Boiling Vegetables with Baking Soda | Cook's Country (2024)

FAQs

Boiling Vegetables with Baking Soda | Cook's Country? ›

We got some surprising results. Baking soda does help green vegetables retain color, but it causes undesirable color changes in red cabbage—it turned blue. The science can be distilled to this: Adding baking soda to cooking water makes it slightly alkaline, which stabilizes the green color of chlorophyll.

This is a bad practice, however, and you should avoid adding baking soda when boiling any type of vegetable. It has various unwelcome effects, such as softening the vegetable, altering the vegetable's flavor, destroying thiamine content, and hastening the loss of vitamin C.

In the case of collard greens, baking soda's utility is threefold, serving as a flavor enhancer, a tenderizer, and a color protector. Baking soda is an alkali salt possessing the tenderizing and flavor-enhancing properties of regular salt.

It's all about tenderization. Treating small pieces of meat with a baking soda solution before cooking is a technique seen quite often in Chinese cooking, especially in stir-fries. If your favorite Chinese restaurant always serves incredibly supple and tender beef in their dishes, baking soda is likely involved.

Use Baking Soda

Naturally, it's an excellent solution for cleaning produce, too. Previous studies have shown that baking soda removes 66.7% to 98.9% of pesticides. Mix one teaspoon of baking soda with every two cups of cold water. Douse your fruits and vegetables for a minute, rinse, and enjoy without pesticides.

Baking soda does help green vegetables retain color, but it causes undesirable color changes in red cabbage—it turned blue. The science can be distilled to this: Adding baking soda to cooking water makes it slightly alkaline, which stabilizes the green color of chlorophyll.

Turns out cooking food with baking soda (a.k.a. sodium bicarbonate) can indeed damage a number of nutrients, such as vitamin C, vitamin D, riboflavin, thiamin, and one essential amino acid. Yet it doesn't hurt others, including vitamin A, vitamin B12, niacin, and folic acid.

Finally, when the magnesium is leached out of the chlorophyll, the chlorophyll goes dull and the vegetables turn grayish. Because baking soda lessens the acidity of the cooking water, it also slows down the chlorophyll dulling process, thereby keeping the veggies greener for longer.

Whether you're cooking green beans, spinach, broccoli, brussels sprouts or peas, the goal is for them cooked through, but still firm enough to slightly resist your bite. That's tender-crisp. The best way to achieve this (and keep your veggies green) is by blanching, roasting or sautéing them.

How do Chinese food restaurants get their chicken so tender? ›

There are actually a few different ways to tenderise chicken the Chinese restaurant way: marinating in a cornstarch/cornflour sludge then deep frying or blanching in water before proceeding to cook in the stir fry.

Baking soda. Here's where it gets science-y: The baking soda raises the pH on the outside of the meat as it marinates, in a process known as velveting (which can also be done with a cornstarch slurry). This makes it so the proteins have a harder time bonding to each other when it's time to cook the meat.

Velveting is a simple process of using baking soda or a mixture of egg whites, cornstarch and oil to marinate and tenderize economical cuts of steak, chicken and other meats before cooking. Velveting meat softens fibers to reduce toughness and enhance juiciness for maximum flavor and tenderness.

The baking soda will soften the water in cooking beans or cabbage, and the vegetables will cook quicker and more thoroughly, but the alkali has a destructive effect on the vitamins present in these vegetables, and in all fresh foods.

While you can remove pesticide residues using a soaking solution such as vinegar and water or salt and water, it's not advisable. There's a small risk the chemical reaction between the pesticides and the solution could produce potentially harmful compounds.

In too large a dose, baking soda is also poisonous. This is due to the powder's high sodium content. When someone takes too much sodium bicarbonate, the body tries to correct the salt balance by drawing water into the digestive system. This causes diarrhea and vomiting.

The Risks of Using Baking Soda for Plants

While stopping the growth of fungal spores might sound like a great idea on the surface, let's take a deeper look into using baking social in your garden. Baking soda is a salt, and all salts—along with other minerals in excess—can be detrimental to plant growth.

Beyond that, studies have shown that while washing produce in a baking soda solution can reduce pesticide residues by 66.7–98.9%, washing in tap water alone can reduce by 26.7–62.9%. Knowing that the levels of pesticide residues are almost negligible anyway, the advantage added by baking soda becomes minuscule.

To create a solution that prevents and treats disease, add a heaping tablespoon of baking soda, a teaspoon of vegetable oil, and a small amount of mild soap to a gallon of water and spray the tomato plants with this solution. This needs to be reapplied regularly to maintain its efficiency.