I see you have some of my favorite root crops here.
I really like parsnips, beets, I think I even see potatoes over there, don't I?
It's not a potato, It's a turnip.
So, what we have here are examples of your flavonoid vegetables, which are white.
And then there's anthocyanins, which are also part of the flavonoid group, and they tend
to be your purplish, red vegetables.
So, this is our cauliflower, and we're going to use this for our acid base example for
our white flavonoid vegetables.
Before we do that, let me show you.
This is a turnip, and a parsnip.
And, these are wonderful root vegetables, like you said.
I love parsnips, especially.
And, they're just like a carrot.
Just peel lightly using the same manner.
Turnips, also, you want to peel before you use them.
Onions, of course, are an excellent example of white flavonoids.
And, then we get into our purple vegetables.
Which, as we saw earlier, beets blueberries, red grapes, and plums are an excellent example
flavonoids.
Nice looking plums.
They are nice looking, aren't they?
So, for your cauliflower, the way you cut up cauliflower, you always want to sharpen
your knife first.
Not sharpen, but straighten the edge a little bit.
And, the best way to approach a cauliflower is to start on the back.
And, just cut it in half.
And then you cut that in a quarter.
And, then from here it's pretty simple to just remove that core.
And, then you simply want to cut them up into little florets.
You can break them apart, you cut them up.
If you're going to make Cauliflower Soup you can use the white core part of it.
There you have your cauliflower florets.
So, here we have the cauliflower.
And, we're going to add one to the base boiling water, and the other to the acid boiling water,
and start our timer.
Two minutes.
So, that was our two minutes.
So, now I'm going to set the timer for six additional minutes.
And I'm going to remove some of the cauliflower from the boiling water with the base.
And, that boiling water should be about 212 Fahrenheit, 100 degrees Celsius.
And, I'm going put to put it into my ice water to stop the cooking.
And that's called shocking.
And, the reason that we shock the vegetables when we pull it out, if we're not ready to
eat them right away, is so that we immediately take away all the heat.
So, that ice water quickly surrounds them, cools them down, and stops the cooking process.
So, interestingly enough, the Cauliflower that's done in the base, you can see it's
slightly yellow now.
And again, you can feel this slight sliminess as the fiber, the cellulose started to break
down.
The cauliflower that was cooked in the acid, you see it's nice and bright white.
Compared to the base which has a distinct yellowing to it.
And, again, much firmer.
So that was six minutes.
So we have our cauliflower from the boiling base water.
And, it's really mushy from the base.
Fibers are all soggy.
Falling apart.
So, you don't want to leave any of your vegetables in the ice water, because again, the longer
they sit, the more water they'll absorb, and again become soggy.
So, here you can see they're yellow from the base.
They're not white anymore.
But, the acid keep them nice and white.
So, you always want to cook your white vegetables with a little bit acid, because that helps
maintain the pigment.
We've been testing the effects of cooking medium pH on cauliflower.
Cauliflower contains the plant pigment anthoxanthin.
A white plant pigment.
Here are five examples demonstrating the effect of cooking medium on this planet pigment.
In the foreground, we have raw, uncooked cauliflower.
In the second row on the left, we have cauliflower that was cooked in a basic medium for two
minutes.
On the right, cooked in an acidic medium for two minutes.
In the third row, we have cauliflower on the left that was cooked in a basic medium for
eight minutes.
On the right cauliflower that was cooked in an acidic medium for eight minutes.
Cauliflower is an example of the plant pigment anthoxanthin.
In an acid cooking medium, anthoxanthin retains a bright white color.
In a basic medium, anthoxanthins shift towards yellow.