Stop Boiling Your Broccoli in Water — Expert Shares a Simple Cooking Method to Make It Tastier

While strolling through a supermarket, you stop in front of the aisle stocked with green vegetables. A gleeful mixture of pride and sublime thoughts rushes into your brain as you stretch your arm to pick up a bunch or two of broccoli. You are the rare one who loves to eat broccoli, you convince yourself. Upon returning home, you pull out the broccoli bunches from a brown paper bag and run your hands through them, feeling their texture and crisp freshness. Its tiny granulose florets feel tender like young spring grass. Its firm, bodacious stem feels hard, crunchy, and solid against the skin of your palm.

After a while, you take out the broccoli and toss it into a pan with boiling water sputtering within. As you sprinkle the boiled broccoli on your pizza, you squirm. It’s bitter. You were never a picky eater, but the taste of broccoli makes you feel as if you have become one because now you can’t eat another bite of that broccoli pizza. The culprit, however, is not the broccoli itself but rather the incorrect cooking method. In an interview with The Mirror, Jamie Vespa, culinary expert and creator of Dishing Out Health, shared the reason why broccoli should never be cooked in boiling water.

Vespa explained that the “no boiling” advice is not just to avoid the broccoli getting bitter but also to protect the essential trove of nutrients the vegetable carries within its potent leaves. Instead of boiling, she suggested sautéing it. "Unlike boiling, which can cause some of the more heat-sensitive nutrients, like vitamin C, to leach out, sautéing helps vegetables retain some of their more delicate nutrients," Vespa told the outlet.

She added that the sauteed version of broccoli is not only appealing to the taste buds but also to the sight of the eater, especially picky eaters. "Perfect sautéed broccoli comes together in just 15 minutes and will become your go-to way of preparing it. Never dried out, perfectly tender, and lightly charred, this broccoli will win over even the pickiest of eaters," said Vespa. An example of a sauteed broccoli recipe was shared by Instagram user @tastefullygrace. The recipe involves cooking broccoli in oil with spices, herbs, chopped garlic, and fresh lemon juice.

According to the Washington University Newsroom, broccoli, which belongs to the family of “brassicas,” carries a subtle bitter flavor squeezed into its leaves as part of a natural defense mechanism triggered by sulphur-smelling compounds called the “glucosinolates.” But by employing a suitable cooking method, the bitterness can be managed. Boiling the broccoli to death, however, is never the correct option, as it tends to strip away many powerful nutrients from its grainy florets.

“If you soak broccoli or boil it in lots of water, you’ll find that it loses some of its vitamins, so it is best to chop it when you’re ready to cook it, and steam it in a pan with a tight-fitting lid,” explains The Food Doctor. When cooked well, the vegetable becomes a rich source of calcium, vitamins, iron, potassium, and antioxidants, per The Spruce Eats. Nicknamed “the flowering crest of a cabbage,” broccoli today is mainly produced by India and China, followed by the United States, according to the World Population Review.