Day 319 of our Green Year: Steaming Instead of Boiling

Recently, I found out that boiling water is not always the most environmental thing you can do when you are cooking vegetables. In our kitchen, we already use the slow cooker more than the stove, as well we use a small personal fryer more than the stove. However, sometimes we still do boil our vegetables on the stove.

Apparently, if you are worried about energy and wasting it, then boiling water for vegetables is not the best choice. Instead, use should be steaming the vegetables. This struck us as odd, since to steam something you need to boil water to create the steam. However, as it turns out, you can cook food a lot faster using the steam and more importantly, you can keep most of the nutrients and important minerals from vegetables in the vegetables. When you boil the vegetables, it can cause you to lose a lot of those helpful minerals in the vegetables.

If you are cooking on a stove, as in using a pan with a bamboo steamer as we used to, you are only saving a little bit of energy. However, here we now have a steamer that connects to the outlet. This uses a lot less energy than the stove and it helps keep our organic vegetables healthy with everything they have in them, and nothing seeping out.