Chef Durye, tell us about these brightly colored vegetables and fruits that are going from
red to orange to yellow.
These are all your carotenoid vegetables, you carotenoid pigment type vegetables.
And you can see there is a huge range in color on them.
So everything from your pale yellow-- lemons, your citrus.
Oranges, of course, all have that in them.
Then you get into your apricots.
And you have nectarines.
And peaches would fall into this category and tomatoes, apples.
This is a persimmon.
And there are two different types of persimmons.
This particular one, the squatter version of it, the ones that are less kind of-- how
do you say it?
More like-- you know, this would be-- they have some that are going to be longer like
this.
This type has a lot of tannin in the skin, so it's very bitter.
Like, if you were to eat any of the skin, basically all the moisture in your mouth disappears.
So that's undesirable, the tannin?
Oh yes.
So this particular type, you want to always make sure they're really ripe.
They should be real soft before you cut them open.
And you always want to take all the skin off.
Don't need eat any.
The other ones can be eaten a little bit firmer.
And you still want to peel the skin off, but it's not as-- they have much less tannin.
So it won't be as strong a flavor in your mouth.
So these are your fruits.
And then over here we have some different vegetables.
Your green bell peppers are under ripe.
And once they ripen, they either turn yellow or red.
There are orange bell peppers.
There are even purple ones.
So as they ripen on the vine, that's when you get the color.
It's generally also why they're more expensive because they're going to take up more time--
Interesting.
To produce.
Does it taste quite a bit different between the green and the red and yellow?
Absolutely.
Like with most things, when they ripen they become sweeter.
OK.
As they get riper, more of the starches convert into sugars.
OK.
You have carrots, of course, our good example of your orange vegetable.
Butternut squash or acorn squash-- any of your winter squashes, when you cut them open
they're generally yellow or orange inside.
Again, you usually take the skin off.
Although you can scrub it and eat the skin.
It's a good source of fiber.
But most people don't care for it.
And then, of course, your corn is an excellent example of carotenoid vegetables.
This is a whole ear of corn.
And when you go to prepare your corn, you need to, of course, take off--
[HUSK SQUEAKING AGAINST KERNELS]
And this silk, you want to get as much of that off as you can.
And then the best way to-- you can, of course, cook corn whole.
You can even cook it on the grill in the husk.
This is great.
It makes really sweet corn.
You just put the whole thing on the barbecue pit.
Cook it just like this.
As the outside starts to brown and burn, the inside steams and becomes very sweet.
You could also grill it just like this.
Or you can put it in boiling water for a few minutes.
Usually, real sweet corn, fresh corn you don't need to do a lot to it.
It cooks really quickly, two minutes or so.
And then for if you want to take it off the cob, what you do is just run your knife down.
And that will give you your niblets.
Carrots-- of course, you always want to peel your root vegetables or use a very strong
scrubber on them because any dirt that might be left on them is a possibility of bacteria.
And most of it is a chance for botulism and so forth.
So you always want to make sure you peel or scrub very well.
But you don't want to peel too much, of course, because most of your vitamins are located
right under the skin.
So you can do nice shallow peeling.
So we're going to just, simply, slice our carrots up.
Take the ends off.
So now we have some corn and some carrots.
I'm going to take half of the corn and carrots, and I'm going to place it into the boiling
water with baking soda in it.
And then I'll take the other half, and I'll put it in the boiling water with vinegar.
And time two minutes.
Take some out.
And then we'll compare the results and then set it again for another six minutes to have
a total of eight minutes.
[TIMER BEEPING]
All right, so we've had two minutes elapse.
I'm going to reset the clock for 6 minutes.
And then here we have some of those carrots and corn that's been cooking in the baking
soda and the carrots and corn that have been the acid.
So we shock them, cool them off real quickly.
And you see, even in just that short period of time-- with the carrots, they're already
starting to break down, become soggy, the fibers.
Interestingly, the corn-- because corn not only has the carotenoid pigments, it also
has the white or flavonoid pigments.
So there you see a distinct darkening of the yellow and even a picking up of the orange
a little bit.
And that's, again, from that baking soda.
The acid one, very firm, pretty nice bright colors.
Not really-- actually, it hasn't really changed very significantly at all from the raw corn
and carrots, just a little darkening from the water, really.
So the carotenoids aren't affected much at all by acid or base timing wise.
But the fibers in them are.
And the time will make a slight difference also.
But, really, these are the most stable of your pigments.
So there won't be a huge change in them.
[TIMER BEEPING]
So that's been 8 minutes.
And the carrots and the corn from the base, because of the effect it has on the fiber,
are really soft and smooshy.
Carrots are barely holding together at all.
And there really hasn't been significant change to the ones cooked in acid.
A little bit of color is gone but not a lot.
So here's the corn and the carrots from the acid.
And it's funny.
The carrots, you would think-- if they had just been cooked in regular, salted boiling
water-- would actually be quite tender at this point.
But the acid does have that effect of keeping the fibers a little stronger.
So they're still-- they'd be al dente at this point even though they've cooked for eight
minutes.
But color wise we really haven't lost any color.
And you can see the base ones.
I mean, they're just falling apart.
The fibers have been just totally destroyed.
But the color-- it retains a lot of color.
So the pigment itself isn't really affected by the baking soda, but the fibers are.
We've been testing the effects of cooking medium pH on the color of carotenoid, a yellow-orange
plant pigment.
Here are some samples of corn and carrots that demonstrates the effect of pH on these
colorful plant pigments.
In the foreground are raw, uncooked carrots and corn.
In the second row on the left, corn and carrots that were cooked in a basic medium for two
minutes.
On the right, corn and carrots cooked in an acidic medium for two minutes.
In the third row on the left, corn and carrots cooked in a basic medium for eight minutes.
On the right, corn and carrots cooked in an acidic medium for eight minutes.
Carotenoids are fat soluble and stable in a cooking environment and change very little
in color.