How is Steaming Vegetables Better Than Boiling

The switch from boiling to steaming your vegetables is certainly a wise decision. The advantages of steaming over boiling have been proved, and they are many in number. This, in a way, depends on how you used to eat the food you used to boil. When you compare, do it between the raw veggies, the ones that you boil and throw away the excess water, and steamed veggies.

Steaming possesses great advantages overeating raw and deep-frying your veggies. For example, you do not need oil when you steam your vegetables. This is one of its biggest selling points over frying or deep frying. And with the number of people turning to steaming their vegetables, there are some tasty recipes out there too! There are quite a few problems that arise when you boil your veggies.

There is a heavy leach of nutrients and colored antioxidants from the vegetables you boil. This is applicable to soluble nutrients, namely folic acid and vitamin C. There is an average 15% to 25% loss of folic acid and vitamin C when you boil instead of steaming.

This is because, heat breaks down the cellular linings and expose soluble vitamins and acids that then dissolve into the water. The same process happens with steaming, but the nutrients are still fully retained by the veggie as there is no direct contact with the boiling water and the veggie.

The problem here is that we mostly tend to throw away the water when we boil, and a part of our health with it. If you can, make a soup out of that water to reduce the loss of nutrition.

Vegetable consistency is hard to maintain when you boil it. The outer sides of the vegetables get cooked much faster when you boil, and the constant contact with boiling water and the hot utensil's inner surface makes it all the more difficult for the vegetables to stay in one piece.

Steaming, on the other hand, is much more subtle, and there's no contact with the boiling water or the cooking surface with the veggies, so it's much easier to hold the vegetables as a whole.

Overcooking happens easily when you boil, comparatively speaking. The temperature exposure is much harsher and if you don't time it right, you get veggie mush. You have to try really hard if you want to overcook by steaming. Apart from the whole health angle, there have been claims that steaming vegetables, when done right, tastes much better than boiling!

You may also consider raw veggies as the best option for nutrition value, but that's not the case all the time. For example, tomatoes, when eaten raw, give the optimum level of vitamin A and beta carotene. When boiled, the tomato does lose a small amount of beta-carotene and almost negligible amount of vitamin A.

But now, we get a spike in the pigment called lycopene, which has been linked to lowering cancer risk and heart attacks. Lycopene intake is less from raw tomatoes than from boiled or steamed tomatoes. This is because cooking brings out the lycopene from within the cell walls, making it easily accessible to the body's digestive system.

But, before you jump over to steaming, consider this - food keeps your body healthy as much as it keeps your mind healthy. A complete abstinence from other types of cooking is never the way to go, especially if you're not a fan of steaming.

Taste and palatability are sometimes more important than the nutrition leach. If you try steaming and grow tired of it, you'll stop eating food steamed and keep eating food fried. If your mother used to boil the vegetables all the time, chances are you will prefer it to steaming in terms of taste. Bottom line is, you'll still keep eating vegetables.