Learning from Daily Life Issues

Cooking Methods Vs Nutrients Cooking the same food ingredients with different cooking methods not only creates various appearance, texture and flavour, but also affect the nutritional values of the food. Let’s see how we can obtain most nutrients from food by applying the suitable cooking methods and controlling the cooking time and temperature.

When cooked in moist, dry heat and hot fat respectively, the caloric value and fat content of the same ingredients can be with great differences.

The chart below compared the energy, carbohydrates, proteins and total fat content of foods cooked by different cooking methods:

Boiling, steaming and grilling

Shallow-frying, stir-frying and deep-frying

Food item(per 100g) Cooking method Calories Carbohydrates Proteins Fats

ShrimpsDeep-frying 242 11.47 21.39 12.28

Steaming 99 0 20.91 1.08

Chicken meat

Deep-frying 289 9.42 22.54 17.35

Grilling 239 0 27.30 13.60

Steaming 219 0 24.68 12.56

FishDeep-frying 248 18.0 17.0 11.6

Steaming 126 0 30.3 0.2

Potatoes

Deep-frying 273 27.6 4.0 15.5

Grilling 72 13.5 2.1 0.4

Steaming 87 20.13 1.87 0.10

Table 1 Comparison of the nutritional value of ingredients cooked by different methods

VS

10–19

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1. Can you conclude any healthy cooking ideas from the article?

2. Is there any trick for us to create the crunchy texture of deep-fried food by using other cooking methods?

3. How can we reduce the oil used to shallow-frying food?

Think about

• Most deep-fried foods are coated with batter or breadcrumbs before being fried. This is why they contain carbohydrates and a significantly higher caloric values.

• Fat content of deep-fried foods are also incredibly higher than their counterparts cooked by grilling or steaming. For example, 100 g of deep-fried potato has a fat content almost 40 times of grilled-potato.

How to preserve vitamins in vegetables?

Water-soluble vitamins (e.g. vitamin B-complex and vitamin C) in vegetables are easy to lose by prolong boiling. To retain the nutrients in vegetables, we can cook vegetables by the following cooking methods:

1. Steaming can largely reduce the contact of vegetables and water.

2. Quick stir-frying of vegetables together with little oil.

3. Blanching vegetables, keeping water for cooking followed by stir-frying them can reduce oil and cooking time needed.

Table 2 The effects of different cooking methods on vitamin C retention

Vegetables Cooking method Amount of vitamin C retained (%)

Leafy green vegetables(e.g. Choi sum)

Blanching (with draining) 55

Stir-frying 85

Root vegetables(e.g. potato)

Blanching (with draining) 65

Steaming 75

Grilling 75

Other vegetables(e.g. eggplant)

Blanching (with draining) 75

Steaming 85

Grilling 85

10–20

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