Blanching the vegetables briefly removes the astringent taste.
Tips
usage
A precise cooking verb: drop food into rapidly boiling water for a few seconds, then take it out at once. Common on recipe cards as 焯水 ('to blanch'). The same action is also written 绰 in some texts.
The fire radical on the left ties this character to heat and cooking — fitting for a verb about plunging food into boiling water. It groups 焯 with the large family of stove-and-flame characters.
Carries the sound. Standalone 卓 reads zhuó; here the reading has shifted to chāo for the cooking sense (and the rarer zhuō reading 'clear; evident' keeps closer to it).
