Cooking Green Beans with Salt Essay

Introduction An experiment was conducted where two sets of green beans where cooked. One set had salt and the other one didn’t. One person who did not know which set of green beans had salt and which one didn’t got to taste and judge both of the sets on taste, texture and color. Chef Heston Blumenthal once asked ‘Why do cooks add salt (sodium chloride) when cooking vegetables, for example green beans? ’ Other chefs answered with these possible answers: * | * It keeps the beans green| * | * It raises the boiling point of water so the beans cook faster| * | * It prevents the beans going soggy|. * | * It improves the flavor. However, a scientist also replied saying these statements were untrue because: * | * Only the acidity and calcium content of the water affect the color of the beans| * | * Adding salt increases the boiling point of water but by such a small amount that it will make no difference to cooking times| * | * Vegetables will go soggy if cooked for too long whether salt is added or not| * | * Little salt is actually absorbed onto the surface of a bean during cooking – typically 1/10 000 g of salt per bean which is too little to be tasted by most people. The aim to this experiment was to prove or disprove these points. Materials:Listed below are the materials used for this experiment: * One bag of green beans containing about 250g * Two pans * Two bowls * One stopwatch * One strainer * A cutting board * A knife * A thermometer * SaltProcedure:First, the bag of green beans were washed and cut up. Then, they were evenly divided into two bowls; bowl A and bowl B. Bowl A had no salt in it and was then put into a pan and observed. The time it took to reach its boiling point and the temperature at boiling point were then noted. After that, the beans were places into a strainer and dried. This was also done with bowl B, except salt was added. DataAfter conducting the experiment, this is the data that was obtained:| | | | | With salt| Without salt| Taste| Tasteful| Dull, boring| Texture| Soft| Crunchy| Flavor| -| -|. As you can see, the only thing that didn’t change about the beans with salt was the flavor, which stayed the same for both experiments. Conclusion: Clearly, after this experiment, we proved the chefs right. Both the texture and taste where better with the salty beans. Some of the limitations where that we only tried this experiment once, therefore it is not 100% correct. We could have also had more people testing it, instead of just one person because there are some factors that could influence the opinion.