Thistles are one of those vegetables that we often discard eating to avoid spending a little more time peeling and cleaning them unlike other vegetables.
One of the problems with thistles, as well as that of artichokes, is that they blacken our hands when we peel them. One very obvious trick is the wear gloves made of latex, which allow us to handle them better in the kitchen, to cut them.
Thistles should be cleaned and cut just before preparing them, otherwise they will turn black.. Resorting to the lemon trick would give us an acid flavor in the recipe that may not be very convenient. What we can do is add flour to the cooking water so that they come out clearer once boiled.
When cleaning them, we remove the stem of the thistle with the knife and separate them into branches. We wash them one by one to remove dirt and grime.
Then with a knife we remove the corners of each branch and we are removing those uncomfortable and characteristic threads of the thistle little by little. Starting from the end of the branch on the leaf, we will stretch the strands down with the knife and we will see how they easily unravel. If we want to insist more on the elimination of the fibers, we can peel the thistle with a potato peeler.
Now the rods are ready to be chopped and boiled, but if we want to make them more comfortable to eat, we can divide each branch into two parts before making them squares.
When boiling them, some people advise changing the water once to eliminate the bitterness of this vegetable. The first time we boiled them only in water for about twenty minutes. We drain and put them back to boil this time in salty water for about fifteen more minutes.
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