5 best ways to cook food

Pasta with creamy aubergine sauce

Food Diary (January 11, 2012)

Breakfast: Rolled oats with raisins, sunflower seeds and flax seeds

Lunch: Pasta with creamy aubergine sauce

Dinner: Spiced lentils and potatoes with sourdough

Baking/sweets: Mulled wine spiced chocolate cake

Today's Favourite Photo

Source: Sparklette

Fried Prawn – looks like it is in yoga pose

Today’s Favourite Blog

Source: Care2

I was skeptical when I saw an article titled “5 best ways to cook food”. I thought I knew the best ways to cook but this article turned out more interesting and useful than I expected.

Steaming

Not only does steaming preserve flavor, aroma, vitamins and antioxidants, it also decreases the volume of vegetables so you can eat more. USDA researchers discovered that lightly steaming greens such as collards and broccoli increases their ability to bind to bile acids more than if consumed raw. With lower levels of circulating bile acids in the blood, the body uses cholesterol to make more bile, which in turn lowers cholesterol numbers and may confer heart-health benefits.

Stir-frying

The intense heat from the stovetop minimizes nutrient loss and helps maintain vegetable texture and color. High-quality woks are great for rapid, even heating at high temperatures, but you can also use a large, heavy, flat-bottom frying pan for stir-frying just about anything.

Sautéing

Sautéing involves cooking food in a moderate amount of fat (oil, butter, etc.) in a pan over direct heat. Cooking times tend to be longer than stir-frying, potentially resulting in slightly bigger nutrient losses.

Slow Cooker

Although heating for an extended period of time, even at low temperatures, will result in some nutrient loss, most of those nutrients can be salvaged if you wind up eating the sauce or cooking liquid in which the food was cooked.

Pressure cooking

Exposure to intense heat and surrounding liquids will cause some nutrient degradation, but the rapid cooking time will help offset this. Again, if you eat any surrounding sauces, you’ll recoup some of the nutrients.

Here's the bad news. Baking, boiling, grilling, roasting and toasting are not the best cooking methods since they do a comparatively poor job at preserving nutrients and, in the case of grilling, can produce unhealthy compounds. Deep-frying is the least desirable preparation method. However these methods produce tasty results.

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