Lemon Is All You Need To Liven Up Your Brussels Sprouts

As a vegetable, Brussels sprouts are versatile and easy to prepare. In terms of flavor, they are nutty, buttery, mildly sweet, and sometimes bitter, especially when eaten raw. This bitterness, which ranges from subtle to very noticeable, often makes Brussels sprouts an acquired taste, and a hit or miss with diners.

However, there's an easy way to liven up and add more flavor to Brussels sprouts, and all you need is lemon. Take, for example, our bright Brussels sprouts fettuccine recipe, where we squirt a generous amount of lemon juice over the Brussels sprouts in the pasta. Since Brussels sprouts are often cooked with butter, olive oil, or bacon fat, lemon's acidity helps add balance by cutting through that richness. Additionally, the tanginess tempers Brussels sprouts' bitterness.

Also, a touch of lemon is all you need to fix overly salty food. So, if the bacon you added to pair with your Brussels sprouts is too salty — or you've tried to mask the vegetable's bitterness with a little too much salt — a squirt of lemon juice will balance out the dish and temper the brackishness. Now, squirting lemon juice over Brussels sprouts is not the only way to incorporate the bright citrus.

Squeezing fresh lemon juice directly over your Brussels sprout dishes, like our shaved Brussels sprouts salad recipe, is one of the easiest ways to liven up the dish. Simply give the veggies a good toss afterward to distribute the zesty juice.

However, don't overlook the lemon peel, or rather, all the lemon zest you can gather from the peel. Each lemon can yield about one tablespoon of fresh zest. After you zest the lemon — you can use a paring knife, zester, microplane, or even a vegetable peeler to do this — mix the zest directly into the dish.

You can also garnish a finished dish with lemon zest. Alternatively, incorporate the lemon zest during different steps when cooking. For example, when making our garlic butter Brussels sprouts recipe, you can add lemon zest to the melted garlic butter which coats the Brussels sprouts. Then, crown the dish with a sprinkle of lemon zest, which adds color and flavor. When serving, squirt some fresh lemon juice over the dish to further liven up the Brussels sprouts. The resulting dish will be balanced, and the Brussels sprouts will taste less bitter with a good pop of lively tang.