7BEST: Prepping/Cooking Vegetables

You go out of your way to buy the freshest, peak-season vegetables, not only because they taste good but also because they’re packed with vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.

But did you know that how you cook them makes a huge difference in how well they retain those nutrients?

Some cooking methods preserve nutrients and even help them enter your bloodstream, while others can destroy them.

So once you get those vegetables home from the market, look to the strategies here to get the most nutritional bang for your buck.

Here are some tips in general:

1. Wash before cutting

Cutting a vegetable breaks its cell walls, allowing nutrients to escape into any water on contact. By washing uncut vegetables, nutrients stay safely tucked inside their cell walls and won’t be leached into the water.

2. Cook soon after cutting

Nutrients can be destroyed when exposed to light and air. Cook and eat vegetables soon after cutting to keep vitamins and minerals secure in their cells as long as possible.

3. Cut larger, uniform pieces

Larger pieces mean fewer cell walls severed and fewer nutrients lost to heat, light, or cooking water. Cutting uniform pieces ensures that everything is done at the same time, eliminating overcooked pieces and loss of nutrients.

4. Keep the peel on

Many key nutrients are found in or just under the vegetable peel, so leave the peel on whenever possible.

5. Limit the water

When you cook vegetables in water, you lose nutrients. You know that green hue the water takes on after you’ve boiled or blanched your broccoli?

That’s a sign that vitamins like C and B have leached into the water, only to be poured down the drain.

To retain these vitamins, cook vegetables in as little water as possible for a minimal amount of time (unless you’re planning to consume the water, as in a soup).

Steaming and microwaving, both of which use little water, will give you the same results as boiling or blanching but with much less nutrient loss.

6. Use a little fat

Eating plain steamed vegetables may sound like the best way to go nutritionally, but you’re actually better off eating vegetables with some fat.

Many nutrients, like beta carotene, vitamin D, and vitamin K are fat soluble, so they can only pass from our intestine into our blood stream with some fat to carry them across.

So toss those steamed veggies with a flavorful vinaigrette, or sauté or stir-fry them—all of these methods use some fat (which helps maximize absorption) but little if any water (to minimize nutrient loss).

They’ll also make your vegetables tastier than plain steamed ones, so you’ll be inspired to eat more.

7. Add citrus

Vegetables like spinach, broccoli, and kale contain lots of iron, but it’s in a form that’s difficult for our bodies to use, so most of it passes through undigested.

Vitamin C, which citrus fruits provide in spades, reacts with iron chemically, changing it into a form that’s more easily absorbed by our bodies.

In other words, it makes the iron user-friendly. So go ahead and add a splash of lemon, lime, orange, or grapefruit juice to that stir-fry or sauté.