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Roast Salmon with Broccoli and Raw Sprouts

Twenty-two minutes, one tray, and the one step everyone gets wrong: the sprouts go on raw at the end.

Dinner

22

Serves 2

Recipe photo

Ingredients

  • 2 salmon fillets, skin on
  • 200g broccoli, cut into florets
  • 1 red onion, cut into wedges
  • 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
  • 1 lemon, half sliced, half for juice
  • Salt and black pepper
  • To finish: a handful of broccoli sprouts or watercress

Method

  1. Heat the oven to 200C fan.
  2. Toss the broccoli and onion with half the oil, salt and pepper. Spread on a baking tray and roast for 10 minutes.
  3. Push the vegetables to the sides. Put the salmon in the middle, skin down, rub with the remaining oil, season, and lay lemon slices on top.
  4. Return to the oven for 10 to 12 minutes, until the salmon flakes but the centre is still slightly translucent. It continues cooking on the tray.
  5. Squeeze over the lemon juice.
  6. Scatter the raw sprouts or watercress over just before serving. Do not cook them.

Why it works

The raw sprouts at the end are the whole point of this recipe.

Broccoli sprouts contain far more glucoraphanin than mature broccoli, but glucoraphanin does nothing on its own. It needs an enzyme called myrosinase to convert it into sulforaphane, and heat destroys that enzyme. Cooked sprouts are just expensive greens.

Sulforaphane matters here because it influences how your liver processes oestrogen, shifting metabolism towards the 2-hydroxy pathway. That is relevant for men carrying abdominal fat and for women with an oestrogen-dominant symptom pattern.

Salmon brings omega-3 and vitamin D, and at UK latitudes most people are low on the second between October and March. Vitamin D acts on receptors in the testes, and correcting a genuine deficiency modestly raises testosterone.

Roasting the broccoli rather than boiling it preserves more of the compounds that survive heat, and it tastes considerably better.

Swap the sprouts for watercress if you cannot find them. Same family, same principle, and it adds dietary nitrate.

More on the oestrogen pathway: how to lower oestrogen in men.