ones can be cooked or steamed with seafood
to intensify the sea aroma.
Sprouts Sprouts are seedlings, newborn plants
just an inch or so long, and are mainly stem,
which elongates to push the first set of leaves
aboveground into the sunlight. Of course these
infantile stems are tender and not at all
fibrous; they’re usually eaten raw or very
briefly cooked. Many different plants are
germinated to make edible sprouts, but most
of them come from a handful of families: the
beans (mung and soy, alfalfa), the grains
(wheat, corn), the cabbage family (cress,
broccoli, mustard, radish), the onion family
(onions, chives). Because seedlings are so
vulnerable, they’re sometimes protected with
strong chemical defenses. In alfalfa sprouts,
the defenses include the toxic amino acid
canavanine (p. 259); in broccoli sprouts, the
defenses are sulforaphanes, a kind of
isothiocyanate (p. 321) that appears to help