Once your vegetables are cooked perfectly, the question
remaining is how to prevent them from overcooking. At the
restaurants I’ve worked in, we’d plunge them into a huge
bowl of ice water and leave them there until completely
chilled. But in my home kitchen, I tested the ice-water
method side by side with two other methods: running the
drained vegetables under cool tap water and simply leaving
them in a bowl at room temperature. Both the ice-water
vegetables and the cool-running-water veg came out
identically, so clearly the ice is overkill—cold water will do
just fine. Surprisingly though, it turned out that even when
the vegetables are simply placed in a bowl and left on the
counter, the ones around the edges lose heat to the air fast
enough to prevent overcooking. It’s only the vegetables in
the center that end up mushy and dark green. So, as long as
you spread the vegetables out in a single layer—say, on a
rimmed baking sheet—you don’t even really need the cold
water. I still use it just for the sake of convenience, but it’s
good to know this in a pinch.
Whatever cooling method you use, it is of vital
importance that you dry your vegetables in a salad spinner
or with a clean kitchen towel before adding them to a salad.
That is, unless you like watered-down salad.
BLANCHING IS the gateway to so much more
than keeping green vegetables green, however. In common
cook’s parlance, blanching is the act of dropping vegetables
into a large pot of boiling salted water and lightly cooking
them. Most often, the vegetables are then used in another
recipe, whether it’s sweet peas that are lightly blanched in