A food steamer or steam cooker is a Small appliance used to cook or prepare various foods with steam heat by means of holding the food in a closed vessel reducing steam escape. This manner of cooking is called steaming.
History
Food steamers have been used for millennia. In
Ancient China, pottery steamers were used to cook food. Archaeological excavations have uncovered pottery cooking vessels known as
yan steamers: a
yan was composed of two vessels, a
zeng with a perforated floor surmounted on a pot or caldron with a tripod base and a top cover. The earliest
yan steamer dating from about 5000 BC was unearthed in the
Banpo site.
[Chen, Cheng-Yih (1995). Early Chinese Work in Natural Science. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. p. 198. .] In the lower
Yangzi River,
zeng pots first appeared in the
Hemudu culture (5000–4500 BC) and
Liangzhu culture (3200–2000 BC) and were used to steam rice;
yan steamers were also unearthed in several Liangzhu sites, including 3 found at the Chuodun and Luodun sites in southern
Jiangsu.
[Cheng, Shihua. "On the Diet in the Liangzhu Culture," in Agricultural Archaeology, 2005, No. 1:102–109. pp. 102–107. ISSN 1006-2335.] In the
Longshan culture (3000–2000 BC) site at Tianwang in western
Shandong, 3 large
yan steamers were discovered.
[Underhill, Anne P. (2002). Craft Production and Social Change in Northern China. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. pp. 156 & 174. .]
Steamers.jpg|A modern metal steamer and a bamboo steamer
Har Gow and Shumai at DK Chinese Restaurtant.jpg| Har gow and shumai, two common dim sum dishes cooked in steamers
Advantages
Most steam cookers also feature a juice catchment which allows all nutrients (otherwise lost as steam) to be consumed. When other cooking techniques are used (e.g., boiling), these nutrients are generally lost, as most are discarded after cooking.
Due to their health aspect (cooking without any oil), food steamers are used extensively in health-oriented diets such as cuisine minceur, some Raw foodism, the Okinawa diet, a macrobiotic diet, or the CRON-diet.
Food steamers release less heat to the kitchen environment, therefore helping keep the kitchen cool during hot summers.
See also
