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Vitamins and Minerals How foods are cooked can have a huge effect on their nutrient content. The best way to ruin vitamins is to cook your food in an open pot of boiling water. To save the most nutrients feasible, many experts suggest that you use as small amount of water as possible. Your food should also be cooked as quickly as possible, because the vast majority of vitamins degrade in water, heat and air exposure. Water used for cooking dissolves and washes away water soluble vitamins, while the high temperature breaks them down. Many vitamins including "B" and "C" are water soluble and simply washing them gets rid of some of the vitamins. Vitamins "D" and "E" are fat soluble. Fat soluble vitamins are stored and metabolized with the fat in our bodies. Fat soluble vitamins are not as unstable as water soluble vitamins and are not as easily cooked away. It is best to choose the cooking method that most optimizes and saves the nutrients in food. In a research published by Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, experts looked at the effects of different means of cooking broccoli. Up to 97 percent of specific antioxidant substances were destroyed by microwaving, while steaming the broccoli brought about only 11 percent loss. Therefore, any cooking that minimizes the time, temperature, and water will support to retain nutrients. Pressure cooking in steam is one of the best methods because it reduces time and requires little water. The environment that a pressure cooker creates, with its super-heated steam, makes food cook rapidly and intensifies natural flavors in food. This allows cooks to use a lesser amount of salt, sugar, and use less pricey herbs and seasonings and also get a far better taste. Pressure cooking generates an airless environment that holds more nutrients than other cooking methods. As the food gets cooked rapidly with very little liquid, more vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients are conserved and not boiled away during cooking. The method of cooking in a steam atmosphere is virtually a fat-free process of cooking as well. As a rule, rapid cooking approaches are much better for saving nutrients than slower methods. Any type of cooking changes food in some way, and more nutrients are lost when food is subjected to heat, light, moisture and air. The procedures that generally preserve nutrients best can be ordered from quickest to slowest, as follows: Pressure Cooking, Microwaving, Steaming, Stir-frying, Broiling, Sautéing, Poaching, Braising, Roasting, Baking then Boiling. There are a few tricks you can employ to protect nutrients. Leaving vegetables in larger portions will minimize the surface area of food. That way fewer vitamins are demolished when they are exposed to air. Always cover your pot to hold in steam and heat. This will also aid to lessen cooking time. Leftover cooking water can be used for: stews, soups, sauces or vegetable juice. It's not difficult to see why countless people today are beginning to catch on to pressure cooking. They're economical, save electricity, lock in nutrients, safe to use, constructed to last and extremely flexible.
Article Source: http://www.bharatbhasha.net Article Url: http://www.bharatbhasha.net/consumer.php/362227 Article Added on Thursday, March 29, 2012 LD | ||||||||
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