Eat Out Eat Well

food prep

A Tasty Way To Lighten Up Your Burger

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In my neck of the woods, barbecue season is right around the corner.

I happen to love hamburgers, but, needless to say, I don’t love the calories and saturated fat in most of them.

Some Hamburger Stats

Most (not all) hamburgers are made with either ground round or ground chuck and are usually six or more ounces.

A broiled burger made with ground round (85% lean meat) has 70 calories in each ounce with 4 grams of fat (2 grams saturated fat).

A broiled burger made with ground chuck (80% lean meat) has 76 calories in each ounce with 5 grams of fat (2 grams saturated).

How about substituting chopped vegetables for some of the meat?  Onions, garlic, peppers, and mushrooms are some possibilities. An ounce of onions is 11 calories with no fat; an ounce of white mushrooms has 6 calories and no fat.

Switching out an ounce or two of meat for veggies can save you 60 to 150 or so calories and 4 to 10 grams of fat and add a whole bunch of flavor.

Try it – you might like it!

 

Does Clean Eating Mean Making Sure You Wash Your Veggies?

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What Is Clean Eating?

Clean eating is about wholesome and natural food – food that isn’t full of chemicals, preservatives, additives and isn’t processed and/or refined.

Clean eating is healthy eating. All of the whole, natural, unprocessed foods in a clean diet are chock full of vitamins, minerals, fiber, and other nutrition that will help you control your weight, blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol, and other markers important for good health.

What To Do

To eat clean, the April 2011 edition of Environmental Nutrition lists seven basic behaviors:

  • Eat fresh, uncomplicated, whole food – and choose it in its natural state.
  • Eat smaller meals – perhaps three small meals and two snacks each day instead of behemoth portions.
  • Eat good carbs  — keep the healthy carbs like veggies, legumes, whole grains, and fruit in your life – and ditch the processed and refined ones like the “whites”  (sugar, flour, rice).
  • Incorporate healthy fats like the monounsaturated fat in olive oil and nuts and cut down on the saturated fats found in dairy and animal products and the trans fats in processed baked and fried foods.
  • Eat high quality lean protein like fish, chicken, turkey, lean meat, and low or non-fat dairy.
  • Make water your beverage of choice.
  • Move your body.

By the way, you do need to wash your vegetables – and fruit.  Wash them really well in plenty of plain water.  No need for detergents or fancy vegetable washes.

Try These To Tame A Way Too Spicy Dish

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Have you ever gotten a little too overzealous with the chili powder – or with the amount of peppers you’ve added to that fantastic dish you’re cooking?

It happens — but what do you do?  You can burn the heck out of everyone’s mouth, toss the whole dish into the garbage, feed the compost pile, or maybe somehow salvage what you’ve made.

There are those of you who routinely look for the spiciest food around and are probably thinking – so what’s the problem?  But, for those of you – like me – who would prefer not to have your mouth on fire – there are ways to calm down an over-spiced dish. After some research, here’s a bunch of suggestions (in no particular order). Maybe some will work for your dish, and maybe not, but file them in your memory and give one or two a try when you’re staring at a pot of over-spiced food.

  • First, know your peppers — they vary in the amount of heat they have.  You can always decrease the amount you use. Be sure to remove the inner membranes and seeds which is where the majority of the heat resides. Capsaicin is the active component in chili peppers and the amount varies according to the variety and maturity of the pepper. Habanero peppers are always extremely hot while ancho and paprika peppers can be as mild as a bell pepper.
  • For three alarm dishes, one prime suggestion is to dilute the heat. Make another batch of the recipe and omit the “overly used” or the “heat” ingredient and combine it with the over-spiced batch. Now you have a double recipe with diluted heat and you can freeze the extra. You can also add more stock, broth, canned tomatoes, or beans depending on the recipe – just make certain there is no added seasoning. A can or two of refried beans or mashed canned beans helps  dilute spiciness, helps thicken chili, increases the fiber and protein content, and gives you more servings without the higher cost of more meat.
  • Dairy helps neutralize the spice in a dish (and in your mouth). You can use (full fat is best) milk, sour cream, or yogurt.  Other suggestions are whipping cream or evaporated milk. If you can’t or don’t have time to incorporate dairy into the dish, offer sour cream or yogurt on the side.
  • Serve chili or curry over rice.  The rice tones down the spices and adds bulk to the recipe. Bread and other grains also help.
  • Add some potatoes or another starchy vegetable like corn. You probably won’t even notice the corn in chili.  If you use potatoes, peel and cube a couple and mix them in. Leave them in until they are cooked through. Remove them (or not, depending on taste) and serve.
  • Try stirring in a couple tablespoons of peanut butter (you could also use almond or other nut butters or tahini) to cut the heat. Depending on the dish it won’t really alter the taste but might give a little more depth to the flavor and make chili seem a little creamier.  Because it may not be an expected ingredient, be certain that no one has nut or peanut allergies.
  • Add some lime, lemon, vinegar or something acidic that won’t mess with the other flavors. Acid cuts through heat.
  • You don’t want to turn your dish into dessert, but sugar goes a long way toward neutralizing the spiciness. So does honey. Add a teaspoon at a time and keep tasting.  Some people use sweet or semi-sweet chocolate to mask the spice, but not so much that the dish ends up tasting like chocolate. Sugar combined with an acid like vinegar or lemon or lime juice works particularly well.
  • Any number of additions can help tame the heat without radically affecting flavor.  Add a can of crushed pineapple to your chili — it will essentially disappear but will also helping to counteract the heat.  Other kinds of fruit and carrots may work, too.

Are You Going To Cook That Or Do A Chemistry Experiment?

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Do you watch Top Chef?  I do.  I also watch Top Chef Masters.  And, because I happen to live in the New York City area, I’ve been fortunate enough to eat at wd—50, Wylie Dufresne’s restaurant in Manhattan. Dufresne, a contender on Top Chef Masters and a guest judge on Top Chef, is one of America’s most famous chefs who routinely uses molecular gastronomy in his food preparation.

What The Heck Is Molecular Gastronomy?

It’s a scientific discipline that studies the physical and chemical processes that happen during cooking.  According to Wikipedia, It tries to figure out things like:

  • How different cooking methods alter ingredients
  • What role the senses play in appreciating food
  • How cooking methods affect food’s flavor and texture
  • How the brain interprets signals from the senses to tell us the “flavor” of food
  • How things like the environment, mood, and presentation influence the enjoyment of food

“The Scientific Study Of Deliciousness”

This is how Harold McGee, author of  the book, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, describes MG. Gourmet Girl Magazine gives these examples of MG techniques:

  • Flash-freezing which involves quickly freezing the outside of various foods, sometimes leaving a liquid center.
  • Spherification: Little spheres are made by mixing liquid food with sodium alginate then dunking it into calcium chloride.  A sphere looks and feels like caviar and has a thin membrane that releases a liquid center when it pops in your mouth.
  • Meat glue: Wylie Dufresne’s “shrimp noodles” are noodles made of shrimp meat and created using transglutaminase, or meat glue, as it’s called at wd-50. It binds different proteins together and is commonly used in foods like chicken nuggets.
  • Foams: Sauces that are turned into froth by using a whipped cream canister, sometimes with lecithin as a stabilizer.
  • Edible menus: Yep, eat your menu. By using an ink-jet printer, inks made from fruit and vegetables, and paper made of soybean and potato starch, your menu can taste like your dinner.
  • Dusts and Dehydration: Dehydrating ingredients into a dust changes the way to use them, for example, making a dust of certain mushrooms and then sprinkling it on food.

The Bottom Line

According to Environmental Nutrition (EN), if you’ve wondered what makes glossy white peaks form when you whip egg whites, or how an ordinary milk can  turn into rich, pungent cheese, you’ve wandered into the world of molecular gastronomy (MG).

MG, “the scientific study of the pleasure giving qualities of foods—the qualities that make them more than mere nutrients,” analyzes long standing culinary practices and old wives’ tales and deconstructs classic recipes. As you lick that delicious ice cream cone do you stop and think about ice cream’s complicated physical structure that includes ice crystals, protein aggregates, sugar crystals and fats in a condensed form?  You don’t, but molecular gastronomists might.

What Does MG Look Like On Your Dinner Plate?

Grant Achatz, a James Beard award winning chef might serve these foods at Alinea, his Chicago restaurant: tiny bits of cauliflower served shaved, fried, dehydrated, and coated in three kinds of custards; Chinese beef and broccoli plated as a traditional short rib, the plate dotted with dehydrated broccoli and peanuts then covered with a clear gelatinous sheet of Guinness beer.

Got you thinking as you lick your lips?