Question
Maria Palacios
After blanching vegetables and shocking them in an ice bath, how do you suggest bringing them back up to serving temperature while maintaining their vibrancy?
Answer
So one thing to think about is, uh, when you go out to eat, generally speaking, uh, the vegetables, uh, on that platter, if you've ordered something with, uh, broccoli, the broccoli looks so bright and green because re restaurants generally blanch, there are vegetables, uh, they don't cook them like my mother did, to release all of the chlorophyll so that the broccoli would turn gray. So, um, to bring it back up to heat, you can do a couple of things. And remember that blanching is the ideal vegetable for making acru de tea platter or whatever. It kind of takes a little bit of the bite off, but still has that beautiful color. You can saute them, you can steam them, you can microwave them, you can roast them. You wanna have a proper oven temperature. And really, if you saute them, for example, they only need one to two minutes in a pan, and they will be warm and they will be ready for service, and they won't lose that bright green color. So a lot of people, uh, with that, uh, blanching assignment will then freeze their vegetables. So you want them to thaw a little bit and then cook them as you would. So, uh, I know many students will write in their assignments that they have a lot of leftover broccoli. So, uh, everybody becomes a, an a broccoli expert from what I like to call the broccoli lab.
