A Cornell scientist's quest for the perfect broccoli

From nytimes.com:

Photo: Thomas Bjorkman, courtesy of The New York Times.

There it sits, a deep-green beauty at the farmers’ market: that sweet, crisp nutritional dynamo we know as fresh local broccoli. 

And then there’s this: a bitter, rubbery mass that’s starting to turn yellow around the tips, all bumped and bruised from its long trip from the field to the supermarket.

Thomas Bjorkman, a plant scientist at Cornell University, examined the store-bought specimen like a diagnostician, unflinchingly but with a certain compassion.

“It’s soft, almost limp,” he said, prodding one of the heads. “That sharp smell is from the sulfur compounds. Scale of 10, with 10 being broccoli picked the same day you eat it? I’d give this a 2, maybe a 3.”

For all the wonders of fresh broccoli, in most parts of the country it is available from local growers only during the cooler weeks at either end of the growing season, nowhere near long enough to become a fixture in grocery stores or kitchens.

Broccoli hates too much heat, which is why 90 percent of it sold in the United States comes from temperate California, which is often bathed by fog. The heads are fine if you live there, but for the rest of us they require a long truck ride (four or five days to the East Coast) and then some waiting time in a warehouse, tarnishing the appeal of a vegetable that health experts can’t praise enough.

But Mr. Bjorkman and a team of fellow researchers are out to change all that. They’ve created a new version of the plant that can thrive in hot, steamy summers like those in New York, South Carolina or Iowa, and that is easy and inexpensive enough to grow in large volumes.

And they didn’t stop there: This crucifer is also crisp, subtly sweet and utterly tender when eaten fresh-picked, which could lift the pedestrian broccoli into the ranks of the vegetable elite. Think Asian-style salads of shaved stems, Mr. Bjorkman suggests, or an ultra-crisp tempura with broccoli that doesn’t need parboiling.

“If you’ve had really fresh broccoli, you know it’s an entirely different thing,” he said. “And if the health-policy goal is to vastly increase the consumption of broccoli, then we need a ready supply, at an attractive price.”

The new broccoli is part of a mad dash by Cornell scientists to remake much of the produce aisle. The goal is to help shift American attitudes toward fruits and vegetables by increasing their allure and usefulness in cooking, while maintaining or even increasing their nutritional loads. In recent months, the Cornell lab has turned out a full-flavored habanero pepper without the burning heat, snap peas without the pesky strings, and luscious apples that won’t brown when sliced — a huge boon to school cafeteria matrons plagued by piles of fruit that students won’t eat unless it is cut up.

The Eastern Broccoli Project, based at the university’s Agricultural Experiment Station here in this small Finger Lakes city, also aims to maximize the new broccoli’s concentration of glucoraphanin, a compound that has been found to aid in preventing cancer.

In this crusade, Mr. Bjorkman, 50, is a hybrid of Mr. Wizard and the Mr. Smith who went to Washington. While developing the new plants, he has lobbied lawmakers on Capitol Hill to include money for vegetable research in the new farm bill. He has reached out to farmers, grocers and economists to ensure the new broccoli finds a mass market, first in the East, then in other parts of the country.

Two years of successful trials involving the largest seed companies have made the hot-weather broccoli plants ready for farming, though it may be several more years before East Coast grocers start selling the local florets.

Read the rest of the story here.