The benefits of slow cooking

TCM and Naturopathic Nutrition both agree that slow cooking is the best cooking method.

This is especially true for dense protein. For example, it’s much harder for your body to digest a grilled steak than say, a slow cooked beef casserole. By cooking it for a long time, you are hugely breaking down the meat before you consume it so your body then has far less digesting to do. This is very effective when cooking with lots and lots of herbs and greens. The fibre in the greens helps your body digest the meat. Same goes for lemon, the lemon can partially digest the food for you.

If you think back to many Middle Eastern countries where slow cooking methods were invented, often they were only able to get bad cuts of meet, so they slow cooked them with lots of other things to break them down making them easier to digest for the body.

Slow cooked bone broth is TCM’s magic elixir and you can see more about it in my post on Bone Broth.

There’s lots of debate over cooked vs raw as certain vitamins e.g. vitamin C leeches into water when you boil vegetables. However, with a soup/broth you are actually then still consuming that water and hence taking in that vitamin goodness.

The same applies to carbohydrates too - if you are a sucker for rice and pasta like me, I would always firstly suggest swapping white for brown. pasta, but, also have a think about your digestion and how you can help it - we spoke already about leaving it to cool so that you get a higher ratio of that good resistant slow burning starch, but also combine it with lots of green leafy veg which will help your body digest it (or for example go for a slow cooked sauce).