How does Dr. Greger pressure steam his vegetables?
In a review of more than one hundred articles on the effects of cooking vegetables, researchers tried to find the sweet spot. On the one hand, heat can destroy certain nutrients, but on the other, softening tissues can make them more bioavailable. Researchers established Steaming is the best cooking method to preserve the greatest amount of nutrients because the vegetables are not submerged in water or oil where the nutrients can leach and excessive dry heat temperatures are not reached. They recognizeHowever, of all the common cooking methods, the one we know the least about is pressure cooking, as you can see in the graph below and at minute 0:37 of my video. Does pressure cooking preserve nutrients?.
There are all kinds of fancy electric pressure cookers, like the Instant Pot. They are great for quickly. cooking dry beans at the touch of a button, but what about nutrition? Let’s look at black beans. (See the chart below and at 1:01 in my video.) The antioxidant content of soaked black beans. boiled for about an hour, a typical cooking time, is high, but it is even longer when pressure cooking for 15 minutes. In fact, the researchers found six times Antioxidant levels in pressure-cooked beans. I’ve been pressure cooking beans just because I like the texture better (canned ones can be a little mushy for me) and dried beans are very cheap compared to canned ones. But now we know that they are tastier, cheaper, and healthier. That’He is quite a triple threat.
What about pressure cooking? vegetables? As you can see below and at minute 1:35 in my videovitamin C is one of the most heat-sensitive nutrients. Researchers found that sautéing spinach or amaranth leaves in a pan for 30 minutes destroyed about 95 percent of the vitamin C, while ten minutes in a pressure cooker removed only about 90 percent. But who pressure cooks spinach for ten minutes or so? skipIs it for half an hour? Anyway, even then, not many two-way effects were found on beta-carotene levels.
However, vitamin C is only one of many antioxidants. What about the effects of pressure? cooking in in general antioxidant capacity? At 2:07 in my video And below, you can see a table with the researchers’ different cooking methods. compared-For for example, 12 minutes of boiling, 5 minutes of pressure cooking and 6 minutes of cooking carrots in the microwave. The researchers found that cooking carrots increased their antioxidant potential and pressure cooking almost duplicate its antioxidant value. In contrast, no matter how the peas were cooked, their antioxidant capacity was affected.
What about the green ones? The chards were not affected a lot across the board, but for spinach, microwave outperformed both pressure cooking and pressure boiling, and pressure cooking outperformed boiling, although pressure cooking is actually boiling, but in less time already a higher temperature. However, the kitchen time seemed to exceed the temperature; The researchers observed significantly less nutrient loss when pressure cooking spinach for three and a half minutes compared to boiling it for eight.
The researchers found The same goes for those magic cancer-fighting glucosinolate compounds in the healthiest cruciferous vegetables, like kale, collards, and turnip greens. As you can see in the graph below and at 3:08 in my videothey had the highest levels of nutrients when they were raw. Three-quarters were removed by boiling, but less than half were removed by pressure cooking. Steaming outperformed both methods, retaining more nutrients than cooking or pressure cooking, because the vegetables were not submerged in water, which can leach nutrients. But, even though the pressure-cooked vegetables were submerged as much as the boiled vegetables, there were only half the nutrient losses, presumably because it was only half the cooking time: seven minutes of pressure cooking compared to 15 minutes of boiling.
What would happen if you reduced that time even more? pressure smokyFor example, adding a layer of water to the bottom of an electric pressure cooker, dropping it into a metal steaming basket, then putting in the vegetables and steaming them under pressure. This is how I cook the vegetables I eat every day. I’ve always loved collard greens, especially in southern-inspired cuisine or Ethiopian cuisine, and found that I could get that same melt-in-your-mouth texture by simply steaming them under pressure for zero minutes. Zero minutes? Yes. Simply set the pressure cooker to zero so it turns off as soon as it reaches cooking pressure, then immediately open the quick release valve to release the steam. The vegetables are tender, a bright emerald color, and cooked perfecttion. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
I love covering practical topics, those that we may need to consider day to day when making decisions. Check out some of my other videos, including some cooking ones, in the related videos below.
