salted water, then tossed in a skillet with some butter, or
green beans that are blanched until almost completely soft
before being stirred into a creamy mushroom sauce and
baked in a casserole. It’s a softening step for vegetables,
allowing you better control over the texture of the finished
dish, rather than trying to cook all the ingredients in one
step or one pot. It’s also a valuable organizational and time-
saving tool for dinner parties or holidays.
Remember this: anytime blanching a vegetable is part of a
recipe, you can always cool that vegetable, dry it carefully,
and finish the rest of the recipe later. This means that a
recipe for, say, a broccoli or cauliflower gratin that calls for
blanching the stalks, then covering them with a cheese
sauce and baking can actually be broken down into two
distinct steps that don’t have to be done with one
immediately following the other. Heck, you could boil your
broccoli on Monday, then toss it with your cheese sauce and
bake it on Thursday if you’d like. This kind of flexibility in
a recipe makes planning and executing far simpler.
I’ve included steaming in this section as well, since it
essentially accomplishes the same goal as blanching.
BUTTERED SNAP PEAS
Here is blanching at its absolute simplest. You boil your
snap peas just until barely tender, then add them to a buttery
sauce (or just butter and lemon juice) you have waiting in a
skillet. Toss to combine over high heat, and serve. Of
course, as I mentioned above, you can blanch the peas
ahead of time, cool them down, and serve them whenever