The big vegetable brewing tip almost everyone is wrong (including chefs)

Are the rules of the Great Pot-Plant Running True?

The general wisdom of the abuse of vegetables is to boil them in large amounts of water, always shake them with salt and then in ice water. How much of this does it really hold testing?

Blanch is a funny word. In some cases this means Cook food quickly in boiling water; With green vegetables, the goal is to improve and fix their natural green color. In other cases, it means losing color or bleaching, such as leek, white asparagus and swords (denied sunlight to increase whiteness), or a chef group who is in a conversation does not know the latest restaurant in the latest restaurant everyone speaks. Shelter Betsy! How embarrassing! (Pro tip: If you have doubts, just tell me how much you like kale salad.)

Very useful techniques for blany vegetables, especially during this season, when green spring vegetables are still plenty. Restaurants rely on blanket for two reasons. First of all, fresh vegetables, especially gentle and/or leaf, should be faded quickly even under good storage conditions. The solid stems of the asparagus begin to fade and fall back, the Swiss movements become rigid and shiny and declining and boring, and the peas will not be polished as fresh sugars from the field are transformed into more complex starch. Rapid murmur in boiling water promotes these vegetables on time, improving their eating quality after the blanket (until they are otherwise bad). Secondly, the blanket of vegetables saves time for restaurants: it takes less time to cook or grill when the order arrives.

Useful for home reasons. One big Blank seat can save time with dinner later in the week and ensures that all the beautiful products you bought in the Farmers market are just as good to finally get around.

Like any restaurant chef can tell you, there are basic rules that drill into blankets from the first day: use a lot of water compared to cooked vegetables, salt water and immediately shake the blanket vegetables in ice water as soon as it is done.

WHYS is behind the traditional Blancing technique

Here are the reasons that often give you why you need to abuse a lot of salted water and then shake the vegetables in icy water.

• Use a lot of water relative to the amount of vegetables: The reason here is similar to the dough, namely that vegetables suffer when the water temperature falls too much. Therefore, the use of a lot of water ensures that adding cold vegetables is caused by a smaller droplet in the water temperature, allowing the water to return faster.
• Salt the water: There are two reasons for salting the water. First of all, seasonal vegetables. Second, Harold McGee, a About food and cooking: the science of the kitchen and loreSalted water attracts less from vegetables' own salts and sugars into cooking water.
• Shock in icy water: The reason for the ice-water bath is that you want to stop transmission cooking as quickly as possible after cooking (so that vegetables do not cook in the remaining heat) and ice water is one of the fastest methods for this.

The tests

The question is, these reasons are really true? Can you get the same good results in a small amount of water or skip the salt? And making ice-water bathing is a pain-it wouldn't be good to know who can leave this part? There is only one way to find out, so I bought and worked many different vegetables.

The ice bath comes

Shocking the shock of flanked vegetables in icy water is the last step in the bland process, but I decided to test the first time as it helps to determine how to run the rest of my tests.

If someone is like me, then this is the step in which you will probably be lazy. I can't tell you how many times I abused vegetables at home and then glued them under cold running water in the sink. I mean how much difference can be achieved?

To find out, I cooked a lot of asparagus in salted boiling water and then removed exactly at the same time. One third of this immediately went to an ice water bath, one third in a filter pot in the sink under cold running water, and in the last third I let it stand at room temperature until all the heat was distributed.

Since temperature differences can affect flavor sensation, I have only moved all samples into the freezer for a few minutes before tasting so that they would all be just as cold.

Uh ja. Seeing the results side by side, it was immediately clear that all my lazy tap-heat and cooling was a mistake. The ice-zone asparagus had a fresher, fried and greener taste. When I invited my colleagues to the office for a blind tasting, without telling them what I was testing, they were all chosen as the best of the ice bath.

So you would go: use an ice bath, it's worth it.

The water: puddle or ocean? Fresh water or salt?

For my next test round, I decided to test both volume and salt at the same time. I set four dishes for our workplace induction burners. Two were large, each with 10 cups of water and two small, each with 4 cups of water. I salted water in one of the big dishes and in one of the small dishes As I make dough; I left the other two in salt.

After all the dishes were boiled, I threw 3 ounces of string at a time in each dishes. The first thing I noticed was that all four pots lost the source when the beans went in, but the smaller pots bounced faster than the bigger dishes.

It is something Kenji had previously introduced dough water: Even if the smaller water exchange shows a higher temperature decrease than the larger vessels, it takes exactly the same energy to bring back all the water in all vessels, so that the large vessels do not return to the source as small. In fact, since large vessels have several surfaces where heat can escape, they can actually be more It is difficult to boil like the smaller ones, especially for less strong home burners. Even with our stunning induction burners at the headquarters, it was difficult to reach and maintain the source in larger vessels, while the smaller ones boiled without problems.

Tasting is the only way to know that I can judge Donness with blanket vegetables, so as soon as I considered the beans in each vessel crisp, I moved them to an ice water bath to cool and then introduced them to my colleagues.

Interestingly, the opinion is evenly divided and the beans were not clearly, either large or small, salted or salted. Some of my colleagues picked up the beans gently, spicy taste from the salted dishes, and preferred them, but not everyone noticed it (washed most of the salt in the ice water bath, which I think could prevent it with the prey of icy water, but I didn't test it).

To ensure that the results are not specific to the string beans, I repeated the test with Broccoli Rabe. The leaf prisoner retained the taste of more salt from the spicy dishes, but apart from that, my colleagues were again shared, which they liked, which suggests that while the salt can slightly improve the taste of the vegetables, the size of the vessel is less important.

The last round of tests

A few days after the tests, I decided that I wanted to further explore the cooking temperature and salt issue. I began to think that the problem with the pot size was less about how quickly the water would return to boiling, and rather the exposure, even at a very short temperature, even at lower temperatures. I also started wondering if I was salt enough -my blanket. When I ran in my dough water testI came to the conclusion that the seawater salt water (average about 3% salt weight) is too salty for the dough. But the dough absorbs water better than vegetables, so maybe even I needed salt water to see the difference.

To test the temperature section, I set the dive circulating material, whose water temperature was 185 ° F. I wanted to cook a vegetable in that water from the beginning to the end just to compare the lower cooking temperatures to the source. Then I put two dishes with equal amounts of water on the stove, leaving one salt deposit and the other to 3%, much more aggressive than before. This time I cooked equal amounts of sugary peas I bought at the farmers' market this weekend, shocked in ice water as they were completed (the two boiling water vessels had exactly the same cooking time;

Here is the wonderful thing: the textural differences were incredibly delicious. If there is something, then the water in the salted boiling water had the best textural results with crunchy bite; Salted water produced beans with a slightly softer outer layer, as if the outermost cells are dissolved; The low Template Bathing Bab made beans that were nicely crunchy but not as lively as the others.

According to McGee, the salt can promote the natural pectins of vegetables to gently tender and soften the vegetables, which can explain the smaller textural differences between the beans with and without the beans. (Another thing you need to consider, depending on where you live, is the pH of tap water: McGee says vegetables are best cooked in neutral or slightly alkaline water.)

But again, I can't emphasize enough, the differences were extremely delicious here: I didn't see strong differences in the texture based on cooking temperature or salting.

As for the taste, the 3% tilt water produced a bean that was significantly more tasty than the others, even when it was rinsed in the icy water bath (actually they were a little too salty without the bath).

Conclusion

Based on my test results, the most important thing you can do when the vegetables are blazed is to immediately shake them in ice water. In addition, the other rules have no effect on the final product. Honestly, it would be much better to pay great attention to pulling vegetables out of the water at the right time than to worry about how much water they use, how long the source has been lost, or even salted. The reason for this is that human error and overcrowding will have a much more drastic and negative impact on the quality of vegetables than other variables.

Overall, salt (and lots) seem to be worth the taste. As for the texture, it may be a bit better to cook vegetables at higher temperatures, so it's probably better to go with a smaller water that returns faster to boiling.

Chefs who have long insisted on that all the rules are definitely essential, can feel the Blanc of their faces when they read it, but this is another question.

June 2014