Boiling Green Beans for a Healthy Cooking Recipe

"Hi! I'm Louis Ortiz on behalf of Expert Village and I'm back to show you the blanching and shocking method that a lot of recipes will refer to with regards to fresh vegetables. So we are going to go ahead and throw these into some boiling water that I have on the stove behind me. I've got some fresh ground sea salt so I am going to go ahead and just sprinkle a few dabs of that in there. What's going to happen is we are going to let these beans tumble around for just a couple of minutes really and as they do that, you will start to see that there is some nice vibrant green color come out of them and that is the color that we actually want to just hold. So once they hit that color, we are going to pull one out and see if it is as tender as it wants to be because we are going to cook these again the second time. But what we are doing is bringing out these colors maintaining the crispness in that vegetable. At that point, we will pull them out and throw them into this ice water bath that I have on the table and it shocks them in that sense. So we stop the cooking process and we preserve those colors and preserve that crispness and it stops everything and puts the brakes on it so that when we go to cook them the second time, we are going to still have that nice color and that nice crispness because we won't have to cook them as long because they have already been par cooked at this point. So we will come back and show you what those look like right before they go into the ice water bath."