My goal is to help you become more comfortable cooking vegetables instinctively and experimenting with your own favorite ingredients and techniques. I want you to develop an intuition for flavors and substitutions. The recipes throughout this chapter provide a great place for beginners to start and a useful reference for more experienced cooks.
Cooking vegetables can completely change their taste and texture and, for that matter, their nutritional profiles (see “Raw Versus Cooked, Nutritionally,” page 149). Some cooking methods — roasting, sautéing, broiling, and grilling, for example — deepen flavor by caramelizing the natural sugars or starches in vegetables, while techniques like steaming and poaching brighten both their taste and their color.
Though there are some exceptions (noted in specific vegetable entries and recipes), I prefer to cook vegetables until crisp-tender (al dente). You’re looking for a state in which the vegetables retain a subtle, pleasant crunch but are tender and moist enough to be pierced easily with a skewer or thin-bladed knife — or your teeth! When crisp-tender, vegetables like asparagus and broccoli will be flexible but not flopping over, and their color will be bright. You’ll learn to assess crisp-tender doneness by sight after a while, but start by simply taking a bite of the vegetables as they cook to gauge their texture.
Generally, it’s important to leave a little elbow room in the pot whenever you cook vegetables. A pot of water will take a long time to return to a boil if you load it with too much — and then the vegetables will probably get mushy. In the microwave, overcrowding keeps vegetables from cooking evenly. Crowding the pan or pot during sautéing or frying causes the vegetables to soak up extra oil instead of starting to cook on contact, and keeps them from browning properly. Bottom line: Have a little patience and work in batches if necessary.
The microwave is ideal for steaming veggies with barely any water, providing you know your machine well enough to cook them evenly and take them out before they overcook. Put vegetables on a plate or in a shallow bowl, sprinkle them with a couple of tablespoons of water, then cover them loosely with a vented microwave cooking lid, a paper towel, or a heavy fitted lid. Stir, check, and re-cover the vegetables periodically. Be careful when you uncover them; the steam will be very hot.
Cooking vegetables above — not in — a small amount of simmering water is fast, efficient, and healthy. This method is great for plain vegetables you want to eat right away or marinate in a vinaigrette (page 628) and cool down for salad. (For a specific example, see Basic Steamed Cauliflower on page 188.)
You can buy fancy vegetable steamers, but one of those fold-up baskets that you set into the bottom of a pot works fine, as does a colander or even, in a pinch, a heatproof bowl that fits in the pot (see “Ways to Rig a Steamer,” page 25). Fill the basket or bowl with vegetables, set it over an inch or so of water, cover the pot, and turn the heat to high. Once the water comes to a boil, adjust the heat to keep the water bubbling steadily. Check frequently to prevent overcooking and make sure there’s still water in the bottom of the pot. If you want to stop the cooking immediately to hold the vegetables for future use, as soon as you remove them, shock the vegetables in a bowl of ice water to cool them quickly.
To boil, there are two options: bring a large pot of water to a boil, salt it generously, and toss in the vegetables. Let the water come back to a boil; continue to boil (or turn it down to simmer, just barely bubbling) until the vegetables are just tender, then drain them and continue with the recipe as instructed. The other is put the vegetables in a pot, add water to cover, then bring to a boil and continue to boil/simmer.
Parboiling simply means to boil vegetables until they are only partially cooked; it’s usually done for vegetables that you will finish cooking by some other method like stir-frying or sautéing. Parboiling gives those vegetables a head start so that everything can finish at about the same time; it’s especially useful for dense vegetables that might not cook all the way through using a faster high-heat method. It’s also a good precooking method that can save time later.
Blanching also involves cooking vegetables in boiling water, but very briefly — usually a minute or even just a few seconds. This tenderizes the vegetable only slightly while fixing its bright color. It can also be used to tame the harsh flavor of some vegetables like onions.
With both parboiling and blanching, the vegetables are usually drained and “shocked”: dropped into ice water to stop the cooking. As soon as they have cooled, drain again.