Say “low-fat” or “light” and people expect all the taste of foam rubber.Well, prove them wrong. By using low-fat cooking techniques, you can avoid taste-bud terrors and whack the fat from your diet. No more than 30 percent of total daily calories should come from fat, nutritionists say. “Gradually, you may turn around your whole style of cooking so you won’t find yourself reaching for a stick of butter or for cream,” says Patsy Jamieson, test kitchen director for Eating Well magazine and a force behind the new “Secrets of Low-Fat Cooking” (Eating Well Books, $16.95).
Here are techniques to get you started.
Roast garlic for maximum flavor
Any time you have the oven on, roast a head of garlic. From Caesar salad dressings to potato salads, you can add a sweet, caramelized cloveoften in place of fat.
“Use it as an enrichment, like butter,” says Jamieson, who once on a “Good Morning America” telecast was challenged by host Joan Lunden to reduce the fat in her mother’s potato salad. The answer? Roasted garlic to replace some of the mayonnaise, which slashed the fat from about 12 grams per cup to 4 grams.
And of course, spread the garlic on crusty slices of French bread in place of butter.
To roast garlic, slice the tip off a head of garlic to expose the cloves, set the head on a piece of foil, sprinkle with 1 tablespoon of water, pinch edges of foil shut and roast 45 minutes in a 400-degree oven. Unwrap the roasted garlic, and when cool enough to handle, squeeze the garlic from the cloves. Use immediately or store in a resealable plastic bag in the refrigerator or freezer.
Combine ground beef with beans or bulgur
Whether you’re making old-fashioned spaghetti and meatballs or your basic burger, reduce the meat by half and sub in bulgur or beans.
Bulgur-wheat kernels that are cooked, dried and cracked into coarse bits-is chewy. It’s the grain used in tabbouleh. Bulgur has slightly less than 1 gram of fat per cup, and increases the fiber and carbohydrate content of a recipe.
For every half pound of ground meat, add two-thirds cup soaked bulgur (from one-third cup dry). Immediately you’ll save half the fat.
Or add beans. For hamburgers, for instance, mix two-thirds cup canned black beans that have been rinsed, drained and chopped, with three-fourths pound lean ground beef. You’ll end up with burgers higher in soluble fiber, the kind of fiber that helps lower blood cholesterol.
Use applesauce in place of oil
Substitute fat in baked goods with unsweetened applesauce, baby-food prunes or one of several commercial fruit puree fat-replacers, usually made of apples and prunes. The purees function like fat, holding moisture in by coating the starchy flour particles.
Some rules of thumb: Applesauce can completely replace the oil in a cake mix, says dietitian Evelyn Tribole, whose book “Healthy Homestyle Desserts” (Viking, $24.95) has several recipes using applesauce.
For each half-cup of applesauce used in place of oil, you’ll save 109 grams of fat and 911 calories.
Applesauce generally works in brownies, cakes, muffins and quick breads. Avoid baby-food prunes in a light cake, where the dark prunes would affect the color.
Removing all the oil or butter from a recipe may result in gummy baked goods. Keep about one-fourth the original amount of fat in a recipe. If you’re unsure how much fat to use, substitute applesauce or fruit puree for half the fat. In other words, if the recipe calls for one cup of oil, use one-half cup oil and one-half cup applesauce or fruit puree, Tribole suggests. And depending on the recipe, she has found that using buttermilk as the liquid helps keep baked goods’ texture from turning rubbery.
Rely on that jar of marshmallow cream
Another favorite baking technique of Tribole’s: creating a tasty frosting of cream cheese and marshmallow cream. By not using butter, you save 92 grams of fat and 392 calories per stick. And though you’re getting plenty of calories with the marshmallow cream, you get zero fat.
Learn to skim the fat
Professional fat-slasher Jeanne Jones, who writes the syndicated “Cook It Light” column in Good Eating, thinks this the most useful of any technique, and one of the easiest:
“Refrigerate dishes overnight so you can skim the fat the next day. It’s one of the things people don’t think about,” says Jones.
After making a soup or stew, cool it briefly and place it uncovered in the refrigerator. Skim the congealed fat from the surface the next day. You can do the same for gravy. Pour off pan juices from a turkey or roast into a shallow bowl, place it uncovered in the freezer 15 to 20 minutes, and skim the fat from the top.
Make chicken broth count
Cans of low-sodium, reduced-fat chicken broth can be used to replace the fat in everything from salad dressings to marinades. Experiment with how much, starting with half oil, half broth.
Boost the flavor of canned broth by using aromatic herbs and spices.A suggestion from “Secrets of Low-Fat Cooking”: Pour 5 1/2 cups chilled broth through a strainer into a saucepan. Fill a tea ball (the mesh kind that holds loose tea) with aromatic herbs and spices such as a combination of two cloves of crushed garlic, two sprigs of fresh rosemary and a pinch of red pepper flakes, place it in the saucepan and heat the broth to a boil. Boil, uncovered, 15 to 20 minutes. Skim off any froth. Remove the tea ball and add one package of cooked and drained low-fat tortellini. Ladle into bowls and serve with Parmesan cheese and freshly ground black pepper.
Just cut quantities
One of the easiest tricks around: Use half the chocolate chips called for in cookie recipes. Hold back on the coconut. Try one-half cup chopped walnuts instead of a whole cup.
CARROT SPICE CAKE
Preparation time: 30 minutes
Cooking time: 35-40 minutes
Yield: 12 servings
Adapted from “Healthy Homestyle Desserts,” by Evelyn Tribole.
Cake:
1 cup each: whole-wheat flour, all-purpose flour
2 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
2 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 teaspoon each: ground nutmeg, ground cloves
6 egg whites
1 1/3 cups sugar
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 cup unsweetened applesauce
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups shredded, peeled carrots
Cream cheese frosting:
1 tub (8 ounces) light cream cheese
1 jar (7 1/2 ounces) marshmallow cream
1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly coat 13- by 9-inch baking pan with non-stick vegetable-oil spray. Combine whole-wheat flour, all-purpose flour, cinnamon, baking soda, nutmeg and cloves in large bowl.
2. Beat egg whites in bowl of electric mixer on high speed until soft peaks form; gradually add sugar. Gradually add buttermilk, applesauce and vanilla to egg white mixture. Add flour mixture; fold in carrots. Transfer batter to prepared baking pan.
3. Bake until toothpick inserted near center comes out clean, 35 to 40 minutes. Let cake cool in pan, on wire rack.
4. Meanwhile, make frosting. Combine cream cheese, marshmallow cream, lemon juice and vanilla in medium bowl. Do not overmix or frosting can become runny. Frost cake and serve.
Nutrition information per serving:
Calories .. 285 Fat .. 4 g Cholesterol .. 7 mg Sodium .. 300 mg
