burnt embers

This Romanesco broccoli really caught my eye in the store last week. I knew right away I wanted to make some macro photographs of it. And to try eating it.

I thought that the closeups were reminiscent of a montane landscape. But then I started researching and no longer knew what to think. It turns out to be mathematically a very interesting plant. Here is what wikipedia has to say about it:

Romanesco superficially resembles a cauliflower, but it is light green in colour, and its form is strikingly fractal in nature. The inflorescence (the bud) is self-similar in character, with the branched meristems making up a logarithmic spiral. In this sense the bud’s form approximates a natural fractal; each bud is composed of a series of smaller buds, all arranged in yet another logarithmic spiral. This self-similar pattern continues at several smaller levels. The pattern is only an approximate fractal since the pattern eventually terminates when the feature size becomes sufficiently small. The number of spirals on the head of Romanesco broccoli is a Fibonacci number.

We steamed it as we would cauliflower and ate it without any additional sauces or even melted butter (which would have been good) treating it as a vegetable side dish. If you like broccoli or cauliflower, then you will like this vegetable too – it is less mushy than cauliflower and has a slightly stronger but pleasant flavour. The bright green colour is very attractive too, and is retained with cooking.

A couple of these photos are also in my week 7 post at the 52Rolls project as they were at the beginning of a roll of film that I started in my week 7. Others were shot in my week 8 and have been seen the past few days on these pages – this link will have all the shots from this roll as I post them.

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