All right, so this is our red cabbage.
And you always want to take off a couple of the outer leaves.
Those get a little tough.
So just take those off, and then just like with the cauliflower, you start from this
end.
Cut down.
And then you cut that in a quarter.
Take out this little core here.
And then you're going to do a little, thin chiffonade.
If you were going to make coleslaw, or add some red cabbage to a salad, this is the exact
same thing you would do.
Generally, in most of your traditional recipes that cook red cabbage, there is some acid
in them.
Germans eat a lot of red cabbage, and they usually cook it with apple cider vinegar and
apples, which give it a little bit of acid, as well.
So here, we're putting some red cabbage in the boiling base water, and here in our acid.
And let me start the timer.
And you can already see the change starting to happen in the boiling water with the base.
It's starting to turn a really lovely kind of aqua, perhaps teal, color.
And on the acid side, the cabbage is getting brighter.
The white's getting brighter.
So that's two minutes, and I'll reset it for six.
You can really see, though, that it really is a tremendous difference.
Becomes almost a navy color.
And what's really fun with both of these is the water, afterwards, can be used for dyeing.
So if you want to dye a blue t-shirt or anything along those lines, it's a beautiful color.
And this also is a really almost magenta purple, so very dramatic difference.
This is your cabbage boiled for two minutes in a base water, and here's your cabbage boiled
for two minutes in a little bit of acid.
Now in this case, we've been using white distilled vinegar, but you could use lemon juice, orange
juice, cranberry juice.
As we demonstrated with the liquids, any fruit juice is usually acidic.
You can use different vinegars-- balsamic, red wine, apple cider vinegar is great with
cabbage.
In terms of base, you're pretty much baking soda or baking powder.
You see the base is almost starting to turn a little bit green now.
So it's gone from blue to a little green.
And the acid is still keeping that nice, bright purple-red color, but it's starting to slowly
fade a little bit.
We're about six minutes in, and it's really turning green, the one with the base.
Most of the anthocyanin and flavonoids have been, I think, pretty much destroyed.
And what we're left with is some of the original chlorophyll.
So now we've been cooking our red cabbage in the baking soda boiling water for eight
minutes, and the other one in the acid.
And you can see even the acid has started to lose color, but it's still holding its
shape pretty well.
And the cabbage that was in the baking soda, it's just mush.
But it's a pretty nice color.
So here you have the red cabbage that's been cooked in the base, and it's an aquamarine,
teal?
And really just slimy, broken down.
Here's your red cabbage that's been cooked for eight minutes in the acidic water, and
it's a still pretty nice, bright purple.
It's a little bit faded, but it's held its shape really nicely.
We've been testing the effects of cooking medium pH on the plant pigment anthocyanin.
Here are five examples of red cabbage cooked in different mediums.
In the foreground is raw, uncooked red cabbage.
In the second row, on the left is red cabbage cooked in a basic medium for two minutes,
on the right, cooked in an acidic medium for two minutes.
In the third row, on the left is red cabbage cooked in a basic medium for eight minutes,
on the right, cooked in an acidic medium for eight minutes.
Anthocyanin is a very sensitive pigment.
It responds to changes of pH.
In fact, red cabbage is often called the edible acid-base indicator, due to its range of colors
in response to changes in the medium.
Another experiment in edible acid and bases.
So, Chef [? Duriet, ?] what do we have here?
I thought we'd try the same acid-base experiment, but without the heat.
OK, good idea.
So we have some 100% pure grape juice, and some pure cranberry juice, and, of course,
baking soda.
What are we going to be doing with them?
We're going to be mixing it into the two end glasses.
You're going to mix cranberry into this, and I'll mix some baking soda in here, and we'll
see what changes occur.
All right, let's do it.
I think you're getting a color change.
I'd say we're definitely getting a color change.
All right, now this was basic, this was acidic.
And we started with grape juice, which is slightly acidic itself.
So what do you think happened here, because this one even looks like a color change to
me?
I definitely see a change in this one.
It became a richer purple.
I think it must have been a positive made it even more acidic, so brought out more pigment
to it.
And this one must have neutralized some of the pigment with the base, and it becomes
almost like a dark blue, navy color.
So we've gone all the way from a deep purple, through a reddish color, all the way to a
blue-green.
And that's the range of spectrums that we'd expect in a flavonoid.
Very interesting, thank you.
Thank you.