I really enjoy snacking on steamed vegetables lightly sprinkled with some salt and pepper, especially broccoli. However I find that steamed fresh broccoli has a slightly sulfuric smell that smells a little bit like fart. I was wondering if there is anything I can do to lessen that smell.
Way to lessen the unpleasant smell of steamed broccoli
broccolisteaming
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Best Answer
Cook it less, if you can. The more you cook it, the more you get that smell. Perhaps you are just more sensitive to it than most; I don't generally notice it until it's overcooked by my standards.
Along with this, cook it as fast as you can. The flavor you don't like is produced by enzymes converting precursor molecules into those with the flavor. From On Food and Cooking:
So as suggested by others, boiling instead of steaming to reduce cooking time helps. So does cooling quickly, with cold or ice water. Boiling in excess water will also leach some out, but you might also lose flavor you like.
A couple other thoughts, also from On Food and Cooking. Cabbage family vegetables grown in the summer, and under drought stress, produce more of the flavor precursors, and those grown in the autumn and winter with less light and more water have less. They're also more concentrated in the core of the vegetables. And for cabbage, you can remove a lot of them by chopping and soaking in cold water; conceivably the same could work for broccoli, but again perhaps at the cost of desirable flavor.