Steaming Vegetable.
The Method for Retaining Color and Texture of the Veggies

Steaming vegetable is another popular cooking method applied in Asian cooking (the most popular one is stir-frying). This method enables you to keep the vegetable moist and tender without loosing too many nutrients content, flavor, color and texture of the veggies. This method can also be alternate healthy cooking when you can not take raw vegetables for some reason.

The good news for newbie is it's quite simple to manage. You can even have the vegetable cooked right on their serving dishes, it's save your time and save dishes to wash as well.

Steaming vegetable wants you to boil water. In fact, the steam is generated from boiling water, circulates around the vegetable and cooks them by this way.

Oh, as I remembered, another cooking method using boiling water and primarily to cook delicate food is poaching cooking. By this method, you can expect delicate foods not to get dried out or fall apart and most of the real taste will be maintained.

Steps of Steaming Vegetable

Steaming vegetable is quite simple to perform. Here are the steps:

1. Put water on steamer pot. The water quantity could be varying. It depends on the amount and the ingredients you are going to steam. For less amount or softer ingredients you may need not too much water. Consider the power you will consume to boil the water, too. Besides, consider that you will spend longer time to wait until the water boiled, even though the quantity of the veggies you are steaming is only a small handful. So, you would better to use your sense to decide how much water you need.

2. Starting this step, there are two methods commonly used, that is:
   
   
   • Rack Steaming MethodThis method requires the rack be placed on steamer pot 2-3 inches above the water. This is where you can put your ingredients on both directly or on another heatproof dishes.

   • Bowl Steaming MethodIt is widely known as Pot in a Pot method. This method requires another smaller heatproof pot to be placed at the bottom of the steamer pot. Please be careful to pick the smaller pot. It has to be smaller so you can put wholly on steamer pot, however it has to be large enough to hold all you vegetables. Other thing is, this method wants the smaller pot will be floated on boiling water. Make sure that the smaller pot height is higher than boiling water waves unless the water will boil over into the vegetables.
   
   On whenever method you are going to apply, you will need to use heatproof dishes/pot. It has to be strong enough to hold the heat generated by steam of boiling water.

3. Once you have your vegetable are evenly laid on the dish/pot inside the steamer, cover the steamer. You can reduce a bit of the heat, but keep it high enough to make water stays boiled.
   
   
   
   
4. The steaming time could be vary depends on the vegetable you are steaming. It could be 15 minutes or may needs few hours. The important thing is, the vegetable should be cooked slightly underdone, since they will continue cooking on their hot serving dishes even after they have been removed from the heat. Knife or pork can be used to test of doneness.

5. During the steaming process, try not to remove the lid too many times for keeping the heat of the steam stays stable. However, in longer time steaming, the water evaporation requires you to check it once a while. If you notice that the pot is running out of water, you can replenish it with more boiling water.

   
   
   

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