Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
cream, cheese and eggs, but not so strong that they become obnoxious. When the cauli-
flower is done, it should be just soft enough that you can crush a floret between your fin-
gers. You can boil cauliflower, but steaming is better. With boiling, the cauliflower taste is
muted. The vegetable exchanges liquid with the cooking water, losing flavor and picking
up only a little saltiness in exchange. (You do salt your cooking water, don't you?) Steam-
ing keeps more of the taste intact because the vegetable never touches the liquid.
What about all of those confusing "intermediate" brassicas, the ones between broccoli
and cauliflower? How do you prepare them? The best thing to do is assign them to one
end of the spectrum or the other. Forget botany and use two simple criteria to do this: curd
and color. Curd refers to the texture of the unopened flower buds in the crown. If it is
truly "curdy" - tightly grained and almost sandy in texture - cook it like cauliflower. If the
buds are distinct and separate, cook it like broccoli. Similarly, if the heads are dark green,
they must be cooked like broccoli to avoid the "olive drab" syndrome. If they are lighter
in color - white or pale yellow - you can safely cook them for an extended period. The
various bunching broccoli types - broccoli rabe (also called raab, rape and rapini, depend-
ing on who is selling it) and the new one alternately called Broccolini and Asparation -
definitely take brief cooking (and, because of their bitterness, are brilliant with sausages).
The curiouslooking Romanesco can take longer cooking if it is not a too-dark green (some
varieties are).
Once scorned by the general public, broccoli and cauliflower have been enjoying dra-
matically increasing popularity (and prices) over the past several years. The value of the
cauliflower crop in the United States increased almost 40 percent between 2001 and 2003,
and that of broccoli increased almost 30 percent. Even so, the United States still grows
more than twice as much broccoli as cauliflower. Although the acreage planted has re-
mained fairly constant, there has been a boom in the sales of precut cauliflower and par-
ticularly of precut broccoli.
Broccoli
