Broccoli Caesar

[project]

My grocery now has big heads of fresh broccoli.

Basically I like broccoli after it is fixed up with enough butter, garlic, Hollandaise sauce, etc., but now wanted to try it with basically a vinaigrette.

But, with a vinaigrette, can borrow from traditional Caesar salad ingredients and get more flavor.

Then can borrow more from Caesar salad and add croutons and grated hard Italian cheese and do still better?

Yes! It's good! Good way to eat broccoli.

So, I took two heads of fresh broccoli, cut off and separated the 'flower' parts, peeled and sliced some of the stalks, and added to a 2 quart pot. The pot was about 3/4ths full. I added about 1/2 C water, covered, placed over high heat, waited until steam came out of the pot, turned heat to low, and got the croutons and cheese ready.

So, I steamed the broccoli maybe only 90 seconds once I turned the heat to low. Should basically just get the broccoli nicely hot. If cook much more than that, then will have limp, soggy, mushy broccoli.

Drained the broccoli, dumped into a serving dish, topped with salt and pepper, vinaigrette, croutons, and grated cheese.

For the cheese, I used an Italian Pecorino Romano, but Parmigiano Reggiano might be a little better.

I couldn't make the stalks good and will omit them the next time: If don't peel the stalks thoroughly, then get some stringy inedible parts. If do peel, or trim, the stalks thoroughly, then don't get much, and what do get needs more cooking than the flowers.

Ideas for more?

The key is just the vinaigrette, and that is:

1 USDA Grade A Large egg boiled 10 seconds (at own risk!)

1 T Worcestershire sauce

1/3 C red wine vinegar

1 1/2 T finely minced garlic

3 T prepared Dijon mustard

1 t dried basil

1 t dried oregano

2 T dried parsley

1/2 t salt

pepper

1 C olive oil

One 2.0 ounce can flat anchovies packed in oil, minced, with the oil

Combine all but last two ingredients. Whip.

Add last two ingredients slowly with whipping.

[Daniel]

Sounds great project.. Will have to do this soon.

[emilyr]

You can just peel and add the stems to the boiling water a minute or 2 before the florets to make sure they're done as well as the tops.

[project]

emilyr,

You are at least partially correct!

When I wrote about peeling broccoli stems, the ones I had had very irregular cross-sections and were not nearly 'convex' (explanation below). So, these stems were difficult to peel, and after peeling very little was left.

However, the broccoli stems I used last night had cross-sections that were nearly oval and quite accurately convex. Thus those stems could be peeled by starting at one end and taking off long strips much like peeling a banana. The result was a little more edible broccoli.

Peeling was a lot of work, and I sliced and ate the results, and they were okay.

So, some broccoli stems have cross-sections close enough to convex to be used, and others do not.

Note: 'Convex' is from some fields of mathematics. In space a set of points is 'convex' if for any two points x and y in the set the line between points x and y is also in that set. An egg is convex but half of an empty egg shell is not.

For many applications, e.g., cooking, we can assume that the convex set includes its surface ('boundary'). In this case, a standard result -- an important 'separation theorem' -- is that any such convex set can be obtained by using planes to cut away points not in the set. There is a proof, e.g., in W. Fleming's 'Functions of Several Variables'.

In cooking, a knife or vegetable peeler can act as such a plane to remove points not wanted!

That is, in cooking peeling usually results in a convex result and works better starting with a convex object. Or using a knife or vegetable peeler to peel an object that is not nearly convex can result in a lot of peelings and a small result.