Cooking starchy vegetables. Left: Before
cooking, the plant cells are intact, the starch
granules compact and hard. Right: Cooking
causes the starch granules to absorb water
from the cell fluids, swell, and soften.
The cook can make use of these influences
to diagnose the cause of excessively rapid or
slow softening and adjust the preparation —
for example, precooking vegetables in plain
water before adding them to a tomato sauce,
or compensating for hard water with a
softening pinch of alkaline baking soda. In the
case of green vegetables, shortening the
softening time with the help of salt and a
discreet dose of baking soda helps preserve
the bright green of the chlorophyll (p. 280).
Starchy Vegetables Potatoes, sweet potatoes,