Roasted Brussels Sprouts With Kimchi and Ginger Recipe

Why It Works

• Roasting at very high heat caramelizes and chars the edges of the Brussels sprouts without allowing the insides to turn too soft.
• A balanced combination of tart and spicy kimchi, fish sauce, rice wine vinegar, and honey perfectly complements the nutty sweetness of Brussels sprouts.

I ‘ve had a batch of kimchi in my theater recently. I mean a batch. See, a few weeks back, as I was tweaking my recipe for fried chicken sandwiches, I got to thinking. I ‘d been experimenting with using fix juice as a brine for my fry chicken. It ‘s a agile and comfortable magic trick that helps your chicken retain moisture ( thanks, salt ! ) while simultaneously tenderizing it ( thanks, acid ! ) and adding relish ( thanks, lacto-fermented cucumber ! ). I thought to myself, If pickle seawater makes a great marinade for fry wimp, what about other brines ?, which was immediately followed by Holy bullshit : KIMCHI-BRINED FRIED CHICKEN .

I immediately went out and bought every variety of kimchi I could find at the market and began experimenting, straining out the juice and using it as a base for my wimp marinade. The resulting sandwich is one of the tastiest blasted things I ‘ve ever made, but we ‘re not hera to talk about that today. today, we ‘re here to talk about what I did with the rest of that kimchi post-draining.

You see, there ‘s only so much kimchi I can personally eat. But, queerly, there is no end to the numeral of perfectly roasted Brussels sprouts I can eat. Brussels sprouts are a near-perfect vegetable for experimenting with new flavors. They ‘re unique in that not only do they have great season of their own, but they ‘ve besides got those layered leaves, which make them ideal for picking up flavors from other foods arsenic well. Like kimchi .

The key to great Brussels sprouts is to cook them right in the foremost put. I cook my Brussels sprouts according to my guide to roasting winter and fall vegetables : tossed with anoint, then placed on a preheated rim baking sheet in a 500°F oven. high hotness is all-important : Cooking the sprouts to the target where they actually begin to blacken and char on the edges brings out the sweet, nuttiest flavors, while rapid cooking ensures that they do n’t turn to mush inwardly. It takes about 20 minutes for them to go from difficult and sensitive to tender and charred .

At first I tried to keep things childlike : I tossed the ridicule Brussels sprouts with some chop kimchi, seasoned them with salt and pepper, and served them at a dinner party. They disappeared in moments, but I still felt they could use a short fine-tune .

finally, I settled on adding some thinly-sliced shallots and julienned ginger to the tray with the sprouts. When sliced sparse, shallots and ginger both have a very broken ratio of bulk to surface area, which means they dry out reasonably cursorily and then turn dark. I mean in truth dark. This is a good thing : taste a stand by of near-black ginger as it comes out of the oven, and you ‘ll find that about all of its sharp, raw edge is gone and all that ‘s left is the gingery olfactory property and a sweet that develops as the bare-assed pep caramelizes. It goes brilliantly with the Brussels sprouts.

serious Eats/J. Kenji López-Alt
With the kimchi, sprouts, pep, and shallots, I had batch of piquant, nutty olfactory property and sharp, hot flavors going, but the whole thing calm seemed a little off libra. Honey lent some bouquet to the mix, while a splash of fish sauce far brought out the flavorsomeness of the roasted sprouts. Rice wine vinegar brightened the dish up. personally, I like to add a big pilfer of red pepper flakes ( or dried crushed roast Thai chili, if you can find it ) .

serious Eats/J. Kenji López-Alt

I topped the unharmed thing with a fiddling chop mint after tossing it together. There ‘s truly not much to the recipe at all. Roast some sprouts, toss them with some things. therefore slowly, so flying, but so mend full .

My recipes tend to fall into two categories. There are those that require a long ton of research before I flush head into the kitchen, and then there are ones like these, where an idea comes to me before I ‘ve done any excavation at all. Of course, it normally turns out that the capital original mind I thought I just had is a common one that ‘s been done millions of times before, including by David Chang in the New York Times .

Great original ideas are hard to come by. fortunately, revamped and reinterpreted old ideas can still be just as delightful .

Speaking of raw ideas, I can think of another vegetable that falls into that tastes-great-on-its-own-but-is-also-a-sauce-and-flavor-sponge class : broccoli. It ‘s like nature ‘s delicious little sauce wipe up .

Be right back. I ‘m off to roast some broccoli …