Prepare Broccoli for Vegetable Beef Soup

Video Transcript

Helen McMahon, here for Expert Village. We have some nice broccoli. This is good fresh broccoli that was left over from our holiday meal. It’s not cooked but it’s a wonderful addition to a nice rich beef vegetable soup but you have to be a little bit careful about it because these nice stems will cook very quickly. These leaves are wonderfully nutritious but we don’t want to throw them in early in the cooking process because they will just overcook and lose their color and become kind of a blah kakis color, so I’m going to pull those off and reserve them until just the last minute. Meanwhile, we have pretty stiff tough stems here. It’s not a problem for the soup because the soup can cook a long time and soften these up. But in order to make that process go a little more quickly, we are going to do a few things here. First of all, we will cut off the touch end and discard that in our compost heap and then just peel down gently the tougher parts towards the bottom. This is kind of tough cellulose, so it is a little harder to digest it. Pull that down; just the stiffer parts of it and usually folks do not like to have these tough ends. They love the upper part which has the pretty tender broccoli flowerettes that are so delicious either as a side vegetable or in a platter with crudités and a nice vegetable dip. But remember these cook just quickly within a minute or two. This tough part is also very nutritious but this is what we are going to put in our stew now. We will cut it in half and then slice up in fairly thin strips and cut them all up and they can cook for as long as the other vegetables do, the potatoes and etc. Make them fairly small because they are kind of tough and that will give an additional element of vitamin A to our soup so this is a nice size but reserve the flowers and leaves which can be chopped up until the very last minute because you don’t want these to get soggy and loose their pretty green color.

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