In cooking, there are many tricks to preserve the attractive appearance of the products, as well as their specific taste, which can change under the influence of high temperature. These tricks include blanching. The root of the word comes from the French blanche, that is, "white." At one time, this culinary technique was used to preserve the color of meat and bones in broths. What is blanching, and why do you need to do this?
Sometimes, in order for the finished dish to be bright and visually beautiful, you need to keep the original color of the vegetables. Everyone knows that during cooking or stewing the same bell peppers, tomatoes, broccoli lose their original brightness and acquire a dull brown hue. Here in this case blanching is applied. After such a treatment, vegetables retain their natural color, as if preserving. But what is blanching, what is the essence of this process?
The basis of this culinary technique is the short-term treatment of products with hot water or steam. In the process of such exposure, the upper layer of cells collapses and fixes the contents in the initial state. To do this, food can be flushed with hot steam in a sealed container, doused with boiling water or immersed in it for a short time (from 30 seconds to 5 minutes). Such a description allows us to briefly explain the principle of such processing, and also clearly shows what blanching is. Vegetables, for example, should be processed no more than 2 minutes. But for meat, fish, poultry, solid foods, it may take a longer time due to the denser texture.
Many products are also subjected to this procedure to eliminate characteristic bitterness. For example, many mushrooms have a rather unpleasant milky juice, which means that they should be blanched without fail. And after that, start cooking in the usual way. In addition to mushrooms, eggplants are sometimes processed for this purpose, bitterness is removed from large fruits of cucumber, and game meat is also eliminated from lactic acid.
Very often, in recipes using tomatoes, there is a need to blanch them before chopping or other cooking. Such a requirement is not uncommon in dishes of Italian or French cuisine, where tomatoes serve as the basis for many sauces. What is blanched tomatoes in this case? By such a technique is meant lowering whole tomatoes in boiling water for 2-3 minutes. This is done in order to subsequently easily remove the skin, which in the fresh state is very difficult to peel off. Before dipping tomatoes in boiling water, it is recommended to make a cross-shaped incision on each, so that then you can start cleaning from this place.
A similar technique is also used before freezing certain products, for example, herbs or stalks of asparagus. What is blanch greens? When briefly boiling over boiling water, the tender stems of greens and asparagus do not have time to boil and change color and taste, but at the same time they become softer. In the case of greens, after this procedure it can be safely frozen, without the risk that over time it will darken and decay in the freezer. But asparagus in this form can already be eaten - it will be an excellent side dish, delicate, soft and aromatic.