Not a lot of people know this, but the way you slice your vegetables can greatly influence the quality of the meals you prepare. This is because vegetables have specific features and characteristics that make them react in certain ways when handled improperly. Moisture, flavour, and even shelf life can be significantly reduced or improved depending on how you choose to handle your veggies.
The use of a veggie slicer has been advocated by many cooks and professionals throughout the years because of the way it can properly cut up your vegetables prior to cooking.
3 Ways a Veggie Slicer can Improve Your Food
1. Less Bacteria, More Electrolytes Studies have shown that using a high quality, sharp veggie cutter can decrease the chances of your vegetables developing bacteria and other pathogens during storage. If youre preparing a garden salad for example and you intend to serve it for later, sharp cutting your ingredients with a veggie cutter will allow it to last longer and offer more health benefits than if you used a dull blade. A dull blade is likely to sap vegetables of electrolytes and vitamins because of the force and pressure needed to get through the veggies. The excessive pressing squeezes the moisture and minerals out of the vegetables, causing them to be less nutritionally substantial than those that are cut with a veggie slicer.
2. Generally Healthier When we slice our vegetables with a dull, inefficient knife, we risk discolouring it, losing its flavour, lessening its moisture, and reducing its nutritional value. This is particularly true for those who tend to slice their vegetables too thinly or finely. A vegetable slicer is optimized to bring out the perfect thickness and size for vegetable slices and ensures that you wont sap your ingredients of these important qualities. Recent research has shown that meals using vegetables that are prepared with vegetable slicers are generally more nutritious and healthy than those that are prepared with knives or bare hands.
3. Shelf Life Improperly sliced vegetables have a tendency to spoil sooner than their properly handled counterparts. This has a great deal to do with the amount of moisture they lose during the process and the effects this has on their respiration. Yes, contrary to popular belief, vegetables that are harvested are still alive until the time that they give in to rot. These ingredients still respirate and consume oxygen as they go along. The less optimal our methods of cutting, the more likely we are to affect this delicate exchange of gasses which can and most probably will affect the rate at which vegetables spoil. That said, a salad thats prepared with a dull kitchen knife should be consumed sooner than one prepared with a high quality veggie slicer.
A veggie slicer can be a great benefit and should always be included in your kitchen arsenal. If you want to ensure that your family or guests are always given the best quality food you can prepare, see to it that you handle your vegetables and ingredients properly by using a veggie cutter.
