Brussel sprouts: an English outcast
A guide on kissing this frog…
Snails, tripe, liver, oysters, squid, jellied eel*. How’s that for whetting your appetite, eh? These are all, predictably enough, some of the foods I found while I was looking for the outcasts, the real unpopular guys at school, of British cuisine. But we all know the story about outcasts, don’t we? It always happens that the nerdy, indie and perhaps pimply kid at school, instead of the hot extroverted one, always ends up being the real keeper. Same goes for food, so for this edition of our new Mucho Outcasts series, meet Brussels sprouts: the all-time unpopular Belgian character of Christmas luncheons who will become the protagonist of your new love affair.
We’ll explore strange things such as how these tiny cabbages may be putting you off because of your genetics, but ultimately why they really do deserve a second chance. Watch out, Kale, the B-Sprouts are coming to get ya — please do enjoy the fame while it lasts.
Go Sprouts!
Our B-stars’ health benefits are a bit insane. They have triple-gold, Michael Phelps, superfood status. This is “they should be sold in pharmacies” level. There are many anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory properties and they’re the royal family of Vitamins C and K.
Note the best time to buy Brussel sprouts is during harvest season. This is from September to March, if you want to keep the carbon footprint low, and if you want the best possible taste… #EatSeasonal #GoSprouts
And for God’s sake, please don’t boil them. Turns out, we’ve been cooking them all wrong all this time.
How to kiss this frog
Steam them, fam. That’s the best deal you’re gonna get, nutrient-wise. I have an issue with the Brussels sprouts tradition. It says that the best way to make them is by making a cross-shaped cut at the bottom of the sprouts and boil them. This is how you’ve most likely had them before, thus ruining the whole experience. Make no mistake, this way of preparing the Brussels sprouts is so wrong that it is as if folks who prepared them in the last century agreed to mess as much as possible with the people of the future. It’s just like climate change, only a little less dramatic. Anyway, my point being that by cutting them and boiling them, the maximum amount of boiling water enters the sprout, which is the perfect way to make it as soggy as possible. This also happens to be the cooking method that activates more of the PTC (phenylthiocarbamide) of the sprout, aka the bitter taste of it, aka the reason why so many object to it. Who’d have thought kids wouldn’t like soggy and bitter green vegetables?!
What went wrong is definitely the boiling part of it, that and the under-seasoning. In fact, former childhood-sprout detractors like celebrity Greek chef Nicolas Callias are giving out the right directions for us, steering us away from the wrong path. Top cooking tips for Brussels sprouts include frying them in vegetable oil, tossing them with sea salt (whooooooah), with the optional herbed Greek yoghurt sauce topping. And not to brag here, but the Mucho app has a few elegant suggestions: give Anna Barnett’s roasted sprouts recipe a go to graduate in the art of living or the honey mustard salad.
Going back to our ancestors’ role in all of this
You might not have guessed (and neither, ever, would I have) that a lot of people have put a lot of effort in trying to understand this aversion to Brussels sprouts. In 2011, geneticists from Cornwall College Fund solved the mystery. Turns out, as there are molecules in your food that match the shape of receptors in your mouth, they discovered that you may or may not have the gene variant that matches with the PTC of the Brussel sprout. Our geneticists friends gave the sprout-sensitive gene a super catchy name: TAS2R38; so, if you possess the TAS2R38 your sprouts experience will be a slightly bitter one. Which is not all that wrong but this leaves us with the hard reality that not liking the sprouts can be hereditary, and it was estimated that about 50% of the world population might have a mutation of this gene, resulting in the other half liking them better. Who knew ancestors would play such an important part on the lack of popularity of the sprouts — as if giving us the wrong instructions to cook them wasn’t criminal enough.
All this genetic and survival predisposition is not to say you shouldn’t give a try. Let’s make no excuses — potential love of your life here — there are mild levels of bitterness depending on the way of cooking it. (Seriously, go for the roasted ones). And before you cast a shade on our sprouts, remember how other outcasts, now reigning popular kids, like Broccoli and Kale, were too discriminated against once.
So, stop objecting, and start loving the sprouts.
* I need more comment on this jellied eel affaire. It’s already pretty jellied, it’s eel. Why, who, how did someone think “oh, I feel like this sea snake is not jellied enough”? Anyone out there in the Medium world a fan of the jellied eel?!
