To Cook... Or Not To Cook

So, to answer the question of should you cook all your food or should you eat all of it raw, the answer is… “it depends”.  It depends on what kind of food you are talking about.

In an ideal world, to get the most nutritional value from the food you would want to eat a potato raw.  But that isn’t very practical, or inviting to your taste buds, so let’s add heat instead. 

The way I cook potatoes is by cutting them up into small pieces and boiling them in water.  Just barely boiling or even a simmer. 

The smaller pieces allow you to break down the cellulose more quickly.  I cook potatoes by boiling them because the heat you are applying to the potato is only 212 degrees. 

If you bake potatoes in an oven, however, you can be applying 350 to 450 degrees or more to the potato. 

The idea is to apply as low a heat to the food as possible because the more heat you apply, the more you destroy the more delicate and heat sensitive nutritive elements contained in the food.

I also cut potatoes into thin slices and cook them in our convection oven.  I’m not sure how high the temperature gets in there so I may be using higher heat than when I boil them.

When I boil the potatoes, I wait until the centers are still fairly hard, then drain the water and let the potatoes cool.  That’s because even though I’ve removed the heat source and the potatoes are cooling off, they are still cooking.  After a few more minutes, my potatoes are cooked all the way through.  The same holds true for leafy vegetables yet even more so.

If you want the maximum nutritional value from potatoes, one thing you absolutely should not do is fry your potatoes with butter or oil. 

That’s because the high heat turns those fats into trans fats and trans fats are very bad for you.  This is even the case if you fry your potatoes with a poly unsaturated fat or oil source. 

By heating the normally healthy polyunsaturated oil to temperatures required to fry food, you end up transforming your healthy unsaturated fat into a very unhealthy, saturated trans fat.

If you absolutely have to have your potatoes fried, cook them with no butter, oil or other fat until they are brown (yes, they will brown) and then add your poly unsaturated fat or oil AFTER you have cooked them.  I do this and love the way they taste.  I’ll even warm my boiled potatoes in our convection oven, then combine them with avocado (a very healthy unsaturated fat), and some seasoning.  Delicious!

I would say that probably the best way to cook a potato is in water with very low heat over a long period of time.  Like in a crock pot.  That’s because you are cooking the food at the lowest heat possible.  But I often don’t plan my meals ahead of time so I boil them.

As far as your other starches go, use the same approach.  Use the lowest heat you can and avoid frying.

Next time, we’ll look at how to prepare carbohydrates that come in the form of leafy, green vegetables.

Yours in health,

- Andy

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