I originally wanted to start this blog with an absolute weekday/hangover classic, my shakshouka recipe, but I still haven’t gotten round to taking halfway decent photos because it’s getting rather autumnal and dark here in Berlin in the evenings – and I keep forgetting.
Autumn is the season for brussels sprouts, so I finally cooked something from my latest cookbook acquisition: Plenty More by Yotam Ottolenghi. Rather highbrow, you might say, for a blog carrying the word ‘broke’ in its title. This easy vegetarian side dish, however, doesn’t require a whole page of rare and expensive ingredients, albeit a few more individual steps than a one-pot weekday meal. Moreover, most ingredients are pantry essentials and require little extra shopping. Perfect for penniless cooks.
If you asked me ten years ago about my worst culinary enemies, I would have said liver and brussels sprouts. I’m still not at all sure about the taste of liver but have fundamentally changed my attitude towards sprouts. As it turns out, my East German, mid-1990s, post-Socialist school meal experience did not do justice to the popular autumn vegetable. Particularly oven-roasted, these little green cabbag
es are delicious and versatile and do not need to taste bland and bitter. Plus, they go extremely well with bacon, which counts double on the pro-side of the list because, well, bacon.
Warning, this dish does not contain bacon. But now that I think about it, it totally could.
The most ridiculous but also enticing feature of the Ottolenghi recipe is that it requires 200g of garlic, which is the equivalent of three whole garlics. In Germany, this is considered an abominable amount of garlic to ingest if you plan on riding the bus, going to the office or, just generally breathing in public at any time during the following week. For this one, we will have to ignore the peculiar relationship of our fellow citizens with the spear-shaped leek and peel roughly 30 cloves of it.
Ottolenghi recommends briefly blanching the cloves before frying them in the same pot for a few minutes over high heat. When your cloves are golden brown, add 90ml of water, a few tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, a teaspoon of salt and two generous tablespoons of sugar and bring the whole thing to a boil. Let it boil down until it gets a syrupy consistency and put aside – keep the liquid.
Next up, thinly peel the lemon using a potato peeler, cut them into thin stripes and add to a pot with the juice of said lemon and 100ml of water. Bring to a boil and, again, let it boil down for a good ten minutes and put aside – this time, you can discard the syrup.
Now for the main star of the show, the brussel sprouts. Clean them, remove the stem and cut them in half. Heat some olive oil in a heavy pan on high heat and brown the sprouts from all sides after seasoning them generously with salt and freshly ground pepper in the pan. You want them slightly charred and crispy, which is why it is recommended to do one half first and the other half later as not to crowd the pan. You might have to add some extra oil to do the second half. Try not to stir too often so they brown nicely and don’t fall apart.
Now that you have the main ingredients ready, finely chop up a chili, leaving the seeds in for some heat, or leaving them out if you just want the aroma. Add the chili to the sprouts together with the garlic and the cooking liquid and let the flavours sink in for about 10 minutes. Toss in the caramelised, liquid-free lemon peel as well as 10-15 roughly chopped basil leaves.
As you can tell, I forgot to take a picture of the final product, which is not very smart when you’re trying to make a food blog. I ask you to take that last photo and imagine it with 30+ brown garlic cloves, little sugary pieces of lemon peel and some chopped basil. Add some bacon, if you must.
We had this dish alongside the Momofuku chicken wings, which I talk about here.
Yotam Ottolenghi’s brussel sprouts with garlic and caramelised lemon peel
- 200g garlic cloves (three large garlics)
- Olive oil
- 2 teaspoons of balsamic vinegar
- 3 large spoonfuls of sugar
- 1 large organic lemon
- 500g brussels sprouts
- 1 red chili
- 10-15 basil leaves
mostly broke, always hungry 