How Gentle Steam cooking is the healthiest cooking method 

What is steam cooking ?  

Steam cooking is a cooking method by which your food cooks through the medium of steam or vapor, a form of water. Water vapor is generated by hot water boiling in a tank or a pot below your ingredients. Freely flowing vapor surrounds the food as in a sauna. What the fluid hot water itself cannot do, i.e. penetrating the food itself, the vapor can do. It penetrates the deeper layers of your food without pressure and cooks them very quickly. Your food cooks without direct contact to water.

During cooking, ingredients excrete water, fats and toxins which falls in the water tank below.

Gentle steam cooking is the healthiest cooking method 

Kept healthy, made healthier: 

Contrary to methods relying on hot temperature above boiling point, what I call gentle steam preserves your food’s nutritional value and even improves it.

Cooler. Unless most other conventional cooking methods, the steaming method does not rely on high temperatures. Unless it is pressurized in a pressure cooker, vapor is cooler than boiling water: water boils at 212°F and start vaporizing, but the temperature rising is cooler and can get above 212°F if under pressure.

Gentler. In your stove pot steamer, vapor or steam temperature ranges at about 93 to 98°F, thereby not killing as many nutrients. Cooking at higher temperature, i.e. 212°F / 100°C and up, runs the risk of destroying more vitamins and making some nutrients more difficult for your body to absorb. With gentle heat, nutrients don’t suffer and remain readily available. Therefore the power of steam is its gentleness. 

What stands out in gentle steam cooking ? 

Positively anti inflammatory By cooking this gently, steam cooking preserves the compounds that make your food anti inflammatory, i.e. foods that fights off inflammation. An anti inflammatory diet allowing for high nutrient absorption helps your body taper off environmental agressions. Did you know inflammation levels and pain sensitivity are related?

A food work out. The vapor not only cooks quickly, it also acts as in a sauna, helping ingredients literally sweat ! Like in a work out, what sweats out are usually toxines such as pesticides trapped the different layers of your foods. For fatty foods like meats for example, fat soluble toxines are excreted in greater volumes.  Therefore the best thing about steam cooking is that it purifies foods from compounds you would rather spare your body from.

This, of course, very much depends on the quality of the equipment you chose.

why is it healthier than other methods? 

Gentler, healthiest cooking method, nut not healthiest eating method 

Of course, raw foods contain the highest amount of nutrients, since little was destroyed through processing except during picking and cooling (1) Studies comparing nutritional contents of raw foods vs. cooked clearly establish nutritional loss during cooking (2) (3).

So if your food is farm fresh and organic, you are probably aware that it is probably the most nutrient dense food out there. Not only is it receiving less or no pesticides. Also, plants that have to survive adversity and aggressors daily enjoy higher antioxidant levels than plants protected by pesticides (4).  

Of course, this does not mean one should advocate a raw food diet. However, eating some food raw does arguably provide higher nutrient contents, fibers and digestive enzymes damaged during the cooking process.

Steam cooking is Healthier than most others cooking methods

• Using a steam cooker is healthier than slow cooker because simmering for hours on end kills nutrients and fibers. Nutrients are also less bioavailable. 
• Boiling: boiling kills off vitamins, so you lose that. Boiling affects the uptake of many other nutrients like protein and phosphorus, phosphate and nitrogen, to name a few. Moreover, if you use the water in which you boil foods, you also get toxins, not all of which is cleaned up by boiling! I  With regard to Efficiency and time , you can boil anything in water. However, water will take the taste of the food you boil in it. It may force you to use several pots to cook different ingredients. With steaming, foods have no contact with water. You only have to change the tank water after you cook meat or fish. Indeed, animal food residues tend to clog the steam basket ! So I usually go around that problem by steaming veggies and grains first, fish or meat last
• Steaming is healthier than grilling of course, since grilling on high heat and open flame exposes you to carcinogens. It may be okay if grilling is not your main cooking method. For best results, adopt a healthier cooking method as your main one, like steam cooking!
• Steaming is Healthier than roasting too. Roasting is healthy as long as you don’t burn your foods or lose nutrients by cooking them too long. However, there will still be vitamin and fiber losses! Besides, roasting does not steam out toxines like steam cooking does. So steam cooking wins!
• Tip: I sometimes finish cooking my steamed vegetables or meals in the oven, slightly roasted. My roasting remains short and I keep it at low temperature so it doesn’t destroy precious nutrients. I can also steam a whole chicken and roast it the last 10 min in my wall oven. It gets a bit brown and crispy. The result is much more moist than a roasted-only chicken!
• Cooking in a wok is high temperature cooking. However it is very quick and your food usually only stays in the wok a minute or two. This is little time to kill nutrients. As in the case of roasting, cooking in a wok does allow for sweating out toxins.

What else stands out about gentle steam cooking?

Benefits of steam cooking go beyond health benefits. It also stands out for its flavor and for its speed !

The Flavor

Because the cooking process is quicker, the mineral salts contained by the foods your steam are not washed out down into the tank. This preserves the natural flavors of the food. As a bonus, you won’t need to rely on much expensive dressing to hide the taste of the vegetables you don’t enjoy. You get to truly taste and enjoy the taste of food.

To me, the difference between the flavors of raw foods and gently steamed foods is akin to the difference between raw foods and freeze dried foods. Especially for delicate foods like green leafy veggies – you’ll be blown away by cooked dark leafy spinach! – or thin asparagus!

Texture:

That goes with flavor and color. The texture retains its integrity, while getting easier to chew ! Try the coconut mango chicken and you’ll find out!

It cooks quicker

Therefore as a bonus, a healthy meal take less time to make in a steamer than with most other cooking methods.  Also, depending on the type of equipment you use, you can cook many different foods at the same time. Use a stovepot steamer with large capacity like the Vitaliseur steam cooker!  

Simplicity  

Non technical. Among culinary techniques, steaming is probably the simplest and the one requiring least technical knowledge. Yes, there is a small learning curve. But trust your instinct ! This is a very common sense way to make your food.

Remember cooking criteria COLOR, FLAVOR, SCENT and TEXTURE.

The thinnest your food, the least time is needed to be cooked. The tickest and denser your food, the larger the piece, the longer you will need.

These are important and simple culinary criteria I learned from my mother, French steam cooking expert and author of a few books on steam cooking:

• Color intensity should not be lost.
• The scent of your foods should remain natural and should bot turn bad.
• Flavor remains recognizable. Vegetables usually turn bitter when old or overcooked.
• Texture: food should remain firm but soft enough to chew. If patatoes, which started very hard, become easy to mash with a simple fork, it may taste good, but you lost much nutrition and fibers.

You can cook many different foods at the same time provided there is enough space for steam to freely and abundantly flow. 

Cooking process:

The best way to enjoy steam cooking is to follow these simple steps.

1. Prepare ingredients preferably into bite size pieces.
2. Fill the tank or a the bottom of a large pot with water, making sure the water level is high enough to not run out during cooking, low enough so your food does not come into contact with water.
3. Place the steam basket ( essentially a perforated insert), bamboo steam basket or sieve over the pot.
4. Put all ingredients in the steaming container you picked- steam basket or colander – so as to leave enough space for the steam to freely flow around it. A rounded lid is ideal! Cook together ingredients with similar cooking times. With a stovetop steamer, you shouldn’t need to change the water in between every ingredients, so you don’t waste time on reheating.

Tip:

Don’t cook food in their own juices. Through steaming, your food will sweat out. You can dress ingredients together after steaming them first. Dress them with water and oil, salt herbs and spices in a separate pot on the stove on low heat – in a skillet or sauté pan – The food will finish excreting its remaining juice in the pan, minus at least some toxines that remains in the tank of the steam cooker. Don’t make sauce with the steamer’s cooking liquid, which is now full of toxines. Get rid of it!

Want to try ?

A good first step is to try steam cooking with eggs and go from there. Most amazing is the difference between hard boiled eggs and hard steamed eggs. The latter do not smell or taste like sulfur at all!

Want to test it with some incredibly simple recipes? Try steamed zucchini recipes like zucchini leek soup or zucchini boats. Steamed fennel tases great as a cream along steamed then pan finished potatoes.

Check out my articles on how to steam rice. Learn how I am cooking vegetables, root vegetables or fish in my stovetop steam cooker ! You can even learn how to make a whole steamed meal !

And remember to check my equipment pages to know what you may need ahead of time! Here is the Vitaliseur page, then check out the Cooking equipment page. I even gave you a few links and tips about how and where to source your healthy ingredients, salt, spices, and bulk items!

Steam Cooking Equipment

There are many types of equipment that purport to steam your foods. Each has its own upsides or downsides. Although this is not today’s topic, an article will follow shortly! 

True, steaming does not require much special equipment. You can do just fine with a steam basket or a metal colander. Whatever you chose, do not pick a pressure cooker to steam food!

Pressure cooking is not gentle enough!

Although the cooking agent of pressure cooking is vapor, pressurized steam reaches a high temperature of 250°F. Needless to say, this does not qualify as gentle cooking. This destroys nutrients but also runs the danger of over cooking your food in the process if you leave it in too long. Overcooking sacrifices not only nutrients, antioxydants and plant hormones, but also fibers, thereby raising the glycemic index of your foods. Relying on pressure cooking and over cooked foods triggers digestive distress, because pressure cooking softens fibers to the point of destruction. Unused to fibers, they can no longer digest them. Moreover, such hot steam also destroys colors, texture, and taste. Why wonder why so many people don’t enjoy vegetables?

My steam cooking choice:

Steaming equipment includes very low budget items to very high prices. Somewhere in the middle, there are very efficient tools you can use daily, and even at every meal, should you chose to. All in all, you need to pick the right equipment for your needs, and one that truly cooks healthy foods! 

My choice goes to a stovetop steamer which is as efficient at cooking quickly at constant temperature as it is at keeping ingredients colorful, moist and delicious. All you need after steaming a few minutes is to dress your food with little oil, salt, and aromatic herbs! This French pot is my best ally in the kitchen. The Vitaliseur truly deserves its name: You get the distinct impression that your food gets a second life right before you take a bite. Hence the “Vitalize” word, which means “gives life”. 

The taste and nutrient retention of the foods steamed in the Vitaliseur are out of this world ! It also can steam large amounts of food at one time. To me, it provides me with the ideal way to use steam cooking in my daily routine, with one pot for a family of seven! What makes the Vitaliseur stand out, besides its classy looks, and simple albeit very sleek design, are the combination of incredible flavor and nutritional value of the meals you can cook in it. If you ever were to adopt steam cooking, this truly would be an excellent choice.