The Raw and The Cooked

Words and Photos by Stephanie Cameron

To cook, or not to cook? With vegetables, that is always the first question. Eating raw vegetables provides your body with folate, fiber, and water-soluble vitamins such as vitamin C, yet the nutrients in some cooked vegetables are easier to digest and absorb. Cooking vegetables leads to the release of vitamins E and K, along with better mineral absorption. Some vegetables are high in certain vitamins, whether raw or cooked. For example, tomatoes, a common dietary source of the antioxidant lycopene, are even higher in lycopene when cooked because the heat breaks through the skin to release more of this nutrient. In their raw form, tomatoes are a great source of vitamin C.

Cook time, oils, and technique can impact a vegetable’s nutritional value. Unless they’re deep fried, quickly cooked vegetables tend to retain more of their nutrients. Olive and avocado oils contain phenols, which are antioxidants, and some studies show that cooking vegetables in extra virgin olive oil increases the diversity of nutrients while helping the body absorb them. Cruciferous vegetables, such as cauliflower, kale, bok choy, and radishes, cooked in olive oil also maintain higher levels of certain vitamins and antioxidants than when they’re boiled. The skins, in addition to having their own vitamins and minerals, protect the vegetable’s nutrients during the cooking process—so if you cook a vegetable with edible skin, don’t peel it, just wash it thoroughly.

And while we are on the subject of nutrition, University of California, Davis, studies show that vegetables can lose 15 to 77 percent of vitamin C and 30 percent of other nutrients within a week of harvest. Almost all the veggies you get at the grocery store spend five days in transit before arriving at a distribution center and another three days on a store shelf before they are purchased by the consumer, who may store them for up to seven days before consumption—all the more reason to buy your produce locally and in season from farmers markets and CSAs.

In this edition of Cooking Fresh, we celebrate the versatility of some local veggies coming to market this spring. We can’t say which preparation is the healthiest, or whether veggies in general are more nutritious raw or cooked. What we can say with certainty is that these flavor-packed recipes will ensure that you eat your recommended three to five servings of veggies a day, and sometimes all in one dish made for four people because you will want to consume it all yourself. Hello, big salad!