Are you still throwing away the broccoli stalk?! Shame on you!
Okay, what I do may be a little excessive: picking out the broccoli with the longest stalk in the store. But even if you’re a ‘regular’ broccoli eater, we want to tell you that you shouldn’t throw the stalks away anymore! What a waste, when there’s still so much you can do with them…
Because after the florets have been cut off, many people simply throw away the stalk when, for example, they’re making roasted broccoli in the oven. Maybe they think it has no flavor, or that it’s tough or stringy. But let’s change that, both to reduce food waste and to stop depriving ourselves of those delicious pieces.
The cook gets first dibs
If I’m being honest, that stalk and the stems don’t even make it to the next preparation step in my kitchen: I think ‘a little treat for the cook,’ and during cooking I quietly snack on them raw and cut into pieces, sometimes even with hummus. With a broad, woody stalk, cut a centimeter or two off the bottom and then thinly slice off the ‘skin,’ but with a fresh example with a thin, crunchy stalk and stems, you don’t even need to do that.
Save the broccoli stem
And if you have a little more patience than I do, you’ll see that you can also make something delicious with it, raw and/or cooked. Just think of it as a raw vegetable like kohlrabi or daikon, which you can eat as is or prepare further. Fry it briefly in hot oil, for example, then sprinkle some salt over it and spoon chili oil over it. You can use them when you’re making pickles yourself.
Oh, this is delicious too!
And we heard another delicious tip somewhere, from a cookbook by Sylvia Shulman and Madame Wong: peel the stalk, cut it into rectangular slices, then cut those again into matchsticks (or julienne, as chefs call it), and marinate them for half an hour in a mixture of two tablespoons of sesame oil, 3 tablespoons of soy sauce or tamari, and two chopped garlic cloves. Great! And the simplest option is, of course, to cook them together with the broccoli florets; just add them to the pan a little later because they cook faster than the florets.
So from now on, we’re never throwing away those stalks packed with vitamins and flavor again, agreed? Ready? Start chopping!
Also read:
- Recipe: broccoli and spinach soup by Yvette van Boven
- Is raw vegetables healthier than cooked vegetables?
- This gadget is the best way to approximate that authentic wok flavor
