It looks a lot like a flatter "green/european" cabbage. It's leaves and stems are finer and softer than a European cabbage, while still being pretty crunchy (as opposed to napa). Compared to European cabbage, you could actually just stir fry these.
Gai lan is just one variety of "Chinese broccoli" - there are multiple varieties with different stem thicknesses, and "branching ratios". This will let you pick to suit your preferred level of crunch and leaf area to coat with sauce =)
And finally, all of the bok choys are also part of this family.
Speaking of Asian vegetables, Brassica oleracea tends to get all the love because Europeans are more familiar with cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, etc but Brassica rapa is perhaps even more diverse.
You might be familiar with turnips, bok choy, napa cabbage, and mizuna, but within Asia, there are a dizzying array of vegetables barely documented that are all derivatives of this weedy mustard.
Vegetables like Jima Turnip of the Tibetan plateau, Taicai, Wutacai, etc are hardly documented in English at all
I already knew about this phylogenetic tree (although I have always heard the common ancestor be called the "wild mustard", not wild cabbage), but the article was quite interesting.
I only wish that as a PSA, they had included the reminder to people over 30 years old who hate Brussels sprouts, that the delicious ones you can eat today are not the ones they hated in their youth, and if you haven't had sprouts in years you might want to give them a second try (salted, oiled and baked, not boiled or steamed of course!)
I think the sprouts trauma is the result of picking the wrong cooking method.
I was so surprised when I tried baked sprouts for the first time (use a really host cast iron skilet for even better results) that I started to believe that every vegetable can be delicious as long as you bake it!
There’s many delicious and easy ways to eat vegetable! Two of my favorite:
- Belgian Stoemp: basically smashed-potatoes with smashed-other legumes. Cook everything together (with herbs if you can), smash, add lipid and salt and you’re done!
- German Ein Topf: put vegetables, beans and sausages in a pot (I use tofu ones or tempeh). Cover, cook slowly. It’s almost a salty Tajin from the north.
- Recover bland vegetables (sprouts or anything) to a fantastic soup in 5 minutes: add a bit of water, coconut cream (or caw cream / silken tofu…), spices. A bit of tahin and corail lentils if you have. Mix and adjust water.
"I started to believe that every vegetable can be delicious as long as you bake it!"
Baking is good, but I also came to another conclusion - vegetables that are disgusting if they are cooked to a slimy paste, can be delicious eaten raw in a salad!
Great point about brussel sprouts and it's truly fascinating on a number of levels. I think we're all tempted to believe the story that our palate just changes as we get older. But that's not what happened with brussel sprouts! They became cultivated differently to change their taste and so the modern ones we have are not the bitter ones we had as a kid.
I think there's a similar story for, say, canned peas which used to be nasty and made me think I didn't like peas. Granted I still don't consider myself someone who likes peas from a can, but fresh peas in a salad, or flash frozen peas in a bag that stores in the freezer, I'm open to those.
That's not to say that our tastes don't change, but brussel sprouts are kind of a fascinating mirage where it seems like the change might have been growing up into adulthood when really it was a chang in cultivation. These are just off the top of my head, but over the past couple of decades, there's been a quiet revolution in mass produced veggies on a number of levels that in each of their individual instances trace back to fascinating stories of science.
People always say this and no, they still taste nasty. It would be interesting to compare today's sprouts to one of the original examples, they must've been truly foul if there's been such an improvement.
Not nearly as drastic as the cabbage case, but to me it’s also interesting that there are three ancestral, wild species of citrus fruit – mandarin, pomelo, and citron – and all the popular modern cultivars are hybrids of those three.
If you liked this, you will be delighted to learn about the “Triangle of U”: the common brassicas are not just tetraploid, they are Frankensteinian mashups of earlier diploid species with different numbers of chromosomes!
For some reason, there was a whole series of brassica oleracea memes going around in 2020 (does that make it a meta-meme? or is that the meme itself, and the images are just instances of the meme?), and they're still wonderful.
Just image-search "brassica memes" at your favorite engine.
This doesn't mention the one brassica that I hate more than any. Bastard cabbage. Like the other brassicas it is edible from flower/fruit to the root. Goes good in salads, etc. Unfortunately it is an invasive species here in Texas that quickly overwhelms native wildflowers. It appears along roads where work has been completed and rights-of-way reseeded using non-native grass mixes.
It is native to Africa and southern Europe I think but is invasive here in the US.
I first found some in my yard a couple of years after I bought a load of "topsoil" from a local materials provider. Not only was the product not a topsoil (it was river channel fine silt that is mostly clay-like particles with zero permeability and zero organic content) but the first thing to sprout on the pile of left-over soil was a tall plant with yellow flowers. There was a single plant that year. I had no idea what it was and asked one of my kids to ID it after it had already dried. Since it wasn't flowering stage when I asked they couldn't get a clear ID so i left it in place. That was a huge mistake. It produced uncounted quantities of small seeds that fell all around it and evidently birds loved it.
The second year saw it sprout up in a 10m radius around the original plant with isolated outliers. Again, I did not know what it was so I let it grow until summer (it is a late winter/early spring plant, one of the first to sprout) by which time it was obvious that this thing was gonna take over if I didn't do something. I sent a few more photos to my kid and this time I got the bad news - bastard cabbage.
With that info in hand I began implementing my eradication plan. I watered in all the plants that I could locate. It was summer and the ground is very dry and soil is hard here at home. With the soil nice and wet I pulled or dug every one of those bastards that I could find knowing that I would be doing the same thing again next year.
So far it has been several years of walking the property, pulling these bastard cabbages as I find them. So far this year I have less than a dozen plants but the season is young. I have found about half of those plants growing where previously I had never seen any and the others were growing in the original affected area.
Just like my years-long battle against St Augustine grass, stickers, goatheads, and Johnson grass I will win. I have eradicated those plants from my property though it took more than a decade to completely eliminate the Johnson grass.
Once I can identify the plant at each growth stage its days are numbered, sometimes with three or four digits, but I will win in the end.
Genes of the wild cabbage: "yah man, we will turn this leafy body into whatever you like. That you are going to eat it? We don't mind a bit, as long as you make more copies of us; that's all that matters."
It's amazing that it only takes centuries. Under natural selection, species traits stay relatively stable for thousands or even millions of years.
I suppose that means natural selection tends to have more of a pronounced effect when there has been a severe environmental change that wipes out a large fraction of the population and leaves behind only those with adaptive mutations. Otherwise, the adaptive mutation stays in the population but doesn't proliferate excessively. Selective breeding can then be interpreted as an extreme version of environmental stress.
I had previously imagined that evolution was a slow process but it seems that its more of a punctuated equilibrium, where when changes occur they occur quickly.
(Caveat: not a biologist, just a layperson speculating and learning.)
When I read the title, I immediately though, I think this is going to be about Brussel sprouts etc. as I just saw a video [0] that mentions the same lineage. The video is part of the series about the evolution of the flagellum, which is really well made.
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You are probably aware of napa cabbage, but there's also Taiwan Cabbage (goes by other names of course...) https://www.westcoastseeds.com/products/taiwan-cabbage
It looks a lot like a flatter "green/european" cabbage. It's leaves and stems are finer and softer than a European cabbage, while still being pretty crunchy (as opposed to napa). Compared to European cabbage, you could actually just stir fry these.
Gai lan is just one variety of "Chinese broccoli" - there are multiple varieties with different stem thicknesses, and "branching ratios". This will let you pick to suit your preferred level of crunch and leaf area to coat with sauce =)
And finally, all of the bok choys are also part of this family.
If you look, you can straight up find the half way points between subfamilies https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/080bca1a659bf2f8b12bca1494c67...
You might be familiar with turnips, bok choy, napa cabbage, and mizuna, but within Asia, there are a dizzying array of vegetables barely documented that are all derivatives of this weedy mustard.
Vegetables like Jima Turnip of the Tibetan plateau, Taicai, Wutacai, etc are hardly documented in English at all
I only wish that as a PSA, they had included the reminder to people over 30 years old who hate Brussels sprouts, that the delicious ones you can eat today are not the ones they hated in their youth, and if you haven't had sprouts in years you might want to give them a second try (salted, oiled and baked, not boiled or steamed of course!)
I was so surprised when I tried baked sprouts for the first time (use a really host cast iron skilet for even better results) that I started to believe that every vegetable can be delicious as long as you bake it!
- Belgian Stoemp: basically smashed-potatoes with smashed-other legumes. Cook everything together (with herbs if you can), smash, add lipid and salt and you’re done!
- German Ein Topf: put vegetables, beans and sausages in a pot (I use tofu ones or tempeh). Cover, cook slowly. It’s almost a salty Tajin from the north.
- Recover bland vegetables (sprouts or anything) to a fantastic soup in 5 minutes: add a bit of water, coconut cream (or caw cream / silken tofu…), spices. A bit of tahin and corail lentils if you have. Mix and adjust water.
Bon appétit :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stamppot
Baking is good, but I also came to another conclusion - vegetables that are disgusting if they are cooked to a slimy paste, can be delicious eaten raw in a salad!
I think there's a similar story for, say, canned peas which used to be nasty and made me think I didn't like peas. Granted I still don't consider myself someone who likes peas from a can, but fresh peas in a salad, or flash frozen peas in a bag that stores in the freezer, I'm open to those.
That's not to say that our tastes don't change, but brussel sprouts are kind of a fascinating mirage where it seems like the change might have been growing up into adulthood when really it was a chang in cultivation. These are just off the top of my head, but over the past couple of decades, there's been a quiet revolution in mass produced veggies on a number of levels that in each of their individual instances trace back to fascinating stories of science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_of_U
Just image-search "brassica memes" at your favorite engine.
It is native to Africa and southern Europe I think but is invasive here in the US.
I first found some in my yard a couple of years after I bought a load of "topsoil" from a local materials provider. Not only was the product not a topsoil (it was river channel fine silt that is mostly clay-like particles with zero permeability and zero organic content) but the first thing to sprout on the pile of left-over soil was a tall plant with yellow flowers. There was a single plant that year. I had no idea what it was and asked one of my kids to ID it after it had already dried. Since it wasn't flowering stage when I asked they couldn't get a clear ID so i left it in place. That was a huge mistake. It produced uncounted quantities of small seeds that fell all around it and evidently birds loved it.
The second year saw it sprout up in a 10m radius around the original plant with isolated outliers. Again, I did not know what it was so I let it grow until summer (it is a late winter/early spring plant, one of the first to sprout) by which time it was obvious that this thing was gonna take over if I didn't do something. I sent a few more photos to my kid and this time I got the bad news - bastard cabbage.
With that info in hand I began implementing my eradication plan. I watered in all the plants that I could locate. It was summer and the ground is very dry and soil is hard here at home. With the soil nice and wet I pulled or dug every one of those bastards that I could find knowing that I would be doing the same thing again next year.
So far it has been several years of walking the property, pulling these bastard cabbages as I find them. So far this year I have less than a dozen plants but the season is young. I have found about half of those plants growing where previously I had never seen any and the others were growing in the original affected area.
Just like my years-long battle against St Augustine grass, stickers, goatheads, and Johnson grass I will win. I have eradicated those plants from my property though it took more than a decade to completely eliminate the Johnson grass.
Once I can identify the plant at each growth stage its days are numbered, sometimes with three or four digits, but I will win in the end.
I suppose that means natural selection tends to have more of a pronounced effect when there has been a severe environmental change that wipes out a large fraction of the population and leaves behind only those with adaptive mutations. Otherwise, the adaptive mutation stays in the population but doesn't proliferate excessively. Selective breeding can then be interpreted as an extreme version of environmental stress.
I had previously imagined that evolution was a slow process but it seems that its more of a punctuated equilibrium, where when changes occur they occur quickly.
(Caveat: not a biologist, just a layperson speculating and learning.)
Though I’m struggling to think of a dish I actually enjoy from that plant group.
[0]: https://youtu.be/Frioffo53wo?t=1205