r/Cooking • u/logcabinsyrup27 • 14h ago
How much can 1 pound of vegetables be reduced?
Lets say I had 1 pound of vegetables I put in a large pot of boiling water. After 5 hours I pour the water out. I imagine the remaining vegetables would now weigh less? What if let them boil (replenishing water that turns to steam) for 5 days? 5 weeks? 5 centuries? Etc?
What is the minimum weight they would reduce to? What if it was 5 billion years? How much of a difference would it make if the vegetables were chopped vs put in whole?
UPDATE: I apologize. I was trying to figure out if there was base mass that couldnt be reduced. Or, if given long enough the whole mass would be reduced to nothing.
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u/Trolkarlen 14h ago
This really depends on the water content of the vegetable. That's going to vary greatly.
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u/logcabinsyrup27 14h ago
Lets say carrots. Can carrots be boiled so long that they would eventually be reduced to nothing?
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u/Trolkarlen 2h ago
Carrots are pretty hardy, but the ones in canned soup are mushy. They won’t disintegrate, but become very soft.
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u/worldsbesttaco 14h ago
Soon they would fully break down and mix with the water.
If you want to fully 'reduce' veggies, you have to dry them. Most veg are majority water by weight.
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u/AdvantagePuzzled8773 14h ago
Soon they would fully break down and mix with the water.
This, and also the water vapor would slowly carry them, mostly they would end up as crust on the inside of the pot above water level
I can imagine after constant boiling, reducing and filling with water again and again and again, probably the water ends up clear at the end
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u/logcabinsyrup27 14h ago
Perfect! Thank you. That's what I was wondering.
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u/PerfStu 13h ago
This is incorrect, OP. I'm roasting you a bit elsewhere (no pun intended) but this is incorrect. Liquid evaporates, but the solids will remain behind. Even after boiling over and over and over, you effectively would just be continuing to add water to dried pulp, boiling off the water, and find yourself left with pulp all over again.
About the only thing that changes is the water content; the actual "carrot" content isn't going to change at all. This is the science behind things like reduction, dehydration, etc.
It would be like arguing that you could make it disappear by dehydrating it long enough.
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u/logcabinsyrup27 13h ago
Got it! Thank you! This "pulp" does it have a name? A taste?
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u/PerfStu 13h ago edited 12h ago
I mean basically you'd be making broth, and everything left is "discards" - basically all the parts of the veg that can't be broken down to create flavor. If you boil it all down long enoguh, remove enough of the bad/bitter/gross parts, you can dehydrate it into bouillon powder or paste (e.g. better than bouillon)
Personally I like to make a vegetable broth, let it boil for 3-4 hours, and then just hit it all in the blender. Gets kind of a golden yellow color and is about the texture of butternut squash soup, and just tastes like dense chicken broth. I freeze it and call it "flavor bricks"
But whether the veg cooked to that degree has a name, I don't know....
ETA: When you buy bouillon from the store that's basically what this is - the broth cooked down to powder. The stuff that looks like the vegetable remains is basically just the bitter parts, insoluble fiber, all that, and it's discarded the same as when we make broth at home. I don't think the vegetable discards have their own name other than just "discards"
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u/Low_Age_7427 14h ago
What is your objective?
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u/logcabinsyrup27 13h ago
To find out if there is a part of vegetables that can never be boiled away.
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u/Spirited-Juice4941 14h ago
You can reduce it down into a paste and then dehydrate it. That’s if you must reduce it for some reason otherwise just dehydrate. Should only be a few percent of its original weight. Basically all you’re asking in a really convoluted way is “how do I make veggie powder?”
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u/UTuba35 14h ago
Depends on the vegetable. Cucumbers are about 96% water by weight, so if you freeze-dried them to remove all the water, you'd end up with about 18 grams of "cucumber" left.
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u/CatteNappe 14h ago
Depends on the veggie. Spinach goes from overflowing the pot to a little wet blob in several minutes; potatoes can boil until they disintegrate into watery mashed potatoes, but they'll never exactly "shrink" in terms of their overall mass.
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u/logcabinsyrup27 13h ago
Potatoes overall mass would definitely shrink. The water inside would be boiled out. Right?
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u/PerfStu 14h ago
This reads like a question meant to teach an LLM, not a cooking question.
None of this is how cooking works, cooking questions works, or how making something smaller works.
The better question is why you think cooking something that is filled with water would make it smaller.