Eating more fruits is good for health. Mothers all know this truth, but many children will habitually refuse to eat fruits or hate the smell and taste of fruits. Therefore, scenes of [chasing after and feeding fruits] are often staged. Children may still have one mouthful without one mouthful, and sometimes even refuse directly without giving face.
Many parents have come up with ways to cook fruits, making fruit soup, fruit pie and baked fruit slices for their children to eat, but they are worried that cooking fruits may destroy nutrients, especially vitamin C (VC for short). Isn’t that not worth the cost?
Today, Ding Ma invited Fan Zhihong, an expert in the field of food and nutrition, to talk about whether cooked fruits will lose nutrients.
It is not a pity to eat fruits with less VC ripe.
Many people think that fruits are rich in VC and will lose vitamins when cooked, which is a pity. However, this is not the logic why fruits cannot be cooked.
It is true that the process of ripening fruits does destroy some VC. However, the vitamin C content of traditional fruits that are often left over is not high. For example, apples, pears and peaches have only 1 ~ 5 mg/100g, so this loss is not a pity.
Besides, VC is the main loss of cooked fruits, while minerals and dietary fiber are not lost, and the loss of antioxidant substances is not large.
Besides, vegetables are also rich in VC, such as green peppers, with VC content as high as 80 mg/100g, far higher than daily fruits such as apples, pears, peaches, bananas and grapes, but people never hesitate to throw them into a hot pan and stir-fry them.
Therefore, for those fruits with relatively low vitamin C content, steaming and cooking are not so regrettable.
Fruits rich in VC are not cost-effective when cooked.
If kiwi fruit, strawberry and other VC-rich fruits are cooked, it is really a pity-even if VC is not considered, the taste is too soft and collapsed, and it is difficult to produce delicious food.
For fruits rich in VC, if you really feel that the taste is not good and too sour and astringent, you may as well add some fresh dates, melons and the like to make them into mixed pulp, or add a small amount of condensed milk and milk to make milkshakes, which children will like very much.
Cooked fruit can stimulate appetite and facilitate digestion.
Ripe fruits may have more diverse tastes, but they do have certain benefits:
- Ripe fruits to a large extent solve the influence of polyphenols, tannins and other substances on digestive function, also destroy protease, avoid damaging the digestive tract, and are especially suitable for children with dyspepsia and diarrhea. After fiber softening, the stimulation to intestinal tract will also decrease, which is a good thing. Sweet and sour taste can also help stimulate appetite.
Of course, after the fruit is steamed or cooked with skin, these ingredients will penetrate into the pulp, and some of the health-care ingredients may increase, thus producing some pharmacodynamic effects.
But why pursue the efficacy of what when you are not sick? Not all what people eat these medicinal ingredients as much as possible. If you do have some diseases and want to use some folk remedies related to fruits, you’d better consult a doctor. In case you use them wrong, it may be harmful.
Cooked fruit must contain less sugar
However, it should be noted that even if the nutrients lost by cooking fruits are not much, some unhealthy factors may also be introduced.
For example, when cooking fruit, the soup will turn sour, which requires a lot of sugar to adjust the taste. This is because cooking fruit requires adding water, which will dilute the sugar and lighten the sweetness.
However, after dilution, the sour taste will not fade basically, because the characteristic of organic acid is that after dilution, it will try to release more hydrogen ions, so the sour taste drop is not obvious.
In this way, the sour taste will not change and the sweet taste will decrease, and the fruit soup will appear very sour. Therefore, when making canned fruits with sugar water, a lot of sugar needs to be added to make the canned fruits appear sweet and sour.
In fact, the effect of cooking fruits by oneself is similar to that of canned fruits in sugar water sold in shopping malls.
The final result is:
Fruit may not be eaten much, healthy ingredients may not be eaten much, sugar is not eaten less.
Usually, if you drink two small bowls (150 ~ 200 ml per bowl) of fruit soup with sugar, you will drink 30 grams of sugar.
Sugar not only contains almost no essential nutrients for human body, but also greatly increases the calorie value of boiled fruit soup.
This greatly discounts the health effects of boiled fruits, and may even do more harm than good.
Therefore, when eating ripe fruits, try to avoid adding too much sugar, including honey, and use less, otherwise it is similar to drinking sweet drinks.
Steamed fruit is better than steamed fruit, so there is no need to add water, so there is no need to add polysaccharide.
Only when the fruit is cooked can it taste delicious.
Many people think that the fruit is soft and collapsed when cooked, and the taste is really hard to accept. If you put down your preconceptions, steamed, cooked and baked fruits are delicious.
Which is not a world-famous delicacy, banana cake or apple pie from European and American countries? Fruit diced fermented glutinous rice soup is also a traditional dessert in Jiangnan region.
I recommend a simple and delicious way for parents, that is, apple and jujube soup.
Wash withered apples, remove kernels and cut them into pieces, remove kernels from jujube, add a few pieces of hawthorn, put them together in an electric pressure cooker, add half a bowl of water, boil under pressure for 8 minutes, and then you can eat them when normal pressure is restored.
There is no need to put any sugar, it is sweet and delicious. Peaches, pears and the like can also be cooked.
Please note that this is because the electric pressure cooker is completely sealed for cooking and will not lose water. If you cook it with a small fire in an ordinary pan, it will take about 20 minutes before it is soft. If there is a problem of water evaporation, you should put more water, at least one bowl.
The secret of cooking this soup lies in the amount of water. As mentioned earlier, if you add more water, the taste of the soup will become sour. It is not delicious without sugar, and the health value of adding sugar will decrease.
Eating this dessert is not only pleasant, but also has a very good appetizing effect. People with dyspepsia will feel that this meal is especially comfortable after drinking a small bowl before meals, which is by no means the effect that sweets such as biscuits, snacks and egg tarts can replace.
In addition to this method, I would like to recommend two kinds of ripe fruits.
- Apples are cut into slices and baked soft, or shredded and added into batter to make pancakes, which is also a favorite delicacy for children. Cut apples into pieces and stew them in braised pork, or cut them directly into diced pieces and mix them with diced beef when cooking, which will bring surprising delicacy to the meat dishes.
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