Boiling food properly will help keep the flavor fresh and nutritious of the ingredients. However, doing it incorrectly not only makes the dish less attractive, reducing the flavor and inherent nutrition.
Taking too long to boil
This is one of the basic mistakes that housewives are easy to make. Boiling food in boiling water for too long will reduce nutrition, for example, for green vegetables, prolonged high temperatures will cause vitamin C and vitamin B to dissolve into water or decompose.
As a result, the vegetables become crushed, yellow, and lose their crunchiness and attractive color. For meat and seafood, boiling for too long causes protein to harden, the meat tripe to lose water, leading to the finished product becoming dry, mushy, tough as well as losing its natural sweetness.
Using the wrong water temperature
Choosing the time to put the ingredients in the pot (cold water or boiling water) to boil will determine the ripeness and flavor. For vegetables such as water spinach, mustard, broccoli... should be added when the water is boiled and maintained at a high temperature. This helps the vegetables ripen quickly as well as retain their green color and crunchiness.
Tubers such as potatoes, carrots, kohlrabi... should be added as soon as the water is still cold and gradually heats up. This heat-up process will help cook evenly from the outside to the inside without crushing the shell and the inside is still thick.
For meat, if boiled to get the broth for making soup and pho, it should be added while the water is still cold so that the sweetener is secreted slowly. On the contrary, if you want the boiled meat to stay sweeter, you should put it in a pot of boiled water to help the meat retain the fresh water inside.
full cover when boiling vegetables
The habit of covering the vegetables tightly to boil vegetables will help the vegetables not turn yellow leaves, especially in green vegetables containing volatile organic acids.
When the mixture is thick, these acids cannot escape, reacting with chlorophyll and will cause the vegetable to turn yellow, less attractive. The secret to making the vegetables lush green is to open the lid throughout the boiling process.
Add cold water to a boiling pot
Another serious mistake that housewives can make is adding cold water directly while boiling food. This causes a phenomenon of "heat shock" affecting the ingredients, especially when boiling meat or bone broth.
A sudden change in water temperature causes protein and fat in meat to immediately clump and harden. This is also the reason why meat (or bones) become tough, dry and significantly reduce sweetness.
