Dill-Marinated Broccoli

This dill-marinated broccoli makes excellent party food, but it’s also a perfect side for a weekday dinner or even a special movie snack. Naturally low in carbs and high in nutrients, this colorful and crunchy dish is tasty yet mild and pleases the palates of kids, too. If you prefer even more variety and kick, see ideas for variations at the end of this post. Oh yes, this marinated broccoli is surprisingly addictive – you are warned.

How to make the Dill-Marinated Broccoli

This is an extremely simple dish to throw together — it’s the marinating that takes most of the time. The flavors become better when they can mingle long enough, at least overnight. The raw broccoli also turns softer after marinating and thus is more pleasing to eat.

In the recipe and in the progress photos below, I’ve first combined the sauce ingredients in a separate bowl before adding them to the broccoli pieces. This ensures that all ingredients are well combined and evenly mixed.

However, in the video, I’ve cut corners and just combine all ingredients in a large bowl and toss well. That works, too, but if you want to be absolutely sure that all ingredients are mixed well, and the broccoli is completely covered with all that precious ingredients, it’s best to mix the marinade separately before adding it to the broccoli.

After cutting the broccoli into florets, you’ll get leftover stems. The outer parts of the stems are full of fiber that is difficult to chew. However, the inner parts are succulent. And those succulent inner parts are perfect for this recipe, so be sure to use them.

Let’s take a look at how to prepare this tasty and crunchy dish:

Take 2 lbs (900 g) broccoli.

Chop it into bite-sized pieces.

Place the pieces into a large bowl.

Here are the stems.

Remove the hard outer parts.

Here are the succulent interiors. Add them to the bowl with the rest of the broccoli.

Here we go. Set the bowl with the broccoli pieces aside for a while.

Take a small bowl and add 2/3 cup (160 ml) extra virgin olive oil…

1/2 cup (120 ml) raw apple cider vinegar…

1/4 cup (60 ml) finely chopped red onion (I got lazy and use ready chopped frozen red onion here)…

…and 1/4 cup (60 ml) finely chopped fresh dill.

Feel free to add some natural salt…

…and pepper if you like.

Whisk the marinade well.

It will get slightly thick – like salad dressing. So feel free to use it as a salad dressing or dressing for fish, especially for salmon!

Pour it into the broccoli.

Toss well for a couple of minutes to ensure that the broccoli is well covered with the marinade.

Cover the bowl with a plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

When ready to serve, remove the plastic wrap and transfer into a serving bowl or plate.

Enjoy!

 

How I came up with this recipe

The idea for this recipe came more or less by accident when I was thinking of foods to serve in our Ketokamu launch party (more pics at the end of the post!) that we organized yesterday at Lentävä matto here in Tampere. I was responsible for the food for about 40 people and prepared a lot of keto stuff. I just love to prepare keto food!

Well, our Ketokamu soups Kukkis (curry-flavored cauliflower puree soup) and Parsis (herb-seasoned broccoli puree soup) are selling well, and those were an essential part of the party, too. Actually, the whole theme of the party was around cauliflower and broccoli. Here’s a photo of an empty slot in a supermarket. Our soups are sold out!

Therefore, I thought, why not serve some more cauliflower and broccoli — but in a completely different way. Since the veggies are soft and pureed in the soups, I got the idea to prepare marinated raw broccoli and cauliflower with lots of tangy and piquant flavors. Those would be a crunchy counterpart to the pureed soups.

I started ideation. In addition to extra virgin olive oil and raw apple cider vinegar, I wanted to add herbs and spices. Maybe lemon or lime juice to provide even more brisk flavor and tang?

My other savory offerings (like sandwich filling and party nuts) used herbs as well, so I wanted my marinated cauliflower and broccoli to use different herbs to provide enough variety. After some pondering, I thought dill would be a perfect match with broccoli.

I also wanted to add onion because it’s an incredible natural flavor enhancer. Quickly, I noticed red onion would lend a unique flavor and provide color contrast to the green broccoli.

After pondering the amounts, I was ready to conduct my first test. I used the same amounts of ingredients as you see in the final recipe – that turned into success. Once again, I saw that proper planning pays off!

The result tasted great and looked adorable. The crunchy broccoli was tasty — just tangy enough — and the dill and onion were perfect companions to broccoli, a super-healthy cruciferous vegetable.

Here’s the recipe for you to enjoy:

Nutrition information	In total	Per serving if 6 servings in total
Protein	27.7 g	4.6 g
Fat	163.9 g	27.3 g
Net carbs	13.6 g	2.3 g
kcal	1693 kcal	282 kcal

Tips for variations

This recipe is very easy to vary according to your taste. Despise dill? Then choose another herb, like rosemary, oregano, parsley, basil, or thyme.

You can replace the red onion with garlic or chives, shallot, or simply with regular yellow onion.

If apple cider vinegar is too sharp to your taste, replace part of it with freshly squeezed lime or lemon juice.

To round the flavors, add a dash of liquid stevia or a pinch of stevia powder. Actually, lemon stevia would lend a very nice twist now when thinking of it. Sugar-free syrup works well, too. I bet sugar-free maple syrup would be something extraordinary and a great match!

For extra kick and warmth, add 1 tablespoon freshly grated ginger.

For our Ketokamu party, I made a version with lime juice and a pinch of stevia powder. Now when I remember, I think I added a good pinch of freshly ground black pepper, too.

General prattling

This week has been one of the busiest weeks for a long time — mainly because I prepared the Ketokamu party offerings for several days beforehand. For example, I made beef jerky, and that took a couple of days to prepare. I made four batches, and each batch took 6 hours to dry in my oven.

I also made a couple of batches of clotted cream. One batch took 12 hours in the oven and another day to cool completely and to develop that delicious, thick layer of thick cream on top. So, I have had my oven on the whole week! (I don’t want to think of the electric bill!)

I’m glad we have a 3D printer so we could print chocolate molds with our Ketokamu logo and also Ketokamu cookie cutters with a food-grade filament.

The first chocolate molds didn’t turn out that well – the chocolate didn’t come off properly!

Luckily, I have silicone putty that I can use for creating molds. We printed 3D-negatives that I used for the silicone chocolate molds. Like this.

It worked wonderfully!

I also made a larger mold because I needed to make lots of chocolate to the party!

For the party, I made the chocolate using my melanger. I’ve developed the recipe and we are going to use it our commercial chocolate products.

And here are the cookie cutters and the Ketokamu cookies I made with them.

Here’s more about the food I served in our Ketokamu party:

As an appetizer, we had a trail mix that had rosemary-flavored activated nuts. Activating means that I had soaked and sprouted the nuts before toasting them to reduce phytic acid and other antinutrients. Activated nuts are also easier to digest.

For the nuts, I had used almonds, walnuts, and pumpkin seeds for the nut mix and seasoned them with ghee, rosemary, salt, and chipotle. I also added a pinch of stevia to lend a hint of sweetness. In addition to the nuts, the trail mix had beef jerky and Greek dried olives seasoned with thyme. I’ve ordered the olives directly from Greece.

I also served tiny sandwiches (the bread recipe you can find on my Low Sugar, So Simple book as Easy Fluffy Bread) filled with Boursin cheese.

Sausages Finland had prepared really juicy and tasty meatballs from beef we delivered to them. I made keto ketchup with the meatballs (again, the recipe you can find on my Low Sugar, So Simple book as Five-Ingredient Sugar-Free Ketchup).

Naturally, we served our Kukkis and Parsis soups. And to ensure we really get an overdose of those veggies, I had prepared marinated cauliflower and marinated broccoli (this blog recipe) to accompany them.

As sweet treats, I had made blueberry mini muffins according to this recipe. I topped the muffins with whipped cream and crushed freeze-dried blueberries.

I also made chocolate muffins (the recipe is in my newest Finnish book Järkevä ketoruokavalio), except I left out the chocolate chips and frosted the muffins with our upcoming Ketokamu nut and chocolate spread. I also sprinkled toasted crushed hazelnuts on top.

Other sweet treats included pumpkin spice cookie dough balls (the experiment I was talking in my last week’s post), blackcurrant fat bombs (recipe in my upcoming Finnish book), Ketokamu cookies, Ketokamu logo chocolate, and clotted cream with strawberry lingonberry sauce that I had sweetened with stevia.

One of the highlights of the party was a custom-made keto kombucha that the Good Guys had prepared for us. They had made two different types of keto kombucha, berry variation, and honeybush-based herb variation. With only 1.5 grams carbs per 100 ml of kombucha, we were delighted with the result – so were our party guests!

Here is Krister from Good Guys installing the kombucha taps for us.

And here is I and our CEO Olli tasting the kombucha.

As my fridges are all full of food, it really helped that we have fridge temperature outdoors. There is practically infinite cold storage space there! Colors are getting beautiful, here’s a picture of Tampere downtown.

Here are some more pictures from our Ketokamu party.

We also had Ketokarhu (keto bear) at our party!

We made goodie bags for the party guests. They contained, for example, my Järkevä ketoruokavalio book and some treats from Foodin.

The party decorations were beautiful and harvest-related – also featuring cauliflower and broccoli and other ingredients we use in our Ketokamu soups!

We also had a spot for taking photos.