SFist in the Kitchen: Brussels Sprouts
We loved the empty marketplace we found at the Ferry Building on a soggy New Year's Eve day. Few buyers wanted to come out on the wet holiday. Sadly, many farmers felt the same way, and the thriving market was a shadow of its normal self. Ah, well, we still found some bright green Brussels sprouts to take home for dinner.
Brussels sprouts are one of those love-em-or-hate-em vegetables, and we hope you'll use the comments to share your opinions on the little cabbages. We used to be firmly in the hate-em camp, but the nutty, earthy flavor of these oh-so-cute veggies won us over a couple years back.
If you don't like Brussels sprouts, you're probably turned off by the bitterness, which is never popular with Western palates. There's no easy way around it: Brussels sprouts are often bitter. As Harold McGee says in On Food and Cooking, "whether we cook sprouts rapidly to minimize the production of thiocyanates, or slowly to transform all of the glucosinolates, the result is still bitter." Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Thiocyanates are tricky little devils.
McGee offers one strategy for taming the bitterness: Slice the sprouts in half and cook them in a lot of boiling water. The water leaches the offending compounds out of the center stem of the vegetable, where they tend to congregate. Alice Waters suggests a more time-consuming approach: Cut out the stalk's core before cooking the sprouts.
Photos by Melissa Schneider
The most laborious solution we've seen, albeit one of the more delicious, was a Thanksgiving dish contributed by our friend Tom and his friend Anne, who concocted the salad to emulate one she ate at the now-closed Gordon's House of Fine Eats. Peel the leaves off a whole lotta Brussels sprouts. Pickle shallots and garlic with salt, pepper, and vinegar for half an hour or more. Sauté bacon and remove it, but use the fat to cook slices of red onion. Remove them and use the rest of the fat to sauté the sprout leaves. Toss everything together and serve while warm.
But the dish we always come back to is the one that changed us into Brussels sprouts fans in the first place. Thomas Keller's Bouchon has you tear off the darker outer leaves, trim the stems, and cut a small X in the bottom (the folks at Cook's Illustrated debunk the idea that the small X helps the sprout cook more evenly, but it does give the boiling water a chance to get up into the stem and suck out some of the bitterness). Bring a big pot of salted water to boil, and put the sprouts into an ice bath for a few minutes. Pull them out, cook them in the boiling water until they're just tender, and then drain them and return them to the ice bath so they stop cooking. Once cool, drain and slice in half. You can hold them like this in the refrigerator for a few hours. When you're ready to serve dinner, warm the sprout halves in a mustard sauce of reduced stock, sautéed shallots, and mustard. We served these veggies over a slice of bread and next to a big piece of crisped goose confit. And though we hoped to find a really meaty wine from the Southern Rhône or Provence in the SFist wine cellar, we had to make do with a California Zinfandel.
In the interests of giving you, dear readers, more options for cooking these little guys, we tried the Braised Brussels Sprouts from Perfect Vegetables, and it's a technique we'd use again, if only for its speed. Cut one pound of sprouts in half, sauté cut side down in duck fat (that was our embellishment; any fat will do) until they start to brown, add half a cup of flavorful liquid and a dash of salt, cover the pan and reduce the heat to low. Cook until just tender, about seven minutes, remove the lid, and reduce the liquid while tossing the sprouts to coat in the sauce. We served this with roast chicken and a brown butter sauce, and washed it down with a New Zealand Pinot Noir.
Brussels sprouts love other earthy flavors such as ham, bacon, cheese, and onions. But high notes complement them as well. When we made the braised sprouts, we used fresh-squeezed orange juice for the liquid, and added strips of orange zest as we reduced the braising liquid to a glaze. The mustard sauce and the splash of vinegar in the brown butter sauce serve the same purpose as the tart orange, adding a spark to a dish that would otherwise be nothing but bass notes.
What are your favorite sprout recipes? Let us know in the comments.