Fill a large bowl with cold or warm water. Allow it to soak for 2 minutes, then dump the vegetables into a colander and allow the soaking water to drain away. While it's still in the colander, give the broccoli a good rinse under running water once more.
Immediatley before cooking, soak your broccoli, head down, in cold, salted water (1 tsp salt to 8 cups water) for 5 minutes. Any critters will float to the top where you can rescue them or allow them to suffer a salty death. (NOTE: If you soak in salt water and then store it, it will become rubbery and wilted.
Place 3/4 to 1 inch of water in a saucepan with a steamer and bring to a boil. (Note that if you don't have a steamer, you can simply put the broccoli directly into an inch of boiling water.) Add broccoli, steam 5 to 6 min: Add the broccoli to the steamer and cover; reduce heat to medium and let cook for 5-6 minutes.
After harvest, you can soak out the broccoli worms
To draw the “broccoli worms” out of the broccoli trees, you need to soak it in a sink of cold water to which you've added 1/4 cup of salt and 2 tbsp of vinegar. You will need to keep the broccoli heads submerged in the water for at least 20 minutes.
Bagged or ready-to-eat, fresh-cut produce
If the product is not labeled "washed," "triple washed," or "ready-to-eat," it must be washed before eating.
Before you cook or eat fresh broccoli, be sure to clean it to remove dirt, pesticides, and even bugs. You can wash your broccoli quickly and easily with water or a vinegar solution, and you can remove cabbage worms from the florets with a salt water solution.
In a white vinegar solution: If you know your broccoli heads have aphids or cabbage worms, you can kill them with a solution that is ten percent white vinegar and ninety percent water.
If you think your broccoli might have bugs or worms, use the soak method with an additional ingredient. Nope, not those commercial produce washes; the USDA actually advises against using those. Instead, use a pantry staple: vinegar. Fill a large bowl with 2 ⅔ cups cold or warm water and ⅓ cup white vinegar.
The US Food and Drug Administration, the US Department of Agriculture and other scientists agree: use a cold water soak with baking soda to effectively help remove dirt, chemical residue, and other unwanted materials from your fresh vegetables and fruits.
Sometimes, raw fruits and vegetables contain harmful germs that can make you and your family sick, such as Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria. The safest produce to eat is cooked; the next safest is washed. Wash fruits and vegetables under running water—even if you do not plan to eat the peel.
Water-soluble vitamins can leach out or be destroyed during storage and preparation. Vitamin C and members of the vitamin B group are water-soluble, and while nutrient loss may be minimal when soaking raw vegetables, soaking will reduce the quantity of these essential vitamins.
These small broccoli worms are segmented and have tapered ends. If you touch them, they wiggle around and may even drop from the plant.
Are Broccoli Worms Harmful to People? If you're panicking because you just found a wiggly green worm crawling out of your otherwise-scrumptious head of broccoli, rest assured – broccoli worms aren't harmful to people. They're just gross.
Although broccoli is one of the few plants least affected by pests, especially during fall, it is not uncommon to occasionally find worms on broccoli heads. If left unprotected, these broccoli worms can wreak havoc on your plants.
Pour about an inch of water into a skillet or wok and bring it to a boil over medium-high heat. Put the broccoli florets in a steamer basket and season with salt. Set the steamer basket over boiling water and cook until the broccoli is crisp-tender, 8 to 10 minutes depending on the size of the florets.
Afraid so – although boiling or steaming your veg will kill off any bacteria, there's still the problem of pesticides, which can wash off the vegetables and hang around in the water while cooking. Thorough washing and drying with clean kitchen paper will help remove any pesticide traces.
Stir-frying and stir-frying/boiling, the two most popular methods for most homemade dishes in China, cause great losses of chlorophyll, soluble protein, soluble sugar, vitamin C, and glucosinolates, but the steaming method appears the best in retention of the nutrients in cooking broccoli.
Add a pinch of baking soda to the pot.
By adding baking soda, you make the water slightly alkaline (the opposite of acidic). This preserves a compound called chlorophyll, which gives vegetables like green beans, asparagus, Brussels sprouts and broccoli their vibrant, green color.