How to Steam Vegetables Correctly
Today I'm going to show you how to properly steam your, vegetables steaming vegetables is such a great way to cook your vegetables because it's very nutritious and it's also low in fat contrary to frying your vegetable or even stir frying your vegetables you don't use any oil at all when you steam your vegetables and also it's better than boiling the vegetables because you actually get to keep the nutrients of the vegetables because when you boil the vegetables for too long the hot water tends to strip the nutrients out of the vegetables but when you steam them the vegetables hold onto their nutrients so if you're on a diet or if you just want to adopt a very healthy lifestyle and steaming your vegetables is the best way to do it and it's so so so easy to do and very quick to do you don't need any fancy equipment you don't need to buy a vegetable steamer really it's not it's not necessary at all all you need is something like this this is a sti I believe it's called a steamer insert or a steaming basket and and basically I got I got this from Ikea for less than five dollars and what you do is you place this into any pot it is.
How to Steam Vegetables Correctly
It's pretty flexible so you get to use it in them any size of the pot if you can't find it then what you can also do is you can get a calendar like a stainless-steel calendar and just basically this one here fits on top of my pot here and it works just as well so basically what you need is some kind of equipment that has holes in it where you can place your vegetables without them actually touching the water and they have to have holes to allow the steam to basically get all over the pot and steam your vegetables properly so now we're going to go to the stove and I'm going to show you how I'm going to steam vegetables so today I'm going to steamed green beans carrots and mushrooms one thing though because each vegetable has their own cooking time or their own steaming time it is better to use separate or to steam the vegetables separately I'm going to start by steaming the green beans using my colander so.
What I did is I placed some water and the bottom of the pot that's about less than one inch actually it doesn't really matter how much water I put what's important is that the water does not touch the vegetables so as you can see
Here there's still plenty of space between the bottom of the colander and the water and then cover the pot and allow the water to boil so what you want to do is you want to create steam in your pot before you place your vegetables and that way the vegetables will cook faster because they would be in steam already and they will hold on to their nutrients longer.
Shouldn't take any time to have the water boiling just a few minutes you see now the pot is teaming so I'm going to place the beans and one layer like that and cover the pot and allow the beans to steam now the steaming time will depend on the type of vegetable of course and also the size of how big or small you cut them I don't usually keep up with a specific time
What I do is that I check on them a few minutes later and I know that they're done when I can poke them with a fork easily so for these particular vegetables they're going to take about
Five minutes have passed and you see I'm I know that my beans are done because if I poke my fork into them I can do that very easily
Ready it's not too tender it's still a bit crunchy and that's how I like it so what I'll do is I'll remove the beans I'm just going to check to see if
There's water left and yes there's one of water left for us to steam the mushroom so just drop in the mushrooms in one layer like that cover them and steam them until they are tender and actually mushrooms require a very very little time to cook so just a few minutes three minutes or so should be enough
Okay so normally at this stage I would add the rest of my vegetables and so on and so forth and if I need to add some more water I would but actually what I'm going to do is I'm going to steam my carrots in a different pot just to show you how to use these steaming insert we use this one here add some water and now I'm going to place my steaming basket or my steaming insert just one thing though you see these metal legs you should not use a nonstick pot with the steaming basket because the metal legs might damage the nonstick surface so if you're going to use the steaming basket please use a stainless steel pot like I'm doing here again
I place enough water so that it goes about halfway up through the leg here cover it and when the water boils and they're steamed in the pot we place the carrots or the vegetables in one layer like this cover the pot and steam them until they are tender or until you can poke the fork in them easily carrots take a little longer than the other vegetables okay so I can easily poke the fork if to the carrots so they're ready and so this is how we make steamed vegetables if you're intimidated by eating them alone and you feel they're a little bland.
Just add your favorite spices salt pepper paprika some oregano squeeze something lemon on top it will be absolutely delicious. l see you next time bye you.
