The “kids don’t like broccoli” has a scientific reason. Kids have a lot more receptors for aromas tasting bitter (10 to 15k different chemical compounds taste bitter to them) which reduce to 5k or less when growing up. So some types of food that adults can eat without problems because they lack the receptors have bitter and vile flavours for kids.
That’s interesting. Do you have any sources on this phenomenon?
This one, for example: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4654709/
Or this one: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22197939/
Originally, I had read a cluster of those articles some years ago, but scientific articles like to hide behind paywalls nowadays.
And at old age, it ends like this: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/05/05/526750174/why-taste-buds-dull-as-we-age
his source is that he made it the fuck up!
~(MGR:R joke)~
Plant breeders have also been busy reducing bitterness/tannins in various vegetables like brussel sprouts and canola oil, so things are in fact less bitter than 30 years ago.
Brussels Sprouts are another one… I don’t think I had properly cooked Brussels sprouts until I was in my mid-to-late-20s, and they’ve become one of my favorite vegetables. They’re so fucking good dude.
Any word on if this impacts nutrition?
I’m mostly familiar with animal feed, where nutritional quality weighs quite heavy during selection. For human consumption I assume there are some base nutritional standards when applying to enter the market with a new breed, but might heavily depend on your region.
Doesn’t help a lot of people used to just boil broccoli without seasoning. Doesn’t do the flavor any favors.
My stepmother was that way so I couldn’t stand broccoli growing up. Most vegetables were blan and tasteless without salt and boiled.
I rarely buy them now because I can’t physically handle cooking every day now. So most vegetables go bad in the fridge.
I always assumed this is also why adults love disgusting cheese (I do to a degree as well nowadays). We just lost our sense of taste and call it refined taste.
The “losing taste” is actually a beneficial thing. Most things that kids don’t like are either risky (e.g. coffee) or difficult to digest (all kinds of cabbage), so it is good that kids don’t like them. For adults being able to expand acceess to available foods helps feeding the horde in difficult times.
Broccoli is like green tofu. It tastes like whatever you cook it in. There is perhaps no other food which has more surface area for holding sauce or seasoning.
Broccoli in Thai curry is the way! So good!
To be fair, everything is good in Thai curry.
Cauliflower
Mandelbrotcolli
Broccoli tossed in olive oil, cooked in an air fryer until crispy and then sprinkled with course salt. Delicious 👌🏼
I thought broccoli only got softer when cooked. Does this work if you don’t have an air fryer and you fry it in a pan?
No I’m wondering what would it would taste like to marinade broccoli in butter and garlic then took them out and put them in a dehydrator to make them into chips
Air fryers are just convection ovens. Its baking it.
They are actually different, but it’s based on locations and how/when they circulate air.
This may be an interesting read… Or not, fuck all do I know about what you enjoy haha
That page is giving me a 403 message
Air fryers are closer to impingement ovens than convection (fan-forced) ovens.
Interesting, I had never heard of an impingement oven!
Just cut into bite size pieces, toss it in oil, salt and pepper it, put it on a baking sheet and roast at 425 for around 20 minutes. Don’t fry it in a pan. It will be delicious
So going to try that!
My recent go to ( not broccoli though) is toss some fresh spinach in a pan with oil and hit it with lemon pepper seasoning and a little lemon juice.
Takes like 5 including prep if you don’t mind the stalks.
Do people not like spinach stalks? It’s like my favorite part… adds a tiny bit of crunch/texture.
You forgot garlic. Copious amounts of garlic at every step.
Nice to read about a person that so appreciated the kindness of another that they were willing to extend a kindness to them
broccoli is like anal sex… if you’re forced to have it as a kid, you’re not gonna like it as an adult
This is a relatable comparison
Holy shit
This is awful lolol
Broccoli is so good it makes me horny too. I fucking love broccoli.
But, do you love fucking broccoli?
What happens at the farmers market stays at the farmers market
Never was a statement more false than this one.
Your statement creates a paradox. You must sacrifice a partition to Windows or risk Steve Jobs visiting you in the night.
I’d rather risk Steve jobs visiting me in the night, much safer option.
I’m not kink shaming but if you fuck the broccoli you better not leave it at the farmers market. You take that shit home with you afterwards.
You’re damn right. Broccoli mates for life, not just for Christmas.
Broccoli and cheese is awesome. Other preparations like steamed are not as delicious, but ymmv.
In almost all cases, I frankly detest steamed vegetables. Probably due to my grandmother steaming the absolute piss out of ANY vegetable when we visited. My mother didn’t overcook them nearly as bad, but to this day I just don’t enjoy the flavor of any vegetable steamed nearly as much as I do roasted in the oven. High heat + short time + delicious, crisp, lightly charred goodness
Steamed is my default method of cooking broccoli.
I cut the stalk up for soup and pasta. Then I lightly steam the florets and I like it.
Steamed broccoli with a little soy sauce & Sriracha is one of my absolute favorite snacks. Cauliflower, too. I’m gonna go make some.
Steamed broccoli + garlic salt, just done overdo the brocc until it’s mushy
I think that’s where the reputation comes from. Overcooked broccoli is inedible, and I know people who refuse to leave any bite to it at all, which seems insane.
I feel like crunchy, fresh broccoli is a relatively new trend. I found out about it on my own, at my place as a kid it always looked like green boogers and tasted the way you imagine that would.
That and canned veggies. Don’t know if it’s because we were low income or if produce was just a lot more expensive back in the 80s and 90s. But, I remember eating a shit ton of canned “mixed vegetables” at my house and at friends houses.
My mom was a good cook, but I feel like we didn’t get a lot of fresh veggies unless we were living on a military base where the groceries were subsidized.
I think it used to have to be cooked to hell because in the past it legitimately didn’t taste as good as it does now. Selective breeding has taken a lot of bitterness out of many vegetables.
I don’t know, man, this was the 80s and 90s, it’s not that long ago. It still tastes like I remember if you overcook it.
30-40 years is a lot of time to selectively breed vegetables.
Yeah, no, it’s not that it isn’t enough time, it’s that I’ve been eating broccoli and beans all this time, I would have noticed.
I mean, we all noticed the tomatoes becoming water balloons, it’s not like it’d be unheard of.
You wouldn’t notice slight changes over decades. You’d need to do a side by side comparison to say for sure.
It got cooked to hell because most people can’t cook and that’s what they know. If anything broccoli tasted the better in the 80s, because it wasn’t as maximized for shipping.
My mom used to have a microwave cookbook and would make most veggies in the microwave oven. This cemented my love for crunchy cooked vegetables. I can’t eat green beans in a restaurant because most of the time they are almost the consistency of porridge.
Fun fact: Brocollis is the ‘veg kids don’t like’ in Amercia mostly. Pixar even edited scenes in ‘Inside Out’ where a dad feeds his daughter broccoli, turing it into bell peppers for the asian market:
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-inside-out-has-different-scenes-in-other-countries-2015-7?op=1
This shows some really nice attention to detail.
Broccoli, cauliflower, and green beans we (brother and I) were always fine with as kids. It was the asparagus and spinach I never cared for as a kid. Turned out it wanst the spinach’s fault, my mother would just buy bags of frozen spinach, put it in a microwave safe container and turn it on. So if tasted bad. As I learned to cook I started to like it as I actually used it in other ways. Asparagus though… I rarely give a chance, and usually if I do I’m trying it in bacon freeze which defeats the purpose of eating a vegetable I feel.
Both my kids favorite veggie was broccoli when they were small. I’d prepare it the way you’d get it in an Italian restaurant - small parts of it just bleached for a short time, so it stays firm, served with nice olive oil and salt. (And a bit of lemon, if I have it on hand)
Broccoli (like so many veggies) tastes awful when overcooked into a soft and mushy consistency (and then it also changes its taste in a bad way).
Here in Germany grandmas typically are amazing cooks, with the sole exception when they cooked veggies. That generation loved their vegs really soft and overcooked.
I only like raw asparagus. If it is cooked, it tastes nasty as hell
Never had it raw, thanks for the tip. I’ll give it a try
If you are a super taster, broccoli taste like grass smells. At least for me and my daughter. Its so bitter that I threw up one time when I was a kid being forced to eat it. So lets accept that to someone with a lesser/different sense of taste/smell its okay. To those of us who can smell when someone has been in their house five hours after they left it taste completely different. So no thanks I don’t want to eat grass.
Fellow super taster though it’s more like a curse. It also extends to wine, beer, coffee, onions, and numerous other things because my sense of bitter is too strong.
Do you think that your special taste buds not liking broccoli are so widespread that they’ve made not liking broccoli a common cartoon trope?
How do you find out if you are a supertaster? I’m curious because growing up I couldn’t stomach any vegetable that was bitter. Broccoli, brussel sprouts, celery, etc. were enough to make me gag just from the flavor. Nowadays, I can cope with the bitterness by focusing on other flavors and textures but I’ve definitely been in positions where I have a single bite of celery and then can’t muster up the courage to eat for a solid hour.
vegetables in general and tasting bad is moreso lack of preparation/cooking rather than the actual thing itself most of the time. Brusselsprouts is the polarizing one where its seen the most.
Brussel sprouts are so easy to make good as well, just put them in the oven at like 400 with some oil and a bit of salt
It’s because traditionally bitter vegetables have been selectively bred to taste better. The brussel sprouts and broccoli your parents had were very different than what we have today.
Honestly I’m still pretty skeptical of this factoid. The Brussel sprouts now taste pretty similar to the ones I had in the 80s and 90s when cooked the same way. The whole “Brussel sprouts taste new” feels like some industry marketing to me.
Your memory of what something tasted like 30 years ago probably isn’t super accurate. It’s a fact that they’ve been selectively bred over the last few decades to taste better.
I mean wouldn’t that also apply to everyone who thinks they taste better? And why would they have only started trying to make them taste good recently?
If you’ve been eating broccoli throughout the whole selective breeding process, then the flavor change would have been subtle enough that you don’t realize there’s been a change at all. If you ate them side by side, the difference would be noticeable.
It’s not too different from Jim adding nickels to Dwight’s phone, then suddenly removing them.
If something tastes slightly different every few times you have it you’re probably not going to notice a difference over 30-40 years.
Maybe, but brussel sprouts still taste like shit.
Broccoli is and always has been really good, if cooked correctly.
Brussels sprouts in sambar is GOAT tier
Fun Fact, if broccoli kinda tastes like soap to you, congratulations! You have a gene variation that makes certain bitter flavors taste like soap, it’s stronger in childhood (which is potentially why “Kids hate broccoli” trope is a thing) and tends to fade into adulthood, but not always.
There are also studies being done to figure out specifically which compounds in broccoli make it taste like that to cultivate it out to encourage more broccoli consumption
Are you saying that I might stop hating coriander when I retire? But I really like broccoli, so maybe it’s a different kind of soap gene…
Glad to see some scientific stuff under a “I would fuck his mom for serving broccoli” content.
I hated broccoli as a kid and I still hate it as an adult. It tastes the way farts smell. 🤮
If you ever feel like giving it another go, try roasting it up with the florets coated in some olive oil, crushed garlic, salt, pepper and a bit of smoky paprika if you’ve got it around
I guarantee it’ll at least be the best version you’ve had
Found my dinner tonight. Thanks!
Had me in the first half, not gonna lie
My theory on this is that some of the hate for a lot of vegetables comes from either eating canned ones or poorly cooked ones. My girlfriend didn’t know she liked green beans until she started living with my family and my father made her some. My dad sautéed the in butter with garlic, and she only had ever had those extremely mushy canned ones and had concluded on that basis she hated green beans.
