Vegetable preservation: What did I do wrong?

[Guest guest]

OK, here's what happened...

As you may know by now, my wife and I love Brussel Sprouts. We got this

great little vacuum packaging machine (which works extremely well) recently,

and thought that I could clean a bunch of brussel sprouts and vacuum pack

them, and keep them for a while. Which I did - I bought about 5 pounds of

them, and packed about half of them away in two packages, and refrigerated

them.

Well, yesterday I went to use one and what a suprise - this package which

WAS very tightly vacuum packed was now blown up like a pillow. It was not

leaking - I want to emphasise that. They looked OK, so I opened the

package...quite an odor of brussel sprouts (what else?) was released. I

looked them over carefully and they seemed to look and smell OK, so I cooked

them. They cooked OK, and although they were edible, they weren't quite

right. I couldn't describe it, my wife called them " bitter " .

Today I cooked the other package. PHEW!! The smell was absolutely awful,

and it stunk up the whole house for hours. I cooked them anyway, and these

were similar to the ones from yesterday, only worse. We could only stand to

eat about half of them, and threw the rest out. I can only assume that they

generated some sort of gas on their own, possibly due to the action of

enzymes, but it was enough to overcome the vacuum it was packed under and

generate its own pressure.

Now, can someone tell me what I did wrong? A couple of people my wife has

talked to since have suggested that they should be blanched, and frozen

instead of refrigerated.

Huggy Bear