Vegetable of the Week: Broccoli

It is coming up on the end (hopefully) of winter. As such you might disrepair of finding any good fresh vegetables in the market. Well, fear no more! There are many vegetables that are in season now, including broccoli.

The broccoli that you typically see in the store is actually called Calabrese broccoli, a relatively modern cultivar of the Cruciferae/Brassica family of vegetables. Other Cruciferae/Brassica vegetables include the much maligned Kale and Cabbage as well as brussels sprouts and cauliflower. I found some debate as to its exact origin...but most of the articles I read (see references below) agree that the broccoli we are familiar with today was created in what we now call Italy, though it was quite some time ago (perhaps as early as the first century CE). This is still relatively recent in comparison to its original parent vegetable which was eaten over 5000 years ago.

Broccoli gets a bad rap - broccoli farts, anyone? This smell is due to the naturally occurring sulfur compounds in the vegetable. They are worse if you over cook the broccoli or wait too long to eat it (either letting it grow too long in the garden before picking or letting it sit too long after buying before cooking). But those very same sulfurs may be really important to your health! Its a load of complex chemistry...but the end result is that compounds in broccoli (and other Cruciferae/Brassica vegetables) break down into antioxidants known to protect against cancer.

Ever hear of "magic smoke"? I'm not talking about what is now legal in colorado. I'm talking about the joke that is shared between antique vehicle enthusiasts and computer repair people."magic smoke" is what you smell or see right as a component in the machine fails (typically ozone). The joke is that if you let the magic smoke out of the machine it no longer works - as though the smoke was what was powering the item. The same holds true for broccoli - but in this case the magic smoke is the sulfur smell. If you smell the sulfur, you let out the magic and the broccoli is not a nutritionally valuable to you anymore. So don't overcook it!

There is no reason why you can't just eat it raw. It is great this way. There is some discussion as to whether the nutrients in broccoli (or any food for that matter) are more bioavailable if they are lightly cooked. 

I prefer to lightly blanch my broccoli so that it turns bright green. I often don't even place the broccoli into the boiling water. For instance I will take a full sized pasta pot and boil up some lightly salted water...get it to a nice rolling boil. Then I place the raw broccoli into a colander and simply pour the boiling water over the broccoli. 

In addition to the sulfur in broccoli...why should you eat it? Nutritionally it is a powerhouse (superfood is such an annoying term). It (like most vegetables) is low in calories  - only about 30 in a 3 oz serving. In those 3 oz though you get more than 100% of your daily recommended intake of Vitamin C (64.9mg) and over 100% of your Vitamin K (141 mcg), you get about a third of your Vitamin A for a day (1548 IU) and a reasonable amount of Fiber (3.3g) plus lots of other important stuff.

Another reason you should eat it...right now -  its cheap. Its not normally the most expensive of vegetables but now its even cheaper. It is getting to the end of the broccoli season here in the United States. Soon we will have to import it from areas in the southern hemisphere. So take advantage of the discounts and get some broccoli now.

Buying broccoli

If buying it fresh you should look for tight closed and uniformly dark green - almost purple- flower top. The stalk should be firm and pale. Any leaves should be very dark green and not wilted. The cut end should not appear slimy or brown.  Most people prefer the tops of the broccoli to the stalks. It is perfectly acceptable to buy only the tops if you can. 

Frozen broccoli is acceptable for most dishes (not salads of course) and as frozen vegetables are picked at their peak in the season and blanched and frozen right away, the nutritional difference is negligible (though you should still try to cook it as briefly as you can).

Resources.

The world Encyclopedia of Cooking Ingredients, Christine Ingram, 2004

The Wellness Encyclopedia of Food and Nutrition (UC Berkley), Sheldon Margen M.D., 1992

http://www.vegparadise.com/highestperch44.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broccoli

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22303412

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/antioxidants/

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/research_says_boiling/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioavailability

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable-products