Essential VEGETABLE
Technique #3:
BRAISING
Braising is a slow-cooking process you see most often
applied to tough cuts of meat (see All-American Pot Roast
here, for instance). It’s a process in which meat is first
seared in hot oil (dry heat), then slow-cooked in a pot with
liquid (moist heat). The result is meat that has the flavor that
comes with good browning but becomes completely fork-
tender as the connective tissues slowly break down.
Vegetables also take well to braising, and the technique is
almost identical, with two key differences: First is
temperature. In order to be fully tenderized, vegetables
must be cooked to at least 183°F, the temperature at which
pectin, the intracellular glue that holds them together, begins
to break down. That means that while with meats it’s
preferable to keep the liquid at below a simmer, with
vegetables, you can simmer away without fear of them
toughening or drying out. Second is time. Vegetables cook
much faster than meats do. While a beef stew can take
upward of 3 hours to tenderize the meat, most braised
vegetables will be as tender as they’ll ever become in 20
minutes or less. This is good news for you.
For a while in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it became
bafflingly fashionable to serve vegetables that were still
essentially raw. Foodies and their ilk called them “al dente”
and proclaimed that any green bean that was not perfectly