A Cooking Tip to Make Your Green Dishes Keep Their Color
Veggies are always a welcomed addition to any dish as they add great flavor and nutrition to sauces, soups, and dressings, but sometimes the green color is, well… not the most appetizing in appearance. Adding this one ingredient to your recipes turns a sad green dish into a sensational recipe that everyone in the family will want to eat.
Why is it so hard to keep the green in green vegetables? During cooking, the vegetables’ cell walls get denatured (broken down), and this allows the chlorophyll to escape. Additionally, when you mix green vegetables with other acidic ingredients, chlorophyll’s magnesium atoms are dislodged and replaced with hydrogen atoms.
Exposing green vegetables to either heat or acid results in vegetables with a weird yellow-green hue. A fun fact is that based on the Australian government’s research, this overcooked green vegetable color was ranked as one of the top 100 ugliest colors.
Adding salt to the steaming water or shocking vegetables in cold water prevents the change in chlorophyll, but when it comes to assembling a dish with green color, those once green vegetables still end up looking kind of icky and sickly (I’m looking at you split pea soup).
Pureed fresh spinach is an easy trick to add a stable, permanent green color to your dishes. Okay, that sounds like it’s an extra step, but the results pay back with loads of dividends. With this added green kick, all of your soups, sauces, and pestos will have and maintain an appetizing color. Before you blend a sauce or soup, add a large handful of spinach leaves. And don’t worry, the added spinach has such a neutral taste it won’t overpower the flavors of the sauce or soup.