produce Converter and if you have any suggestions for how we can improve it and make your cooking easier please let us know.

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