Preparing to Cook Brussels Sprouts

"Hi! I'm Louis Ortiz on behalf of Expert Village and today we are going to show you how to clean and prepare some brussel sprouts. These usually aren't very popular vegetables with most folks because they had bad experiences with them as children but fresh brussel sprouts are really really nice green vegetables, real good for you and they make a nice attractive side dish when prepared the right way. So we are going to take just the outer leaves off of these and expose a little bit more of the stalk as you can see as I pull these away. There is really just a bulb that we are after. As you notice the outer leaves are darker green and the inside is lighter so we are trying to hit this lighter color there. We are going to use a cooking procedure on these that we've shown you in a previous video which is the blanching and the shocking method. I've got some boiling water behind me with some salt in it in a small sauce pot. We will plunge these into the water for just a couple of minutes so these take in a little water and will brighten the colors and make them a little bit tender and then we will plunge these into a salt water bath shortly thereafter. At that point, they will be ready to sautee or finish cooking with whatever cooking procedure you see fit. I tend to like to cut these into either halves or quarters depending on the size of the brussel sprouts that I have and I've got a small paring knife to do that with. So I am going to take a little bit of the stalk off because we are not going to eat it and we don't really need it on the brussel sprouts any who. Peel him out of the way. I'm going to cut these just down the center like that and then you can see a cross section of what we are going for. So I'll cut just a little bit more of the stalk off and then I am going to kind of score it this way so that we've got a line going down and this will facilitate the cooking process and also make that stalk which is very fibrous allow the hot water to penetrate on the inside so it will be eatable, easier to eat as well. I'll do one more here for your and show you what we are after. Let's take a little bit more of that stalk off, take that, score this down there, down the middle. This is a little bit bigger one so we will go ahead and just cut him into quarters that way. So these sizes are going to match more closely, these smaller halves so that we will have an even cooking process. If you wish just to make them all look the same, you can go ahead and quarter those if you so desire. So we'll come back here in a little bit and show you some different recipes that we can use for these brussel sprouts and make them a little more appealing than when you had them as a child."