What you see: Yellow beads on portions of your broccoli where the florets come together. You might only see the yellow if you bend the broccoli a bit to peer inside, or while you’re chopping it.
What it is: Marginal yellowing!
Eat or toss: Eat! You’re just seeing the part of the broccoli that the sun didn’t reach.
What are those yellow patches inside some broccoli crowns?
We’ve previously written about how sunlight can cause potatoes, onions, carrots, garlic and certain other types of produce to turn green – the light triggers the production of chlorophyll, which, of course, is green.
A lack of sunlight, on the other hand, can cause certain produce that would normally be green to be, well, not green. Like the inside corners of a crown of broccoli. If the florets are tightly packed together, sunlight might not reach those inner buds, leaving them yellow. You’ll probably only notice the yellow if you pull apart the florets or when you chop the broccoli.
So called “marginal yellowing” is, logically, more common in broccoli with dense, tightly packed florets and heads. Those yellow areas are, of course, perfectly fine to eat.
All that said, broccoli can also turn yellow if it’s overmature, stored at too-warm temperatures, or exposed to ethylene, a ripening and aging-inducing gas emitted by types of produce. In that case, the yellowing wouldn’t be restricted to those “margin” areas and it would be a sign that the broccoli was losing quality and on its way out.
