On Food and Cooking

group, which is more soluble in fat than in water, so the colors don’t readily leak out of the tissue, and ar ...

hay, honey, and violets. Green Chlorophyll One change in the color of green vegetables as they are cooked has ...

active between 150–170ºF/66–77ºC and only destroyed near the boiling point. The second and more noticeable ...

and chlorophyll. This is why dull, olive-green vegetables are so common. Changes in chlorophyll during cooking. ...

of years. One is to cook them in alkaline water, which has very few hydrogen ions that are free to di ...

the greens can be minimized by keeping cooking times short, between five and seven minutes, and protecting c ...

layer of oil (as in a vinaigrette) or butter. Old Tricks for Green Vegetables Cooks had worked out the ...

some form until the beginning of the 20th century, though Sweden outlawed the use of copper cooking ...

gets duller or brighter according to these conditions, the anthocyanins change color completely! This is why ...

anthocyanins are stored are generally acid, while the rest of the cell fluids are less ...

cooking water or sprinkled on the food can help with both aims: its citric acid binds up metal ...

long time, the combination of heat and acidity causes the subunits to break off one by one; and then oxygen ...

Both vine ashes and egg whites are alkaline substances and do transform the wine’s color — though whe ...

temperature approaches the boiling point, the cell walls begin to weaken. The cellulose framework remains mostly un ...

firm during hours of cooking, while in neutral boiling water, neither acid nor alkaline, the same ...

Cooking starchy vegetables. Left: Before cooking, the plant cells are intact, the starch granules compact ...

winter squashes, and other starchy vegetables owe their distinctive cooked texture to their starch granules. ...

starchy vegetables with relatively weak cell walls, the gel-filled cells may be cohesive enough to pul ...

for vegetables meant to hold their shape in a long-cooked meat dish, or potatoes in a potato salad, or ...

Persistently Crisp Vegetables A few underground stem vegetables are notable for retaining some crunc ...