You should never throw away your broccoli stalk again

Say wine, snacks or haute cuisine and the foodies of the online food magazine FavorFlav know where to drink, how to eat it and what to cook. This time our chefs serve you: you should never throw away your broccoli stalk again.

Okay, what I do might be a bit exaggerated: picking the broccoli with the longest stalk in the store. But even if you are a ‘regular’ broccoli eater, we want to tell you that you should not throw away the stalks anymore. What a waste, while you can still do a lot with them.

Because after the florets are cut off, many people just throw the stalk away when they are going to make roasted broccoli in the oven, for example. Maybe they think it has no flavor, or that it is tough or stringy. But let's change that, to reduce food waste and not deny ourselves those tasty pieces.

Whoever cooks has priority
To be honest, the stalk and the stems don't even make it to the next cooking step for me: I think of it as a gift for the cook and while cooking I just snack on it raw and cut into pieces, sometimes even with hummus. With a wide woody stalk, you cut off about an inch or two from the bottom and then thinly slice off the ‘skin’, but with a fresh specimen with a thin crispy stalk and stems, that isn't even necessary.

Save the broccoli stem
And if you have a bit more patience than I do, you'll see that you can also make something delicious from it raw and/or cooked. Just see it as a raw vegetable like kohlrabi or radish that you can eat or prepare further. Just sautéing it in hot oil for a bit and then sprinkling some salt over it and drizzling chili oil on top. You can use them when you're making pickles yourself.

Ooh, this is also delicious!
And we heard another delicious tip from a cookbook by Sylvia Shulman and Madame Wong: peel the stalk, cut it into rectangular slices and then into matchstick pieces (or julienne, as chefs call it) and marinate them for half an hour in a mixture of two tablespoons of sesame oil, three tablespoons of soy sauce or tamari, and two chopped cloves of garlic. Great! And the simplest thing is of course to just prepare them along with the broccoli florets, just put them in the pan a little later because they cook faster than the florets.

So we will never throw away those stalks full of vitamins and flavor again, agreed? Ready? Chop away!