Why arugula/rocket is the way it is 

This. Leaves also generally tend to shrink during this stage becoming drier and more fibrous. I remember when I worked on a farm in July and we had to pick all the flowers from the basil to keep it worth selling.

@@charlietudju8238 my basil always starts doing this (more compact, firm and bitter leaves) after a couple months, even though I'm regularly cutting it back to prevent it from flowering. IDK what it is I'm doing wrong.

​@@tiarkrezarYou're not doing anything wrong. Once the temp reaches a certain point, basil will bolt faster than you can prune it

@@sangha1486 I figured it's something like that. I just wanna have good basil for more than like 2 months out of the entire year :(

​​@@tiarkrezar If its bolting faster than you can cut it then you should just let them go to seed tbh. You'll at least be able to get a couple years worth of seeds from it. Then you can use it for next years crop or for a fall crop.

what does "7b" refer to?

@@tyber_roman313 The USDA Hardiness Growing map that classes parts of the US based on average minimum winter temperatures.

Can confirm, 35 years gardener... I let a lettuce go this year though and it grew into the most ornamental red Christmas tree shaped beauty, so sometimes things still surprise me.

@@darcieclements4880 Bolted lettuce is really beautiful! If I was an ornamental gardener I'd let all my lettuce bolt. Unfortunately, I've got to clear bed space for the next crop.

@@tyber_roman313 USDA hardiness zones

Also Plant some in August for the fall. It won't bolt and like all brassicas can take a frost which makes it sweeter.

I continue to eat mine after it bolts and its not AS good as the young stuff but ive never had a reaction like Adam's and id never describe it as tasting like a fart. I would eat arugula absolutely every day if i had it

Now that sounds heavenly. I had it on a burger once, was pretty good too.

MVP comment making sure people get the facts right

Thank you!

I didn't know roka and aragula are the same thing. I'm lebanese and moved to the US to discover aragula. In lebanon, we have roka. I'm not much into any of them, so I never made the connection. Also, if I remember right, roka is much spicier, which makes sense as americans have bred the flavor out of everything.

Same in Germany: ‘Rauke’ was seen as a weed that was known as edible but no one would actually eat it outside some very specific regional dishes…

Its good on pizza.

Interesting! I lived in rural East Africa for a time and my local friends taught me to forage for a very delicious green to add to our meals. Turns out it was amaranth, which most people consider a weed. I found some growing wild in my yard in East Texas!

​@@tonymouannes bred but yeah

Good point. One addition is that these rules apply before "front vowels" e and i. Before other sounds no need to add the h. And if you need to have a soft sound before a non front vowel, you add in an i which isn't pronounced. So 'caro' and 'che' both have the sound of car. But 'ciao' and 'face' both have the sound of chair. Same for the gs but with the appropriate g sounds

@@danielhill8551 Right, thank you for completing the rule! I didn't write the rest of it because otherwise the message looked to long 🤣 But in that way is surely better!

A few summers ago? What you waiting for, put a damn ring on it already 😅😅

Do it!! Get married already

wishing you a happy marriage

You know it

I make one with pesto and about half as much greek yoghurt with salt and pepper and lemon juice to taste as a sauce, add some chicken, as much arugula as you can stomach for bitterness, some variety of small tomato for a little acidity, juiciness and a heterogene texture, and mozzarella for creaminess and fat. All in all, fairly balanced flavorwise if a little bland with the upside that you can pretend it's "healthy."

@@personmcpeopleface266 I wonder if it's "bland" because it's missing some bites of intense and different flavor. Slivers of parmesan tossed with the arugula so that they don't slip out, red pepper flakes stuck on the mozz, or maybe even a leaf or two of mint could be all it needs. Or you could try taking the minimalist approach. Deconstruct the concept of this sandwich, reduce it to the bare minimum of what it is to you and reconstruct. With less stuff going on the remaining things should pop more and that might fix the perceived blandness.

@@PetroklosZDM I think he's missing roasted peppers, preferably kept in oil with garlic and other flavorful things.

Yep it’s like eating cilantro after it’s bolted and being surprised when it doesn’t taste good. That’s what happens when plants bolt

And was shunned and despised for so many years, but slap a new name on it, put an italian chef or something on TV using it, and suddenly you have great demand. Branding is important, it's why I maintain the opinion that Kålpudding (lit. Cabbage-Pudding) has a "branding" problem, it's meatloaf with cabbage served with gravy, it's great.

Mustards are great. Except they are all invasive in the US, but you can eat all of it. Root to flower. Not necessarily caloric but in a pinch you'll get vitamins from gathering mustards in the wild.

The plant and the leaves both are called rucola in Dutch :D

In Germany, it's classically called Rauke, but in the past 2-3 decades, it has been marketed as Rucola and become much more hip.

It might have been considered as a stimulant by Ancient Greek humoral medicine, because it's "hot" (i.e. spicy) but I don't know about that church ban.

It wasn’t banned by the entire church, it just was banned from being grown in some monasteries.

There are relatives that have medical uses, maybe confused between them?

Radishes are brassicas as well, so ... yes! 😀

yeah i was weirded out by the video since i grew up with store bought rucula (what we call it here) and i certainly wouldnt consider that spicy

The stuff from the store is typically baby arugula. The younger the leaves, the more tender and mild they are. Stuff you're getting from the local farms might be more adult and potentially close to bolting (flowering) when it's harvested, which is when it's a lot spicier.

Most home grown stuff will take a lot stronger than the store bought equivalent

funny that this would be considered fancy, as a pizza with very sparse toppings of cheese and rucola would be very cheap. I'm sure you could easily spend more on a sprinkling of cheese than on the rest of the pizza, but that's not so much because that small amount of cheese is expensive, it's rather because the wheat, yeast, tomato, oil, spices and rucola cost almost nothing. if you made a more american pizza with good cheese and good sauce, it would certainly be more expensive.

@@Ass_of_Amalek what was the point of this comment

@@Ass_of_Amalek i guess it's different philosophies. Bear in mind that Italy pizza is personal. It's not meant to be shared. Everyone gets his own. While in America from what i can see pizza is usually meant to be shared, so it stands to reason it has more toppings. I also believe it's down to different food philosophies.

@@fiftyclown what was the point of this comment

There's a pizza place in Minnesota that has a pizza with sausage, mushrooms and arugula and it's delicious

it's expensive because of it's shelf life.

"White people can't handle spice" mfs trying to consume milk

Racism. Reported.

I mean dude literally even said at the end

It's not about race, boo.

What I've seen in Brazil is the leaves are larger, more tender, less fibrous, and milder tasting than the arugula I've eaten in Italy and the US. This makes the Brazilian variety conducive to eating whole leaves on their own with your hands, no dressing or other ingredients needed.

The best levantine salad!

No oil or salt added, just sumac, onions and lemon juice?

​@@erzsebetkovacs2527I'm sure you could try it that way, and customize it to your liking

​@@erzsebetkovacs2527 oh absolutely add salt to preference, and good olive oil can make it better, but the heart of the salad is some onions,arugula, sumac, and lemon. ( I prefer red onions, but any kind is fine) some stuff that are good if you have them: pomegranates, walnuts, a fruit molasses that isn't overly sugary(traditionally pomegranate or carob molasses).

Those are also brassica plants.

plus the european culinary rucolas are plants of two species (eruca and diplotaxis). I think you can probably eat just about any brassicaceae member for some variant of spicy taste. different breeds of lettuce also have different taste though, maybe try something more bitter than iceberg and romana, like a more red and more curly cultivar.

Lettuce isn't just iceberg or soft lettuce. Mature cos lettuce makes more of meal than iceberg and the soft leaved lettuce. But the brassica family is a broad church, and older cultivars may have more flavour.

If you bag of leaves contain mush IMO they are too old.

the spinach mush is the worst! Spinach should never go in salad mixes, it goes bad before everything else and ruins the whole thing

Sativa can refer to any cultivated plant. Often a domesticated form is derived from a plant named sativa, but it also refers to a plant that is merely suitable for cultivation / collecting and planting just as it is, found in the wild.

that's known to be the case with all leafy greens. concentrations of all sorts of substances we taste as bitter and the like (which typically are produced by plants to deter animals from eating them) start out low in parts of the plant that only just grew, and then continuously increase. flowering is generally recognised as indicating low edibility, though I think this is not so much a binary thing of the taste changing rapidly only as the plant flowers, but rather it's because the flowering period on most plants stops or heavily slows down the growth of leaves, and then the leaves that are there continue to age and become more bitter. usually a plant that's still growing will have leaves and stems that are softer and a lighter green colour at the tips of stems and branches, and those will be the least bitter, while the oldest, darkest and hardest leaves are the most bitter (except for those oldest ones at the bottom potentially going yellow from nitrogen deficiency or the like, the light colour there probably doesn't correlate with light taste. I've never tried those since they're very unappealing).

And much more like Arugula soup, watercress soup is amazing

👍🏽🤓👍🏽 Yes !! Hearty 🍲 Bone Broth, with blend of Arugula & Watercress !!

kale is lehtikaali, just kaali is simply cabbage, but perhaps it could be more accurately translated as brassica, as that in turn is kaalit, since more or less every brassica ends in -kaali in finnish.

​@@fdagpigj Oh yeah, you're right. I had mixed up cabbage and cauliflower in my head for some reason.

I have been playing with adding greens to rice when I cook it... I have also been doing Frank's hot sauce cooked in rice... a spicy green could be a very interesting addition to cooking rice... today I am doing a precooked and crumbled pork sausage, drained of fats and juices... added two cups of rice and 4 cups water and as much spinach as I could add to the sauce pan on and induction cooker set to 20 minutes for the rice to cook and to wilt the spinach... will stir together and probably top with a Tuscan Italian dressing (Kraft)...

The result was good... half the volume filled me up, the rest is in the fridge for later, and am ready for a nap. A pound of Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage, 2 cups basmati rice, a couple tablespoons of Frank's hot sauce, a pound of washed spinach, and a couple tablespoons of Kraft Tuscan Italian salad dressing... just in case I want to recreate it.

So that’s why my basil tasted awful after a few weeks!

The German name for the plant is also "Rauke"

I (from Hamburg) got me some Rucola a few weeks ago, and it was crazy spicy when eating it on its own. Was glad to read the spiciness could be dealt with by adding sugar to the dressing, which I did using honey. Made myself a very tasty salad with that.

@@louisana "Garten-Senfrauke" or "Ölrauke", to be precise. I did a bit of reading and there indeed are different varieties of arugula. Eruca sativa, which Adam talks about in the video, and Eruca vesicaria. Sativa seems to me to be a subspecies of vesicaria, but I'm not an expert in these things. So far I also couldn't find out whether arugula around here is any different than the one Adam has. I mean, I kind of had different types of arugula before. Like, sometimes the leaves are paper thin, other times they appear more succulent and even a bit like peach skin (like, with tiny hairs or something). Maybe the latter simply stem from older plants, I don't know. What a weird herb it is.

@@scelestion What did you use for the dressing?

@@erzsebetkovacs2527 I used a bought salad herbs mix that you need to add to a water and oil mixture (those don't really mix of course, but you pour them into the same container). Added just a little honey into in the mix and poured that over the chopped vegetables. (The salad herbs mix I used is Knorr Salatkrönung Gartenkräuter, in case you live in Germany too.)

Lettuce is just crunchy water. Has very little flavour of its own. Arugula is like a mustard-y leaf which actually brings a flavour to the table. Arugula is some dope stuff. I had this pizza with parmesan, spanish chorizo and garnished with raw arugula leaves topped after baking. That stuff was so damn good. Highly recommend trying a bit of arugula with a smoky pork based pizza.