A New Way to Broccoli

I took a trip over the weekend to see my brothers and my dad.  I helped cook dinner one night and I found out my dad never liked broccoli. I figured that might be the norm for many people because most of us have only been exposed to one or two ways of cooking broccoli and both end up smelling the house in a peculiar way.   I grew up with a friend whose house always smelled like overcooked broccoli, and I just couldn’t get myself to really enjoy hanging out with him ever since, but I was a pretty shallow kid growing up and I realized now how bad of a decision that was to make. The poor guy never knew.  

Boiling broccoli gives off the worst smell, and roasting broccoli in oil and seasoning makes for a crispy nutty and charred vegetable for any meat pairing. But if you want the broc to be the highlight and main of a dish, then blanching should be the choice to make.  

Blanching is a short time in hot water. It should not be so long as to smell your house up.  Blanching helps partially cook vegetables but keeps their color vibrant and green.  Blanching should not conclude with green bay packers green color. That’s simmering and stewing. Too long and for broccoli too smelly.

Blanching liquid is a lot like pasta liquid. It’s salty. More salty than you would want to drink on its own. That salt gets transferred into the par cooked vegetable and onto the surface of the vegetable just like when pasta is being cooked.  Salt is key to make the vegetable taste more like a vegetable. If there is no salt, then the food will not taste like anything. 

This is where I start to differ from traditional blanching.  In most restaurants the veggies are blanched and then shocked in an ice bath to stop the cooking. This is done because the veggies are going to get cooked later on the saute line.  But I like to not shock them and let their cooking temp ride out slowly for two reasons.

One, the ice water takes away the salt. The veggies don’t taste the same as they did when they were surrounded by salt water.  That’s one of the reasons we put salt in there.  The salt on the surface stays on the surface since they were not dunked in buckets of ice water.   

Two, salt is not the only thing that can go in the blanching liquid. It’s just the start. Blanching water is no different than creating a brine for chicken or pork.  It’s a blank canvas for other aromats and aromatic vegetables. Maybe a few dried chilies to add some spunky heat in the background. Maybe some cloves of garlic for all the alliums sake.  How about some coriander and peppercorns and a few wedges of lemon.  Let the aromats transfer their flavors into the vegetables and bring more flavor to the party.  

The key here is removing them a little before their done. Then when it comes time to saute, there is going to be a whole new wow factor going on.  

But for the purposes of broc in a salad, blanching with salt is enough because the binder is where all the flavor comes enter.

Enter the pesto.  Now pesto is just a fancy word like salsa. It doesn’t mean just one thing. It’s a title given to a range of things that are mushed together to form a sauce using a mortar and pestle.  So open your mind to pestos beyond basil and pine nuts. Yes it is good, but our broccoli will fair better with more green. We use a pistachio pesto.  So sub out the pine nuts for pistachio and grind it down with basil and add vinegar and not lemon juice and you have the starto to a pesto that also is a dressing that when tossed in with broccoli gets all trapped in its florets and won’t let go.

That’s what I like about broccoli.  It has a huge surface area that just loves to grab onto things. It is the best vehicle for sauces and flavors. More batter, more sauce, more love for what drives people to eat.  Sometimes I don’t eat chicken unless there is a sauce. It’s hard to even eat a french fry unless there is something to dip it into. Like a pancake without syrup, broccoli don’t do well without its partner, the sauce.  

Our pistachio pesto sauce just turned our blanched broccoli into a composed salad to stand on its own as a first course on the buffet line.  So I hope you look into ordering our broccoli to see how we make a vegetable different. In a way that won’t stink up the house and in a way that brings a wow factor to the meal.