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Steaming: A Healthier Cooking Method

A food steamer is a small kitchen appliance that cooks or prepares various foods using steam heat by enclosing the food in a closed vessel. Food steamers have been used for centuries, with early examples dating back 5000 BC in China consisting of two vessels - a perforated floor pot surmounted on a boiling pot. Food steamers offer advantages like retaining nutrients from foods that would otherwise be lost through boiling, making them useful for health-conscious diets. They also release less heat into the kitchen during cooking.

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59 views2 pages

Steaming: A Healthier Cooking Method

A food steamer is a small kitchen appliance that cooks or prepares various foods using steam heat by enclosing the food in a closed vessel. Food steamers have been used for centuries, with early examples dating back 5000 BC in China consisting of two vessels - a perforated floor pot surmounted on a boiling pot. Food steamers offer advantages like retaining nutrients from foods that would otherwise be lost through boiling, making them useful for health-conscious diets. They also release less heat into the kitchen during cooking.

Uploaded by

Daniel Rae
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Food steamer

A food steamer or steam cooker is a small kitchen appliance used to cook or prepare
various foods with steam heat by means of holding the food in a closed vessel reducing
steam escape. This manner of cooking is called steaming.
History

A Bronze Age siru (traditional Korean steamer)

Two types of steaming vessels, metal and bamboo

Food steamers have been used for centuries. The ancient Chinese used pottery
steamers to cook food. Archaeological excavations have uncovered pottery cooking
vessels known as yan steamers; a yan composed of two vessel, a zeng with perforated
floor surmounted on a pot or caldron with a tripod base and a top cover. The earliest
yan steamer dating from about 5000 BC was unearthed in the Banpo site.[1] In the
lower Yangzi River, zeng pots first appeared in the Hemudu culture (5000–4500 BC)
and Liangzhu culture (3200–2000 BC) and used to steam rice; there are also yan
steamers unearthed in several Liangzhu sites, including 3 found at the Chuodun and
Luodun sites in southern Jiangsu.[2] In the Longshan culture (3000–2000 BC) site at
Tianwang in western Shandong, 3 large yan steamers were discovered.[3]
Advantages
A steam cooker catchment which collects water with condensed nutrients

Most steam cookers also feature a juice catchment which allows all nutrients (otherwise
lost as steam) to be consumed. When other cooking techniques are used (e.g., boiling),
these nutrients are generally lost, as most are discarded after cooking.
Due to their health aspect (cooking without any oil), food steamers are used extensively
in health-oriented diets such as Cuisine minceur, some raw food diets, the Okinawa
diet, a macrobiotic diet, or the CRON-diet.
Food steamers release less heat to the kitchen environment, therefore helping keep the
kitchen cool during hot summers.

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Steamers for cooking.

1. Chen, Cheng-Yih (1995). Early Chinese Work in Natural Science. Hong Kong: Hong
Kong University Press. p. 198. ISBN 962-209-385-X.
2. Cheng, Shihua. "On the Diet in the Liangzhu Culture," in Agricultural Archaeology,
2005, No. 1:102–109. pp. 102–107. ISSN 1006-2335.
3. Underhill, Anne P. (2002). Craft Production and Social Change in Northern China.
New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. pp. 156 & 174. ISBN 0-306-46771-
2.

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