Steaming is an ancient form of quick and healthy cooking.
As long as you use fresh ingredients you can make tasty and satisfying food with little effort.
Steaming is an ideal cooking method for almost any vegetable. Not only does steaming help to retain most of the vegetables nutrients, it also helps to preserve its shape and vibrant color.
The best way to determine if vegetables are steamed to the appropriate doneness is to taste them. It’s important to get into the habit of tasting your food as you cook to determine the proper doneness. Vegetables, when steamed properly, should be tender and offer little resistance to the tooth.
Vegetables can tolerate a more vigorous steam, so it is okay if the liquid beneath is simmering rather briskly. This will create more intense steam and encourage quicker cooking. Quick cooking helps to maintain the vegetable’s color and valuable nutrients.
if the simmering water alone is flavored with aromatics, the steam will impart relatively little flavor to the food item.
Finishing Steamed Vegetables
Because moist-heat methods tend to diffuse (rather than concentrate) flavors, it is important to use post-cooking flavor development to layer and build bold flavors. In the case of steamed vegetables, this means that most of the additional flavor of the dish will come after cooking with the addition of ingredients that will give the dish character and appeal.
After steaming, shake the excess moisture off the vegetables. Place them in a bowl, add a bit of flavorful liquid, a squeeze of citrus or splash of vinegar and season with fresh herbs, spices or anything else you’d like. Then toss, taste and re-season.
Reheating with steam helps to preserve and even add some moisture to many foods.
Submersion cooking methods, such as poaching, simmering and boiling, tend to soften the ingredient’s surface releasing many of the precious nutrients and flavorful compounds into the cooking liquid. With steaming, however, the food never comes into direct contact with the liquid, so its nutrients, color and pure flavors are kept within the food and are not able to leach into the water.
Simmer and boiling: cooked to just tender state. Test daneness: slid easily with knife in middel.
Starchy (potatoes), hard(beets) and delicate (brussel sprouts) vegetables, should be simmer.
Finishing Steamed Vegetables
Because moist-heat methods tend to diffuse (rather than concentrate) flavors, it is important to use post-cooking flavor development to layer and build bold flavors. In the case of steamed vegetables, this means that most of the additional flavor of the dish will come after cooking with the addition of ingredients that will give the dish character and appeal.
After steaming, shake the excess moisture off the vegetables. Place them in a bowl, add a bit of flavorful liquid, a squeeze of citrus or splash of vinegar and season with fresh herbs, spices or anything else you’d like. Then toss, taste and re-season.
Reheating with steam helps to preserve and even add some moisture to many foods.
Submersion cooking methods, such as poaching, simmering and boiling, tend to soften the ingredient’s surface releasing many of the precious nutrients and flavorful compounds into the cooking liquid. With steaming, however, the food never comes into direct contact with the liquid, so its nutrients, color and pure flavors are kept within the food and are not able to leach into the water.
Simmer and boiling: cooked to just tender state. Test daneness: slid easily with knife in middel.
Starchy (potatoes), hard(beets) and delicate (brussel sprouts) vegetables, should be simmer.
Things you need to keep in mind during cooking to preserve color, nutrition and flavor:
- CLOROFIL is very sensitive to heat and acids. Cook green vegetables without a lid so that the acids from the vegetables will not condensate on the lid and fall back on the vegetable changing the vibrant green color.
It is the quick cooking time that helps maintain the vibrant green color.
- Red, blue and white vegetables contain several flavonoids. They require the presence of an acid to preserve their color. 1-2tbsp of acid (vinegar) per liter. can be cooked with a lid.
- Orange and yellow vegetables contain the pigment carotine – very stable and can generally tolerate any method of cooking.. If adding an acid should be done half way trough, because acids tend to keep them firm.