Spinach Basics

• Spinach is a member of the same family as beets or chard, originally domesticated in central Asia. It can be found at your supermarket in canned form, but it's much better if purchased frozen or fresh. Full-sized leaves of spinach can be either flat or the crinkly "Savoy" type, which stand up better to packaging and shipping. They're suitable for eating raw once the tough stems are removed, or can be cooked. Baby spinach is picked smaller and immature, making it especially delicate and well suited to eating raw. Spinach is grown in sandy soil so it's prudent to rinse fresh leaves, removing any lingering grit. This is especially important with curly varieties.

Cooking Spinach Down

• Cooked spinach is available frozen all year in any supermarket, so it makes sense for many recipes to call for cooked rather than raw spinach. If you're working with fresh spinach, this means you need to know how much to buy or harvest for your recipe. The most useful rule of thumb is that one pound of fresh spinach leaves will cook down to approximately one cup of spinach. This is only a rough average. Curly varieties have thicker, hardier leaves and don't reduce quite as much, while baby spinach can reduce to less than a cup. Still, it's a useful rough measure for most purposes.

Cooking Your Spinach

• Spinach can either be served as a side dish after steaming or boiling, or cooled for use as an ingredient in other dishes. Remove the tough stems from full-sized leaves, and chop or tear them into smaller pieces. Baby spinach is tender enough to cook with the stems still attached, though it makes a neater appearance if you remove them. Four or five minutes of steaming, or three to four minutes of boiling, is enough cooking time for most purposes. Drain the spinach and serve it hot, or chill it for use in pasta dishes or casseroles. Spinach can also be sauteed or stir-fried in a small amount of oil. Add fresh leaves in handfuls as the previous ones shrink.

Freezing your Spinach

• Freezing your spinach allows you to keep cooked spinach on hand so you know exactly how much you're working with, and you don't have to buy out the whole market to cook for a large group. Briefly cooking or "blanching" your spinach in boiling water is an important preliminary to freezing it. Blanching the spinach gives it a vivid green color and deactivates enzymes that would otherwise break down the leaves. Immerse the leaves in boiling water in small batches. After two minutes of boiling, transfer the spinach to a bowl of ice water. Once it's cold, drain it and squeeze out any excess moisture, then package it for freezing.