Are Brussels sprouts stalks edible? I cut to the pith.

When I was a kid, I imagined Brussels sprouts as little cabbages with their heads growing out of the ground, carefully picked in Belgium by … children, maybe? … and sent to us in the States.

That is not how they grow. They grow like this:

It’s quick and easy to work down the stalk, twisting and snapping off the little sprouts. So easy, in fact, that it’s baffling you usually pay much less per sprout when you buy a whole stalk.

But that stalk! Aye, that stalk! It’s heavy. It’s like a baseball bat. And I feel wasteful every time I compost one—or, with no compost bin these days, throw one in the trash.

Can a Brussels sprout stalk be eaten? Is it edible?

I turned to the internet. Someone had asked the same question years earlier, so I wasn’t exactly the first person to ponder this. The answers ranged from “yes” to “no” to “technically, but why would you do that to yourself?” Several people said the shoots were edible and tasty. Others warned that the stalk required heroic peeling, and that there are Brussels sprout cultivars explicitly grown to make walking sticks.

Then I found a promising claim: cut the stalk into six-inch segments and steam them until they crack open.

Aha. A lead.

But about that verb cut: yikes. I don’t own a cleaver. I’m never going to own a cleaver. I’m terrified of cleavers. My stalk seemed fresh, though, and I thought leaning on the blade of a sharp, heavy knife might work. So I started up the stalk in six-inch increments, wondering whether this Brussels walking stick was ruining my $54 J.A. Henckels santoku.

It turns out you don’t have to cut all the way through. Score the stalk about ¼ inch deep all the way around, then snap it at the cut. Less hacking. Less knife-dulling. More dignity all around.

Awesome. Now I could see what was inside.

Steam until “done,” huh? You could hammer nails with the core of that stalk. I could imagine someone reaching this point, abandoning the food experiment, and going the walking stick route with it.

But into the steamer basket the pieces went. I wondered how long “done” would take.

I checked every five minutes. After fifteen minutes, there was not much progress.

Same story at half an hour.

At an hour: aha! Cracks in two of them!

At 1 hour 45 minutes, I could press my thumbnail into the core. I could still have used the outer ring as a bludgeoning weapon, but this qualified as progress.

So: the moment of truth. What treasure was inside, assuming I could open them?

The pith was coarse and could easily have handled another half hour—or even another hour—in the steamer. But it was soft enough to scoop with a spoon.

Aaaand now I had a bowl of coarse, warm brassica pulp.

I tasted it. It wasn’t bad at all—somewhere between a broccoli stem and an undercooked artichoke heart. Purée it, maybe, I thought. Add some fat and liquid, spread it on home-baked sourdough, and finish it with parsley so it looks as though it was worth three hours of my life.

Into the mini-prep went the pith, mayonnaise, kosher salt, freshly ground black pepper, rubbed sage, and a little too much fresh lemon juice. I gave it a whirl. Then I added more mayonnaise and gave it another whirl. Then I stopped, scraped down the sides, engaged it in a staring contest to convince it to become a purée, and ran the mini-prep one more time.

And the delicacy pictured above—the featured image—is what emerged. A little too lemony, perhaps. You can’t tell that from the photograph.