Say Goodbye To Bland Broccoli When You Add A Spoonful Of This

Broccoli is one of the best vegetables you can eat for your health. The cruciferous veggie is jam-packed with vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, helping us in many ways from boosting our immune systems to cutting back our inflammation. Sometimes, though, you may not feel excited to get your broc on. Broccoli can be absolutely delicious — fresh, herbaceous, bittersweet, and toothsome — but it can take some additional ingredients to jazz the vegetable up and remind us of this. Or, ideally, just one ingredient: chili crisp.

If you're in search of ingredients that will upgrade your broccoli, look no further than chili crisp for both savoriness and spice. The genius part of using chili crisp is that it has both the oil you want to cook the broccoli in, plus the spicy flavor and crunchy texture. Whether you're sauteing, roasting, grilling, or stir-frying broccoli, you want some kind of oil so its fats tenderize the vegetable as it heats. The oil in chili crisp can be considered one of the best oils for cooking — it's typically a variety like canola or vegetable oil, infused with chili pepper heat. When you're cooking your broccoli, you can toss it first in just the oil from the chili crisp, using a spoon to strain it from the jar. Once the broccoli's done, season it according to how much crunch and heat you want, and voila: You've got crispy, complex, tender, spicy broccoli, a truly upgraded dish.

There are a ton of different ways to level up your cooking with chili crisp. It goes with everything from pizza, pasta, eggs, and dips to even fruit jams and chocolate cake. So, it's worth keeping chili crisp on hand — and this pantry staple will work wonders for your broccoli, taking so little time and no extra ingredients to do so.

Of course, once you see how quick and easy chili crisp broccoli is to make, and how delicious the results are, you're bound to start experimenting with riffs and additions. Chili crisp works beautifully with really any roasted vegetables, so you can add it to your broccoli in a snap with squash, mushrooms, carrots, or mini potatoes. You can toss in cubes of tofu, chicken, beef, or shrimp and have an entire meal without too much more time or effort. To make the dish even more substantial, serve it over rice or noodles with ponzu sauce. Some individual mix-ins, herbs, and seasonings that would be a breeze to add in and would create such a tasty, complex dish include chives, sesame seeds, ginger, minced garlic, fresh basil, water chestnuts, peanuts, lime, or cubed pineapple. You can even let your broccoli and chili crisp chill and serve it as a fun side at a barbecue. Enjoy it as a fresh, cool appetizer, or turn it into a salad with cucumber and celery.