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Broccolini
We spend as much time thinking about what vegetables to put on a plate as about what to put in the center of the plate. It irks us when customers don’t eat those vegetables that we have worked so hard to prepare. So, it probably comes as no surprise that we monitor popularity of vegetables with the garbage can test: by seeing how much comes back from the dining room to end up in the garbage can. And when we find a vegetable that doesn’t end up in the trashcan, you know that we have a winner.
Recently, a relatively new vegetable called Broccolini® has dropped in price enough for us to start using it at the restaurant. I’ve eaten it at home for nearly five years. It seems that no other vegetable has generated so many questions in the dining room. “What is it?” everyone asks. Not really knowing, I’ve been saying that it’s a new cultivar of broccoli, which it is, but what a dry answer to a vegetable with a most interesting history.
I set out to find out about Broccolini with my vegetable broker, a guy who’s been in the market for 30 years. When Ralph told me, “Ed, I don’t really know,” I knew I had to dig deeper.
Our story takes us to Yokohama, Japan back in the late 1980s, to Sakata Seed Company who sell 80% of the broccoli seed on the market. Being business guys, they asked how they could expand their market. Broccoli is a cool temperature crop, which restricts its growing seasons and locations. If broccoli could be selected for more heat tolerance, more growers could grow more and Sakata could sell more seed.
Enter gai lan, the Chinese broccoli that we serve from time to time at the restaurant for its big, sweet stalks. Gai lan is a more heat tolerant genetic cousin to standard broccoli, with much tastier and less tough stems. Perhaps a cross of broccoli and Chinese broccoli would give Sakata the heat resistance they were seeking, without losing the essential broccoli nature of the resulting vegetable.
Using traditional hand pollination techniques, Sakata's breeders set out on a quest for a stable hybrid, crossing and recrossing to get the desired characteristics. It took them seven years to arrive at the goal, which they named Asparation, in part for the long asparagus-like stems. The new vegetable is genetically more than three-fourths standard broccoli with six- to seven-inch long stems and a small flowering broccoli-like head.
Now to California. Asparation seeds ended up with two growers for trials, with small family grower Sanbon of El Centro, which uses the Asparation name, and with Sakata’s largest broccoli seed customer, mammoth Mann Packing of Salinas, which coined and trademarked the term Broccolini. What these growers found is that Broccolini is not any less heat sensitive than standard broccoli, and it has particularly demanding water and fertilizer needs. Broccolini can turn bitter and stringy if the rain and weather do no cooperate.
Moreover, Broccolini is expensive to harvest. It doesn’t have an easy-to-cut central crown like standard broccoli. Rather, it has a profusion of side shoots, not all of which mature at the same time. So, it has taken some training of the workers who harvest it to select only the ripe shoots. Add to this that the crop doesn’t ripen consistently across adjacent blocks and you have a difficult to grow vegetable.
Given these difficulties plus the small scale of production, the product is naturally expensive, yet its future looks very bright. Why?
Broccolini has great shelf-life when compared to broccoli: I have no worries about carrying a case across the weekend in our cooler, a major concern when I’m paying twice or three times the cost of broccoli. It’s also completely edible. We merely slip the rubber bands from the bunch, wash the product, and use it. No labor costs—no prep time! And Broccolini makes quite an elegant statement on our plate.
But the number one reason for Broccolini’s success: it passes the garbage can test! |
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