Hungry Bear and I love bamboo shoots, but we've never cooked with fresh ones until recently. During the winter time, we always see fresh bamboo shoots in our local Asian markets, but hesitated to buy them until a few months ago.

Neither one of us knew how to peel them, so we searched the Internets and discovered it was relatively easy to prep bamboo shoots. Here's an informative video that shows how they are found and prepared. The bamboo shoots in the video are boiled to remove their bitterness. We're not sure why it is necessary because the shoots we get are not bitter, so we simply peel them following these steps.

We've cooked with fresh bamboo shoots several times now and Hungry Bear created this easy sauté with ground pork. It's a simple dish that really highlights the freshness and crunchy texture of the bamboo shoots. Now that we're comfortable peeling fresh ones, it's going to be really hard to use canned bamboo shoots ever again.

Side Note: For a behind the scenes look at our kitchen, check out Jen Yu's kitchen tours: week 3 on Use Real Butter.

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