Steaming is not only a healthy way to cook vegetables, but it's also easy, explains Chef Bruce Mattel of The Culinary Institute of America. He begins the process of steaming baby carrots by filling a stockpot with a few inches of water, then inserting a strainer inside. The holes of the strainer let the steam come through while keeping the carrots out of the water itself. Once the water comes to a boil and steam starts coming through the holes of the strainer, he adds the carrots to the strainer and covers the pot. About 3-4 minutes later, he removes a carrot (hold the lid away from you to avoid steam burns) and checks it for tenderness by poking it with a paring knife.
Since the carrot is nice and soft (but not mushy), he removes the carrots, noting that butter, salt, and pepper would make nice additions to the dish.
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Hi, I'm Chef Bruce Mattel from the Culinary Institute of America, and I'm going to show you this kitchen basic: how to steam vegetables.
We often steam vegetables to make them more tender and make them more palatable, and you don't need a lot of equipment to do so. What we have here is a stockpot with a couple of inches of water at the bottom. We're going to turn the heat on fairly high; we want the water to boil and generate the steam. We're going to place a strainer on top it, to allow the steam to come through but also keep the vegetables from being submerged in the water. So we're going to wait until we see a little steam coming up through.
Now that I see some steam coming through the holes in the strainer, I'm going to lift this off the pot and make sure the water is indeed boiling before I put my vegetables in. I see it has just come up to a rolling boil.
I'm going to steam baby carrots. I'll just place them on top of the strainer in a single layer - though they can be piled up a little bit. But since I don't have that many, I'll make sure they're in a single layer, and tightly cover the pot. This will take three to four minutes for those carrots to get tender; it's a really quick process. If you don't have a strainer, and this type of a setup, I take a sauté pan, put just a little bit of water in the bottom of it, lay in the vegetables, cover the pot and steam it that way also.
Now that our carrots have been steaming for about three minutes or so, I'm going to carefully remove the lid - pointing it away from me, so I don't get a steam burn on my arm. I'll take one carrot out and place it on my cutting board, and I'm going to use a paring knife and see how easily the knife slides into the carrot. It slides in pretty easily, so the carrot's nice and tender; I'm going to remove the rest of them now. I want to make sure I remove the lid carefully, once again, and I use my tongs to lift out the carrots.
Now if you like, once they're steamed, they can be finished in other ways. For instance, just placing them in a pan with a little bit of whole butter, and a little bit of salt and pepper. Some people add a pinch of sugar and kind of glaze them a little bit. So this is how you steam vegetables.