Everything changed when I had to start cooking for myself.
Turns out, my parents didn’t know how to cook broccoli. Or… Most vegetables really. Real steak’n’taters folks.
I find broccoli discorse fascinating, because it seems like there’s a lot of people who feel the need to shower it in praise because it’s the default “eww vegies suck” vegetable.
IMO broccoli is ok. it’s like median tastiness veg. Makes some dishes good, makes others suck.
But if you look at the dishes where broccoli is good, it’s always something along the lines of “we lathered this in cheese” or “dunked in salty oil and roasted”. It’s good and the broccoli definetely makes it better, but I also question if you just like cheese and oil.
dunked in salty oil and roasted
You’re describing the most basic of seasoning and cooking. That’s a weird position to take, that you don’t really like a food unless you eat it raw and unseasoned.
Right? I roast mine in the oven, so I must just like heat.
not really?
italian and japanese cuisine don’t consider fat and seasoning the “basics” of cooking - quite the opposite actually. these cultures consider exemplifying the inherent qualities of the fresh ingredients more important and it shows in their dishes. just look at a proper italian pasta dish, or some sushi/sashimi…
it’s only a weird position if you come from a culture where “maximize the amount of brain chemicals this dumps out” is the objective of the cuisine…
That’s a pretty safe bet, given that oil is a great flavour conductor helping flavour remain on the tongue longer, and cheese being a cultured product brings a lot of complex umami flavours to the table.
dunked in salty oil and roasted
Most people prefer their food cooked and seasoned, yes (if you call salt seasoning). That said, you can eat it raw if you so prefer.
I honestly think the stem is the best part. I love gai lan for that reason.
I don’t like broccoli… I’ve tried it in several ways, it’s not to my taste
it just doesn’t taste like much
crunchy is nice, but it makes a mess
steamed is great texture, but little flavour without adding to it
it’s not like carrots that are delicious both ways without adding anything
cooked broccoli tastes like the farts they make.
steamed broccoli is lovely with some lemon pepper.
fresh broccoli is great with some ranch or sourcream dip.
Heavily depends on how well it is prepared, as brocolli reacts not in a good way to a suboptimal cooking process.
Vegetables provided by child catering services tend to be overcooked, because of keeping them warm.
While that is fine for e.g. carrots, it converts brocolli into a textureless pulpy or even slightly watery-slimy stuff.Not just keep them warm! Children are considered like, part of the group that food must be cooked to higher temperatures to keep them safe, like the elderly and the immune compromised. So some foods suck ass when cooked like that! Or so my food manager safety quiz told me. Well it told me about the higher temps. It also told me about turtles carry salmonella and a lot about typhoid mary.
Ok, now I get what the fuss is about. Half my life I have been wandering why people didn’t like broccoli or where that running gag came from. It probably is my favourite vegetable but I never enjoyed food from child catering services or similar places.
Fwiw it’s not just child catering. The trend for the parents of baby boomers was very often to just boil the shit out of vegetables, even at home. And many of those boomers would in turn keep doing that as they had kids of their own.
Roasting vegetables only became a (semi) widespread thing in the '90s. It sounds stupid but before the '80s the idea of chucking broccoli in a stove pan or oven just wasn’t part of the Western home cooking canon - that was reserved for meat.
I definitely remember that was still the norm for my GenX parents in the 2000s and they only started properly roasting vegetables on occasion in the 2010s. Though at least they’d use generous amounts of sauce so we always enjoyed our vegetables.
I always assumed it was because the writers didn’t know how to cook and had only ever eaten over boiled broccoli that has no flavour left, instead of garlic and chili roasted broccoli.
Yes and no. Broccoli, like a lot of other veg, contains bitter flavors that kids can still taste, but adults can’t. So, for them it may actually taste horrible, even if it is delicious for you.
Broccoli is one of the less bitter vegetables. Kids tend to like it. I think kids don’t like overcooked tasteless broccoli.
And they grew the bitterness down over the years, too.
fake: ive always enjoyed brocoli
Maybe you never had those receptor cells. We are talking about 15000 different bitter receptors in kids vs. 5000 in an adult. If you were lacking one in 15k it’s not much of a miss.
Huh. I wonder why humans would just happen to be born with the propensity to hate something good for them only to lose that propensity later in life. Like, would there be some evolutionary advantage? Maybe there are toxic plants that contain those bitter compounds and children who don’t eat them survive to pass on their genes but adults who have lived and learned what not to eat don’t need the same bitterness feedback, so humans evolved to lose it later? Or maybe I’m making stuff up and it’s just one of god’s practical jokes on humans like when we bite our tongue while chewing.
The idea is that some kinds of food are hard to digest or otherwise problematic for kids, while adults can eat and digest a broader diet.
I don’t know where I heard or read it, so take my explanation with a grain of salt. Most poisons taste bitter, so avoiding bitter tasting things means avoiding poisonous things. Since children have a smaller body weight, the lethal dose is smaller for them. As go grow older, your body mass increases and so does your tolerance to poisons. But I am not sure why we would not want to avoid poisons in general even if they were not lethal any more.
Kids have double the taste buds, they taste everything more. #TheMoreYouKnow
Having a kid who always ate broccoli since solid foods were introduced, I think it comes down to more of what options the kids have available, and what their taste buds expect.
A lot of “kid food” marketed to parents is sugar filled, processed shelf stable stuff. If you give your kid “fruit snacks” and Teddy Grams as part if their daily food, of course they’re going to think broccoli or other veg is disgusting.
So even if they have “double the taste buds” (something that I’ve never seen or heard a doctor tell me in all these years), but even if that’s true, if the palate is used to sugar/ultra-palatable foods, yeah, broccoli will taste like shit.
TIL I’m still a kid.
Brokkoli smells like farts to me. I’m not eating something that smells like farts.
The smell is a typical cabbage smell, so you probably won’t like other cabbages either.
True that! Sauerkraut and boiled red cabbage is fine, though.
Well, it is fermented, respectively boiled. Which reduces or destroys some of the sulphur-based molecules that cause this issue.
I recently forgot my broccoli on the stove and finally understood why there are people who don’t like it.
You were steaming it, that’s why there are people who don’t like it
Blanch those fuckers and then paint em up with olive oil and salt and oven roast them. Works awesome for kale too
No, I didn’t like it because I FORGOT it and it turned to mush
I love broccoli. Steamed, grilled, whatever. It’s good. Toss in a sauce, hell yeah. A touch of butter? Delicious. Mm hm.
Think it comes down to how it’s prepared, I love me some raw broccoli with some vegi dip, or roasted with some light oil and s/p. When I grew up I only had it offered steamed or boiled and it was awful.
Our parents didn’t have the internet, there were barely any cooking shows and cookbooks, while plentiful, didn’t lend themselves well to the daily grind that was increasingly taking up their time.
We got professional chefs on YT showing how to make “Michelin Star broccoli” in 30-second shorts and grocery stores that offer all the stuff we might need.
In other words, our parents were in the dark about cooking, relative to us.
It all comes down to two things. The first is timing, because broccoli is best when blanched and not fully cooked, with an appropriate amount of salt and (optionally) nutmeg. The second is deception, because even the pickiest child will eat broccoli when it’s covered with some buttery sauce, like butter and breadcrumbs heated in a pan.
I just don’t care for the texture of it. The flower part of it is completely fine and tasty, but I hate how the stem feels and crunches in my mouth and doesn’t taste good either.
Broccoli and cauliflower are the only foods I detest. I hate their taste. I hate how they feel in my mouth. And I hate their smell.
Real. They smell like fart and the taste isn’t much better.
I’m in my 40s, and Brocolli (and all other cruciferous brassica) still smells and tastes like farts to me. It smells/tastes less like farts than it used to, but the overall flavour is still farts. My partner doesn’t smell/taste it the same as I do, so we eat it quite often.
As an adult, I just accept that “sometimes, part of my dinner will taste of farts” and move on with life.
As someone else mentioned, many people taste all the foulness and bitterness in these things when they’re younger, but as their taste buds age/deteriorate/mature, the foul/bitter flavour can’t be detected any more. In other people, they could never taste it, and in others they will always taste it.
In my case, I look at how much I enjoy the taste of blue cheese or beer, compared to how “yucky” they were when trying them as a child.
I don’t seem to grow out of these. Weirdly, I do like the taste of high-proof liquor; I wonder if I’d also dislike that if I’d tasted it as a kid.
I wasn’t keen on the taste of wine, whisky etc as a child, but I definitely grew to like them. When I was much younger, I drank whisky with coke - now I’d drink it straight, or with a little water. It is better quality whisky, to be fair, but I know my tastes have also changed in that regard.
My tastes did adjust to non-brassica green veg - which I also didn’t like as a child, but I’m stuck with crucifer-fart-flavour and red-onion-makes-my-eyes-and-mouth-burn, probably for life.
Boiled broccoli is terrible!
Steamed broccoli is great!You don’t need to add extra stuff on correctly steamed broccoli.
Brussels sprouts however, are just bad. No way to cook them that doesn’t taste awful. They should be the childhood horror vegetable.
Cut the sprouts in half, brush lightly with something flavorful (olive oil and salt works, but bacon grease is another option) and roast until crispy on the outside. They’re amazing.
Fun fact this is actually new! A Dutch scientist, Hans van Doorn, identified the specific chemicals that cause bitter taste and very quickly bred the bitterness out of modern cultivars
holy shit that’s amazing. That guy needs the Nobel equivalent of food awards, because I started seeing them pop up in restaurants and it made me very happy but I did know why 😆
Roast broccoli and roast brussel sprouts and roast asparagus. Give me greens, evoo, salt pepps, and 425 degrees for some amount of time, and we’re good to go.
