Knowledge Base > Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

This event was on Tuesday, September 27, 2022 at 1:00 pm Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern

Join Chef Dan Marek in his virtual office as he welcomes all of your questions. This event was created for you and we encourage you to Ask Anything – from cooking techniques to cours… Read More.

Recorded

Question:

What is the best cooking method to maintain the color of green vegetsbles?

— Andrea Ryan

Answer:

Raw no. Yeah, so, you know it really there's a couple of things to this. So there's a great lesson that we offer on, you know doing like broccoli or greens like that in a pan. If you're cooking them in a pan that's be able to put a lid on them or put acid into quickly because it'll lose the green color on those as well, too. One of the biggest things that I think though is people often overcook any kind of green vegetables to the point where they turn gray, right? So collard greens are a great example of this. I love collard greens and I do them all the time. I do them, you know, I lived in Texas long enough. I do I'm gonna southern style. I don't use fatback. I use mushrooms and studies mushrooms onions paprika. Even used some dried mushrooms ground up to be able to add a little more of that Umami flavor that the fat back gets and then I'll use either a smoked salt or a liquid smoke depending on the salt intake that I'm doing for those but what I'll do is I'll cook my mushrooms and onions first and put those into the pan and then I'll chop up my collards and put them into the pan and then toss them and then pull them and immediately and that way the greens. I always tell people that you're cooking that make sure that the greens are brighter than before you put them in. And what I put them in there, we're talking like 30 seconds to a minute like, you know, some people cook greens like collard greens like half a day and that's when they become like discolored and they just they don't taste as good. You know, it's definitely a pretty different thing. So, Cooking greens shorter amount of time making sure not to overcook them low temperatures keep, you know the acid away from them until the very end. If you do want some sort of, you know, if you do want some sort of an acid like a lemon or something like that just add it at the very end of the dish instead of the beginning because it'll actually draw the color out of it as well too. So
Dan Marek

Dan Marek

Director of Plant-Based Culinary & Dev

rouxbe.com