Article content
Potatoes. One of the most common side dishes to meals in Czech households. We often view them only as a side dish, yet potatoes are much more. They are truly a rich source of a wide range of vitamins and minerals. When cooking, it would be a great pity if this nutritional value of potatoes were irretrievably lost, yet we do this repeatedly over and over again. So how can you preserve all the nutrients in potatoes even when cooking them? We looked into that in our article.
What can you lose by cooking potatoes incorrectly?
First, let’s take a closer look at what exactly you can find in potatoes. If you cook potatoes incorrectly, i.e. in the typical way most people cook them here, you can lose the following vitamins and minerals:
- Vitamin C
- Vitamin A
- Vitamin B1, B2 and B6
- Potassium, magnesium and sulfur
All these vitamins and minerals are very important for the human body. In many cases we may also commonly be deficient in them, which often leads to slowly developing health problems or other health complications, where we often do not even realize the exact cause and it is difficult to determine whether we are missing something. People are often lacking even the basic vitamin C, due to a lack of consumption of fresh fruit.
How to retain nutrients in potatoes?
It is perfectly normal that when cooking foods nutrients are often lost because they simply do not survive high temperatures during long cooking. That is also why raw diets have become so popular in recent years, when ingredients are not processed at temperatures higher than 42°C. However, sometimes you can protect certain vitamins from being destroyed even during cooking, and this is precisely the case with potatoes.
How to do it? All you need to do while cooking is add one carrot to the pot with the potatoes. Yes, that’s exactly how simple it is! Carrot contains beta-carotene, which particularly protects the vitamin C contained in potatoes.
