A week after my garden began to almost flourish last month - daisies blooming, tomato stalks fruiting - the temperature dropped, and my plants’ leaves started to wither. Every few days, I harvested a handful of something. The day I snipped my broccolini stalks out of their pot, I decided it was brisk enough outside to make soup.
This Broccolini Parmesan Soup is my take on broccoli cheddar. Broccolini might sound as if it were born in Italy, but the leggy green vegetable was a Japanese invention. As Carole Sugarman reported for The Post in 1999, "It was bred from a cross, and its parents are an unlikely couple: broccoli and Chinese kale,” otherwise known as gai lan.
Generally, broccoli thrives in cooler climates. Although it can grow in temperatures between 40 and 80 degrees, if subjected to more than a few days of 90-degree heat, it can falter. Thus, the initial goal for the plant breeders at Yokohama’s Sakata Seed was to create a broccoli hybrid that could be grown in hotter weather.
Researchers wanted to retain broccoli’s best qualities: vibrant green crowns, pleasant crunch and mild sweetness. What if they crossed it with gai lan, which has tender stalks and can tolerate higher temperatures? Though they didn’t succeed in creating a heat-resistant strain of broccoli, the team at Sakata Seed did bring a winning new vegetable to market. After some naming and marketing hiccups, the small, slender stems with fluttery bunches of buds eventually became a hit with consum.