Alton Brown’s Grilled Brussels Sprouts, Skewered

Overhead image of Brussels sprouts and garlic on a rustic wooden surface with kitchen tools.

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This method comes from Alton Brown’s Good Eats episode “A Cabbage Sprouts in Brussels,” published on Food Network — see the Grilled Brussels Sprouts recipe on foodnetwork.com. Instead of a grill basket, it skewers the sprouts directly, which keeps them from rolling around and makes flipping the whole batch a one-motion job.

Ingredients

  • 1 pound Brussels sprouts, as uniform in size as possible
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 tablespoon minced garlic
  • 1 teaspoon dry mustard
  • 1 teaspoon smoked paprika
  • 1 teaspoon kosher salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

The recipe is rated easy, with a total time of 23 minutes — 10 minutes prep and 13 minutes on the grill — and yields 4 servings. Every ingredient here is plant-based, so there’s no hidden-animal-product label check needed on this one the way there is with a bottled sauce or a rub.

Skewering and Grilling, Step by Step

  1. Heat a grill to medium.
  2. Cut off the stem end of each Brussels sprout and pull off any yellowing outer leaves.
  3. Put the sprouts in a large microwave-safe bowl and microwave on high for 3 minutes to par-cook them.
  4. Add the olive oil, garlic, mustard, paprika and salt, and toss to coat. Let the sprouts cool until you can handle them comfortably.
  5. Skewer 4 to 5 sprouts onto each metal skewer, with all the stem ends facing the same direction and at least 1/2 inch of space between sprouts.
  6. Lay the skewers on the grill with the stem ends closest to the flame. Cover and cook for 5 minutes, then turn the skewers over and cook for another 5 minutes.
  7. Serve as is, or slide the sprouts off the skewers back into the original bowl and toss them with whatever oil-and-garlic mixture is left before plating.

Brown’s own cook’s note flags the one variable that actually matters here: uniform sprout size. Since they’re grilled as a batch on shared skewers rather than individually monitored, sprouts that are noticeably bigger or smaller than their neighbors will finish at different rates.

Why the Microwave Step Is There

Three minutes in the microwave before they ever touch the grate is doing real work, not just saving time. Raw Brussels sprouts are dense enough that 10 minutes of direct grilling alone would likely char the outer leaves before the center cooked through. Par-cooking them first means the grill only needs to add char, color and smoke flavor to sprouts that are already most of the way to tender — which is also why the total grill time here is just 10 minutes split across two sides.

Nutrition, as Published

Food Network’s nutritional analysis for this recipe puts a single serving at 126 calories, 8 grams of total fat, 11 grams of carbohydrates, 5 grams of dietary fiber, 4 grams of protein and 509 milligrams of sodium — most of that sodium coming from the kosher salt and any extra added at the table, since none of the other ingredients are salty on their own.

How Food Network Files This Recipe

On the recipe page itself, Food Network tags this dish under Gluten Free and Diabetes-Friendly, alongside Healthy Dinner, Healthy Lunch and Side Dish categories. That’s consistent with the ingredient list: there’s no wheat-based thickener or added sugar anywhere in it, and the seasoning leans on spice rather than a sauce that might otherwise sneak in sodium or carbohydrate beyond what’s already counted in the nutrition figures above. It’s worth remembering that those labels describe the dish as written — if you’re serving it alongside something else at a cookout, the plate as a whole may not carry the same tags even if the sprouts themselves do.

A Word on the Vegetable Itself

Brussels sprouts (Brassica oleracea, variety gemmifera) take their name from the city they’re associated with: according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, they may have been grown in Belgium as early as 1200, though the first recorded description of the vegetable dates to 1587. Britannica also notes each stem produces small axillary buds that look like miniature cabbage heads, which is exactly the shape that makes them easy to thread onto a skewer in the first place.

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