A cook’s February friend

Side-sprouting broccoli was made for the garden-to-kitchen trek. It’s easy to grow, easy to cut, easy to clean and easy to cook. 

Have you ever grown those huge heads of broccoli? I kept stopping myself from harvesting because I got greedy. “Oh, wow,” I thought, “Maybe I’ll let it go a little more and see how much bigger it can get.” But the bigger the head gets, the better chance of fungus, pests or bolting. Multiple times I’ve let the broccoli plant size up, only to find bugs have beat me to a fresh feast. Bolted broccoli stems are OK to eat, but you’ve gotta catch them at exactly the right moment or the texture is more like gnawing on sticks than stems.

If you harvest a big ‘ol broccoli head, you still have to cut it into smaller pieces, wash it, drain it and cook it. With side-sprouting broccoli, you get to skip the trimming step. Instead, harvest the exact size you want to eat. You don’t even need to cut it with scissors or a knife; I snap off the broccoli florets with my fingers. 

Smaller florets also mean smaller stems, so the cook isn’t left with trying to dice stems into tiny cubes that will cook at the same rate as the rest of the plant. Cooking fresh also means zero of that farty-brassica smell that comes from older, well-traveled grocery store broccoli. 

If you’ve never grown your own broccoli before, I highly recommend it. It takes about a foot of space, produces multiple harvests and the plant will bolt eventually and provide pollinators with some of the spring’s earliest flowers.