Tips to Retain Nutrients When Cooking Food 19.05.2016

Cooking is an everyday task performed in every kitchen which serves as a mini industry of a house. The head of the kitchen must decide what items to include in the shopping list, what is to be cooked and when. Along with all the other dilemmas a home chef faces, one of the biggest one is how to get the most of your food or in other words, how to preserve the nutrients that are in your food. Yes, how you cook your food has a drastic impact upon the nutrients and the reason behind is that many of the vitamins are prone to heat and air especially vitamin B, C and folate but there are foods that are less nutritious when raw. One of the examples are raw dried beans which has an enzyme inhibitor which thwarts the activity of the enzymes that serve to digest the protein so they must be cooked before eating and meat or eggs raw can be pernicious to your health. The basic principle that works for most of the foods is that the loss of nutrients is directly proportional to cooking time and cooking temperature, these two factors how nutritious you food will be when you take it off the stove. Below are some tips to help you preserve as many nutrients as you can.

1. Time and Temperature

As described above, the first and foremost that you should consider controlling is the time and temperature of your cooking, the longer you cook your food, the more nutrients you destroy and the same thing goes for your cooking temperature.

2. Cut Your Vegetables Down to an Adequate Size

There are a lot of air sensitive nutrients in your food like Vitamin C, E, B6 and folate. If you chop your vegetables to small pieces, most of these nutrients will be destroyed when exposed to air. The best way to conserve these nutrients in to cut your vegetables into big chunks.

3. Use Minimum Amount of Water

Just as air can destroy the nutrients in your food, water can do the same thing. Nutrients such as Vitamin C, Thiamin, Riboflavin, Vitamin B6 and Potassium are highly soluble in water. In order to conserve these nutrients, you have to us as little water as you can while cooking and don’t leave your pot uncovered because that will surely destroy all the nutrients in your food. Keep your pit covered to minimize the cooking time and preserve more nutrients.

4. Try Eating Raw

You don’t have to eat things raw all the time but consuming fruits and vegetables as salads every now and then will certainly have a substantial impact on your diet and health.