{"id":573,"date":"2009-11-03T00:01:50","date_gmt":"2009-11-03T00:01:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/?p=573"},"modified":"2009-11-03T00:01:50","modified_gmt":"2009-11-03T00:01:50","slug":"the-cabbage-core-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/the-cabbage-core-challenge\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cabbage Core Challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

4 Tricks for Taking the Sting Out of Bitter Vegetables<\/h2>\n

There’s a reason grocery store displays of broccoli rabe, rutabagas and turnips go<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Cabbage<\/em><\/em>
Does my "waste not-want not" motto really extend to cabbage cores?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

untouched for hours at a time.\u00a0 Some members of the vegetable kingdom are just a little harder to like than others.\u00a0 But we still want the flavor and nutrient diversity they offer.\u00a0 Happily, there are ways of preparing these difficult specimens that make them more palatable.\u00a0 Although the following article focuses on cabbage cores, a particularly challenging vegetable, its tricks can be used to form a good working relationship with any of the harsher vegetables.<\/em><\/p>\n


\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here’s an honest admission:\u00a0 I have a “waste-not-want-not” thing going on. My Twitter column<\/a> is filled with vegetable dishes fast enough for breakfast and lunch\u2014a good many made with stems, stalks, cores and leaves that normal cooks would pitch.\u00a0 But not me.\u00a0 I have this thing about waste, so I set myself a personal goal of starving my compost pile as much as possible.<\/p>\n

To date, things have been going pretty well.\u00a0 I’ve been turning kale stems, cauliflower leaves, broccoli stalks and other such “refuse” into tasty dishes\u2014boosting my vegetable intake and stretching my vegetable dollars.\u00a0 But then came yesterday’s cabbage core.\u00a0 Couldn’t I safely pitch that without violating my self-inflicted waste code?<\/p>\n

Tasting a piece of it triggered deep, gastronomic memories of everything bad about cabbage.\u00a0 I now knew why the cabbage itself was unbelievably sweet and light:\u00a0 Every bit of the head’s strong, musky, sour and harsh taste had been sucked into the core!\u00a0 And that foul taste is what I got upon testing a bite.<\/p>\n

I immediately started to scrape the whole thing towards the compost bin.\u00a0 Not until the last<\/p>\n

\"Cabbage
The compost bin got the moldy end of the core, but the rest got chopped for a higher purpose. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

second did my better self rise to the occasion.\u00a0 The compost bin got the moldy end of the core (I do have some<\/em> limits!), but the rest got chopped as I decided how to transform it into something I could stomach.\u00a0 Working with vegetable parts that are frequently discarded, I’ve learned a few tricks to render them not only palatable but pretty decent-tasting.\u00a0 This core was about to be my biggest challenge to date.<\/p>\n

Trick 1:\u00a0 Cook It <\/strong><\/span>Cooking is the best way to extract the bitterness from a vegetable.\u00a0 In this case, I didn’t even consider steaming or sauteing but went straight to boiling, which is the preferred cooking method for really tough vegetable characters.<\/p>\n

I know that boiling has lost favor over the years, probably because we get vegetables shipped in year round that are tender enough for just a light steaming or saut\u00e9ing, which is generally better taste wise and nutritionally.\u00a0 But imagine a pioneer farm wife faced with some garden remnant in November\u2014it may be tough and gnarly, but it’s the closest thing to fresh that she will have for four months.\u00a0 She is going to make those stalks or stems taste good no matter what, and boiling is the tool for the job.<\/p>\n

Note, however, that boiling isn’t limited to throwing vegetables in a huge pot of water, cooking the vegetables to death and then pitching the water.\u00a0 On the contrary, I simmer<\/em> rather than boil my vegetables in a tiny<\/em>, not a potful, of liquid.\u00a0 This means any leached out vitamins and minerals get concentrated in an amount of liquid small enough that it can be fully incorporated into the finished dish, minimizing nutrient and flavor loss.\u00a0 Also, I only simmer until the vegetables have lost their bitter or harsh taste, which is often when they are still crisp-tender.\u00a0 My cabbage core had to be cooked beyond crisp-tender, but still far short of mush, before losing its harsh taste.<\/p>\n

Trick 2:\u00a0 Inject Flavor<\/strong><\/span> While water certainly works as a cooking liquid, experiment with<\/p>\n

\"Simmer
This broth has plenty of flavor, so little additional salt was needed.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

different broths.\u00a0 They can inject flavor into the spaces left by the extraction of the vegetable’s bitterness.\u00a0 I used Imagine’s Vegetable Broth, which has plenty of flavor to spare.<\/p>\n

Third:\u00a0 Salt<\/span><\/strong> Salt is also good at both drawing out bitterness and imparting flavor.\u00a0 Your broth might be salty enough as is, but if using a low-sodium variety or water, try adding a little (maybe 1\/4 tsp. to 1\/2 tsp.) of good sea salt. \u00a0I used about 1\/4 tsp. of Celtic salt in my simmer water.<\/p>\n

Fourth:\u00a0 Combine with Other Flavorful Ingredients.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

I always say that sausage is a miracle ingredient.\u00a0 Add just a little and the entire dish tastes great\u2014no work, little cost and no cooking knowledge required. \u00a0Sausage was the primary tastemaker I added to my simmered cabbage core.<\/p>\n

\"Sausage
We just received a shipment of sausage from pasture-fed pigs. It I had no fat, so I had to add olive oil to saute the onion. Less than 1\/4 lb. is all I needed for a great-flavored dish.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I also added sweetly browned onions and sweet snap pea shoots (I rescued a few from thegarden before last week’s snow.)\u00a0 Their sweetness balanced the trace amounts of bitterness left in the cooked core pieces, as would other sweet vegetables (red peppers, corn, etc.) or saut\u00e9ed fruits (like pears and apples), or just rice, chicken, tofu or some kind of sauce with a little sweetness.<\/p>\n

The end result?\u00a0 I think I met the challenge with a delicious for lunch that wasn’t just another sandwich–not by a long shot!<\/p>\n

\n

\"Cabbage
For a little color, I added vivid green pea shoots at the end.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We want to eat more vegetables, but what if they are pretty awful tasting? Four easy tricks take the nasty taste from the harsher tasting vegetables. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11,27,2,20,22,28],"tags":[48,91,92,221,277,332,505,508,615,627],"class_list":["post-573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-what-is-healthy-eating","category-make-vegetables-taste-good","category-healthy-cooking-basics","category-recipes","category-healthy-cooking-money-savers","category-waste-not-want-not","tag-astringent-and-bitter-tastes","tag-cabbage","tag-cabbage-core","tag-food-waste","tag-harsh-tasting-vegetables","tag-imagine-vegetable-broth","tag-sausage","tag-saving-money-at-the-grocery-store","tag-vegetables","tag-waste-not-want-not","masonry-post","generate-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-50"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}