The Ultimate Easy to Prepare Vegetarian Recipes Cookbook - Steaming

Steaming

Steaming is a great cooking method for vegetarians because it’s fast, it’s easy, and you don’t need any oil. What you do need is a steamer, bamboo or otherwise. A stove-top steamer should do just fine; it costs less and it’s not complicated. All you need to do is put enough water so that it doesn’t dry up while cooking and heat it up until the water is boiling.

Steaming is great for vegetables because they’re not at high risk of getting limp or soggy. But be sure to be extra careful while steaming. Like boiling, steaming cooks food at 100°C and can cause burns just as easily.

Some excellent ingredients for steaming are vegetable sticks like carrots and celery, mushrooms, broccoli, and cauliflower.

Blanching

Blanching is less of a cooking method and more of a preparation technique. It’s something that you do to prepare your ingredients for further cooking. It is fairly simple to do and it offers up a bunch of advantages.

To blanch your vegetables in water, the first thing to do is to heat water until it reaches a rolling boil. Have enough water to make sure that the ingredients are not touching the bottom of the pan. Also, prepare a bowl of ice water where you can shock the ingredients later to stop the cooking process. If you are blanching vegetables with no seeds, add salt, enough to make the water taste like the ocean. If you are blanching vegetables with seeds such as tomatoes, do not add salt. This is just the rule of thumb for cooks.

When the water is boiling, drop your vegetables into the pot but don’t overcrowd them. Make sure the water stays at a rolling boil. For green vegetables, blanching should only take seconds. Test the vegetables for doneness via the fork method. That is, take a fork and stick it into a vegetable to see if it is just done enough that the fork goes through but it is still hard enough that it isn’t cooked through and through. When the vegetables are ready, scoop them out with a strainer and place directly into the ice water. Make sure the vegetables aren’t warm to the touch before removing them from the ice water.

Blanching is a good way to clean and sanitize your vegetables and to keep them from sticking to each other when you’re cooking them later. It also improves the color of vegetables so that they’re more presentable and by pre-cooking your ingredients, you can store them longer by freezing them. It is also a great way of wilting vegetables like spinach.

This is an excerpt from the book:  The Ultimate Easy to Prepare Vegetarian Recipes Cookbook