Purple Sprouting Broccoli with Onion, Walnut and Parmesan Fonduta
A Seasonal Supper for March for Umami Addicts
Hi lovely people, it’s me Rosie! And this week I’m gracing your inbox with a Seasonal Supper, the episode in the month where I take an ingredient at it’s best and give you a bloody nice recipe for it.
Purple Sprouting Broccoli is a variation of the world’s most famous brassica that is just at it’s peak right now. It is basically the winter version of its cousin, tenderstem broccoli, with long, thin stems and fluffy purple florets. It’s delicious and nutty and truthfully not wildly different to the other broccoli you probably eat, the main thing is it’s purple. And we love a little bit of flare in our veg!
The savoury, sulphurous quality of broccoli makes it a really good stand alone vegetable - it doesn’t need much to make it shine, but it can also handle a lot of strong flavours. When approaching vegetable cookery, I often fall back on a meat-based approach, by which I mean treat your main vegetable as you would a piece of protein (meat or fish) and give it a side / sauce / condiment rather than it being one itself. So that’s what we are doing today; making the broccoli our star, cooking it with a light touch, but serving it with a rich, luscious sauce and a divine dressing.
Caramelised onions are a great little topping for hardy green veg, like chilli and garlic but less fiery, more mellow and sweet. If I am doing a roast, I will often toss my greens in a softly cooked onions and butter and top them with a generous drift of parmesan.
This combination is what inspired today’s recipe, which takes it a step further. A fonduta is a creamy sauce where you simple melt cheese into hot double cream. It’s a cheats cheese sauce basically; flourless, rouxless and therefore half as much work. (It also makes a WONDERFUL pasta sauce, fyi). Walnuts are a wonderful milky nut that have a rounded, slightly bitter edge and they are just gorgeous in the fonduta with all that salty parmesan and a clove of garlic. Altogether the crunchy, firm PSB topped with luxurious caramelised onions sitting on a bed of intensely savoury, creamy sauce makes this a very clever and extraordinarily moreish main.
NEXT WEEK ON MORE PLEASE - PIES - including my fave easy pastry, Beef and Gravy Pie, Macaroni Pie and Homity Pie.