Volatile Vitamins

I actually took a shopping list to the Market today, and came away with a heavy bag: red and yellow onions, fennel, Cara cara and blood oranges, spinach, arugula, watermelon radishes, napa cabbage, and walnuts. None of the vendors offered green beans, cherry tomatoes, or zucchini.

I worked on this week's demonstration recipe, putting it into CUESA's recipe template. Sarah suggested that I add the nutritional analysis, "just for fun," using the nutritiondata.com web site like we did in school. It's an entertaining exercise, requiring some translation and thinking; it's also a lot like balancing your checking account, because in the end, you always take a bigger hit than you'd hoped, in calories or in out-going dollars.

Julie, CUESA's education director, took a look at the results and with her scientist hat on, wondered if our nutritional results were adjusted for cooking. Sure enough, further exploration revealed that "Vitamin C is the most easily destroyed vitamin there is." Our recipe calls for citrus juice, citrus supremes (wedges), and citrus zest, and for baking and boiling some of the juice -- plenty of opportunity for the vitamins to lose their potency. Just for kicks, we looked up the vitamin numbers for raw orange juice, as well as canned juice and reconstituted frozen juice. Sho'nuf. One cup of raw orange juice contains 207% of the recommended daily requirement for Vitamin C. Canned juice contains 143%, "chilled" contains 177%, and diluted juice from frozen concentrate contains 161%. Clearly, the pasteurization process, which involves heating, affects the vitamin content, so the juice in our recipe would be impacted by the baking and boiling steps. What to do, what to do? We just opted to omit the Vitamin section of the nutritional data.