How to cook brussels sprouts
💰 Support independent publishing and join the $2 Lunch Club! 💰
This week’s question comes to us from Gurj Johal:
What would be a reader’s best reaction to reading one of your newsletters?
To re-examine something they’ve believed for a long time.
The human brain starts out soft and squishy and full of possibilities. We’re born free of opinions, free of hot takes, free of prejudice, and free of hate. We become what the world makes us, and by “the world” I mean those closest to us as we’re growing up. We’re little sponge babies soaking up other people’s opinions because they’re, well, because they’re there.
We adopt our parents’ sports teams. We adopt our parents’ love (or hate) of the outdoors. We adopt the language that our parents’ use to refer to the neighbors, the people they pass in the car (as they remind you to lock the doors), and the people they see on the news. (Please feel free to replace the word parents with whichever caregivers are most appropriate to you.) We adopt our parents’ diets. We adopt our parents’ faith. We adopt our parents’ politics. As we get older the circle of influence grows and we start adopting the opinions of relatives, siblings, neighbors, and others around us. But as like tends to attract like, this only tends to reinforce opinions already starting to take root in our heads, rather than introduce new, and competing, opinions. That will come later.
The Aunt that disagrees with your parents on mostly everything might be a lifesaver. As might a good teacher, or a librarian that overhears you say something stupid and walks over with a book you should read. (Stay away from priests and cops though.)
Now, obviously, as we grow up and start making our way in the world a lot of those opinions that we were introduced to us children get challenged (hopefully) and we start re-examining them. For example, you eventually go to school and meet kids who look different than you and realize the opinions your parents instilled you with aren’t matching the experiences you’re actually having.
Here’s where you get shafted, though. Realizing that you are forming your own honest opinions based on your own experiences in the world is fantastic, but it doesn’t magically hand you the tools to maneuver your new reality.
For example, I grew up in a household where people talked to each other loudly and in anger. My parents screamed at one another, and at us. Eventually my brothers and I screamed at each other, because that’s how human communication was modeled for us. And when we went out into the world, we screamed at other people. Not always in anger, mind you. But our volume was set to “loud.” Because we grew up in a household where you needed to be loud to be heard. And while I eventually decided that this wasn’t how I wanted to talk to people, that realization didn’t come with a set of instructions on other ways to talk to people.
So I got quiet.
Unless I got upset. At which point I went back to what I knew how to do, the thing that had been baked into my little baby brain from watching my parents communicate, I got too loud. I found that I was either sitting quietly in the corner, not knowing how to communicate well, or screaming at others. This was exhausting for everyone around me, and it wasn’t doing me any favors. It took years of therapy—not to mention very patient friends—to actually get the tools I needed to have the kinds of conversations I wanted to have with the people who were around me.
Wanting to fix a broken step doesn’t come with the knowledge of how to fix a broken step. It needs to be learned. Which is hard, but also necessary.
I am so far from answering your question right now, but I’m going to bring us back. Let’s talk about brussels sprouts. I grew up hating brussels sprouts. Rubbery. Squishy. Tasteless. Which is what happens when you boil a brussels sprout for an hour. Which is how my mom cooked brussels sprouts. And all other vegetables. My hatred of brussels sprouts was only increased because she would boil them for an hour, along with other vegetables which shouldn’t have been boiled for an hour, and then prepare two plates. One for me, and one for her. My dad and my brothers would get something else. Usually in the meat and potato families, which I got to watch them eat, while gnawing on rubber sprouts. To add actual injury to trauma, when you bite into a sprout that’s been in boiling water for an hour, the insides of your mouth get treated to a squirt of third degree burns which is just fucking intoxicating. This is why I hated brussels sprouts.
So you can understand why I spent the next ten years avoiding them. Until finally I was invited to a friend’s house for dinner and one of the sides was brussels sprouts.
“No thank you.”
“Why not?”
Explanation of traumatic childhood events ensued, and then my friend said, “Your mother didn’t know how to cook brussels sprouts.” Which was a healing thing to hear. So I tried them, and they were amazing! They had a crunch! They had a flavor! It was wild. I asked her how she’d done it and she walked me through the whole process. My mind was opened.
Brussels sprouts are amazing. Top five vegetable.
So yeah, that’s what I’m hoping to get out of my newsletter: a willingness for my readers to re-examine brussels sprouts. As well as any other opinion that might be living rent-free, and unexamined in their head. And if you still end up still hating brussels sprouts, that’s fine. Maybe you really just don’t like them. But at least you’ll have given yourself the gift of re-examining a belief you’ve been carrying around. Unexamined beliefs are heavy. They’ll keep you from getting to where you need to be.
Throughout our lives, we adopt opinions about things. We’ve talked about the ones that were instilled in us as children, which are the ones that tend to run the deepest, because they were planted into a soft trusting foundation, and those might indeed be the hardest ones to re-examine, if only because we tend to forget they’re even there. These weren’t decisions we ever made, they’re almost part of our firmware. We are Phillies fans because it’s unimaginable not to be. We belong to a certain church, mosque, or synagogue because it’s unimaginable not to belong to that particular type of congregation. We celebrate the 4th of July because it’s unimaginable to not do so. We are this way because we’ve always been this way. But it’s worth remembering that those were put there by others. Sometimes with great love! Sometimes not. Some of us were raised to be healthy, some of us were raised to be carbon copies of unhappy people.
We also need to reexamine the opinions that come to use throughout our entire life. Is the company you were excited to go work for still doing things that make you proud to be there? Does the political party you joined in college still stand for the same things it did back then? Does a friendship still feel mutually beneficial and joyful to you? Is In Rainbows—an album you’ve been defending for close to twenty years—actually any good? Are you sure? Does the idea that you shouldn’t give money to a hungry unhoused person still hold up? Is the subway actually scary? Is that AI breakthrough actually right around the corner? Was the real issue “economic anxiety?” Do you really have an informed opinion about trans athletes? (Really? Informed?)
Sometimes we end up being wrong. Sometimes we were right, until we weren’t. And sometimes we were right and continue to be right, which is nice. All of these are ok.
It’s okay to have been wrong, like I was about brussels sprouts. But in the face of new evidence—there’s good ways to make them!—it would’ve been stupid to not change my mind about them. I would’ve robbed myself of some amazing meals had I not re-examined an opinion—which was made honestly!—and adjusted to the new reality in front of me, which was delicious.
(Do you really think I’d talk about how good brussels sprouts are without including a recipe? I’m not cruel. It’s at the end.)
🙋 Got a question? Ask it!
📣 The next Presenting w/Confidence workshop is happening on September 25 & 26. Sign up! We’ll have fun.
🖤 RIP Robert Redford
🍉 Please donate to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.
🏳️⚧️ Please donate to Trans Lifeline.
And now, a very good brussels sprout recipe:
As a special treat I asked my friend Jim Ray—who’s a wonderful chef, as well as an incredibly kind human being—for his go-to brussels sprouts recipe. This is what he sent:
Roasted Brussels sprouts with bacon
As with most vegetables, the key to making them taste amazing is to a) roast them and b) use a bit more fat and salt than you think necessary. If you’re avoiding meat (or just pork), you can leave out the bacon and just use a neutral oil instead.
Trimming the sprouts just means cutting off a sliver of the bottom that’s likely hardened and turned brown. Try to find smaller sprouts—they’re sweeter—but if you get stuck with some big boys, quarter them.
Opt for the thickest cut bacon you can find. If you are friends with your butcher, just ask her to sell you an entire slab and you can cut it into ½” lardons.
For this many sprout, you will likely need two half-sheet pans. Don’t try to squeeze them all onto one tray, they’ll just steam and not properly roast. You can probably get away with making one tray to serve immediately and then pop a second tray in once folks start serving themselves dinner and it’ll be ready by the time grandma’s boyfriend heads for seconds before everyone else has even sat down.
Equipment
2 half sheet trays
Large bowl
Ingredients
2kg (about 4 ½ pounds) of Brussels sprouts, trimmed and halved
225g (about half a pound) of thick bacon, cut into rectangular lardons
Neutral oil, like canola or sunflower seed
Salt
Directions
Set the oven to 450ºF and arrange two racks in the middle.
Cook the bacon lardons over medium low heat to render out as much fat as possible and crisp the bacon. Use a slotted spoon to remove the bacon and leave behind as much bacon fat as you can.
Dump the trimmed and cut sprouts into a large bowl then pour the bacon fat over them and stir to combine. Add a bit of neutral oil if it seems the sprouts aren’t fully coated.
Arrange the sprouts cut side down on the half sheet trays and then pop them into the oven. After 15 minutes, flip the sprouts and roast for another 10-15 minutes until crisp and charred at the edges.
Transfer the sprouts to a serving bowl and toss with the cooked bacon. Taste and add salt if needed.
Because I am selfish and don’t eat hog, I asked Jim for more vegetarian options. He suggested these:
“For a vegetarian version, I’ll add grated parm right when it comes out of the oven for that umami. And a healthy shake of MSG if you’ve got it.
“You can also mix together 1tbsp of sriracha with 1tbsp of maple syrup and toss the sprouts in that after they roast. That shit is gooooood.”
Thanks Jim!
I hope you try this recipe. And if you grew up hating brussels sprouts, as I did, I hope it changes your mind.
All is love.