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What is a kale raab - vegetable?

Does the water used to blanch or steam a vegetable retain "lost" nutrients from the vegetable?

  • If I blanched Kale, for example, in boiling water for eight minutes, do the nutrients in the Kale leach into the water? If I consumed the cooking liquid as well as the cooked Kale, would I ingest some or all of the nutrients lost in cooking?

  • Answer:

    Basically, yes. Many recipes, in fact, recommend using the water in which vegetables were cooked in other parts of the recipe or other dishes. This won't capture all the nutrients because some of them (or parts of some of them) are denatured or destroyed by the cooking. Others, though, remain. Different cooking processes can minimize vitamin loss , e.g. steaming or microwaving.

John Burgess at Quora Visit the source

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The water contains some, but not all, of the nutrients "lost" from the vegetable after blanching or steaming.  Nutrients such as Vitamin-C are highly unstable, and long exposure to heat will cause much of it to oxidize and be lost.  Polyunsaturated oils such as Omega-3 fatty acids also do not fare well in high heat.  Therefore, when cooking vegetables that are high in Vitamin-C and Omega-3 fatty acids such as kale, it is best to keep cooking time to a minimal.  Also keep in mind that highly water soluble nutrients such as Vitamin-C also get leached out to water during wash, so keep soaking time to a minimal is also recommended. That said, water soluble, but heat stable nutrients are kept in the water.  Consuming the water that was with the vegetable during cooking can recover some of the lost nutrients.

John Ying

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