cooking in a off grid place

Re: cooking in a off grid place

Jeff,

I wouldn't worry that you lose nutrients with pressure cooking vs. regular cooking. I prefer to eat as much as possible raw foods, but we all love cooked food and need lots of calories so cooking is usually part of our lives. Raw foods contain valuable enzymes, according to some dietitians, but these enzymes are destroyed at temperatures as low as 118 degrees F. Therefore, any cooking at all will destroy the enzymes. From what I have read most of the essential nutrients survive the cooking process in quantities sufficient enough to keep us healthy. Some even say that cooking makes the nutrients more available (sans the enzymes, of course). However, if you boil foods in water some of the nutrient goes into the water which is often not used. When we pressure cook we use very little water, and the cooking time is reduced significantly. With pressure cooking the little water that is used, if any, becomes part of the meal. This is why the food tastes more flavorful and richer even though it is cooked so quickly. Therefore, when pressure cooking we actually may prevent loss of vitamins and minerals and make the food more digestible as well. For example, I had pressure cooked swiss chard last night. The nutrient levels for this vegetable are astounding. We stuffed the pressure cooker full. When the cooking was done in 3 minutes (plus ten minutes to cool a little) we both had a full 1 1/2 cups of chard. There is no way I could have eaten that much raw without getting sick. I know because I have tried. However, with the pressure cooker I received the full benefits of all the protein, calcium and magnesium, Vit. C and most other nutrients described in several food content databases which were based on testing of cooked foods. Since I was able to reduce leaching by using NO added water and then drinking the liquid supplied by cooking I was able to get the full 100% of the nutrients.

The pressure cooker never comes half way close to the heat used to grill foods or barbecue or roast. So, I would submit that in total the food cooked rapidly with the least dilution in the pressure cooker may be the most nutritious. Restaurants use this method frequently. When I was in food service we used steam pressure cookers for all types of foods which usually yielded very palatable vegetables that were cooked just to the bare threshold needed to make them soft and very tasty. I had a sweet potato yesterday at Outback that was done that way. Great! Of course, I make these statements from memory of past research, and as anybody on this forum knows I am often wrong. Of course, if you overcook something it can only degrade the food, but we have learned to use only the minimal time needed to cook. The results have been great. So has the taste. I appreciate your comment because people should be mindful of nutrient quantity, and your point should be a priority when making decisions about food preparation. Most people just go straight for the empty calories and to heck with the consequences. Thanks for your note. Pardon the long run here, but we are discussing the most energy efficient way to prepare healthy food so I guess we are still on topic. Don't forget too that I cooked that chard with almost zero kwh. I think it registered 500 watts on the meter, then dropped off. The whole process was done in 3 minutes of electrical use. The kil a watt reading for brown rice which took ten times as long was only 0.28 kwh. I didn't check the chard kwh use, but I estimate it was less than a tenth of a kwh. Not bad!