13 September 2016

I can fly, but I want to soar

Penne with “melted” broccoli

Every now and then, you come across a recipe that flies in the face of what you have been taught about cooking. Such is Roy Finamore’s broccoli cooked forever, in which the vegetable cooks for two hours.

On the Internet, you can always find someone to defend any darned thing. Overcooking vegetables hardly qualifies for dark web material, but there are practical reasons against doing so, foremost being nutrition loss. Plus, who eats soggy, mushy veggies? Offhand I can think of infants (as if they have a choice), and then there’s a friend’s father.

I’m not exactly new at this stuff. Remember roasted cauliflower? That took 45 minutes, and it was very good. Also, bacon braised green beans. As for the broccoli, I decided they had cooked long enough at 25 minutes — I only used the florets from a single head, and 2 to 3 tablespoons of olive oil, plus some cracked black pepper and chili flakes, leaving out the anchovies. I did not see how cooking the broccoli any longer would make a difference as the florets were already crumbly; after all, I was not aiming for pesto.

Penne with “melted” broccoli

Maybe I should have. Was it any good with pasta? Sure. Let us just say that the trick is in getting others to understand that that broccoli is “melted” on purpose. “Really,” the help said. “You could have fooled me.”

Hand me the masher; at least broccoli is nutty enough already.

This post has no comments.

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...