Choosing Healthy, Low-Fat Foods

Eating healthy foods doesn’t mean losing flavor. You can choose and prepare low-fat foods that your family will enjoy. Just follow the advice below.
Breads, Cereals, Rice and Pasta
Whole-grain breads are low in fat. They are also high in fiber and complex carbohydrates. Choose these breads for sandwiches and as additions to meals.
Avoid rich bakery foods such as donuts, sweet rolls and muffins. These foods can contain more than 50 percent fat calories. Snacks like angel food cake and gingersnap cookies can satisfy your sweet tooth without adding fat to your diet.
Hot and cold cereals are usually low in fat. But granola cereals may have high-fat oils and extra sugars. Instant cereals with “cream” may also have high-fat oils or butterfat.
Avoid fried snacks. Try the low-fat or baked versions.
Vegetables and Fruits
It is important to eat at least five servings of vegetables and fruits per day.
Fruits and vegetables are naturally low in fat, and they add flavor and variety to your diet. They also contain fiber, vitamins and minerals.
Margarine, butter, mayonnaise and sour cream add fat to vegetables and fruits. Instead, use herbs and yogurt as seasonings.
Meat, Poultry, Fish, Dry Beans, Eggs and Nuts
Beef, Pork, Veal and Lamb
Baking, broiling and roasting are the healthiest ways to prepare meat. Lean cuts can be pan-broiled or stir-fried. Use a nonstick pan or nonstick spray coating.
Trim away outside fat before cooking. Trim any inside, separable fat before eating. Select low-fat, lean cuts of meat. Lean beef and veal cuts have the word “loin” or “round” in their names. Lean pork cuts have the word “loin” or “leg” in their names.
Use herbs, spices, fresh vegetables and non-fat marinades to season meat. Avoid high-fat sauces and gravies.
Poultry
Baking, broiling and roasting are the healthiest ways to prepare poultry. Skinless poultry can be pan-broiled or stir-fried. Use a nonstick pan or nonstick spray coating.
Remove skin and visible fat before cooking. Choose low-fat breast cuts. Chicken breasts are a good choice because they are low in fat. Eat domesticated goose and duck only once in a while because both are high in fat.
Seafood
Poaching, steaming, baking and broiling are the healthiest ways to prepare fish. Fresh fish should have firm, springy flesh, a clear color, a moist look and a clean smell. If good-quality fresh fish isn’t available, buy frozen fish.
Most seafood is low in saturated fat. Omega-3 fatty acids, found in some fatty fish, like salmon and cold water trout, may help lower the risk of heart disease in some people.
Cross-Over Foods
Dry beans, peas and lentils fit in the meat and meat-alternatives group or in the vegetable group. They make tasty low-fat main dishes that are good sources of water, fiber and protein.
Milk, Yogurt and Cheese
Choose skim milk or buttermilk. Substitute evaporated skim milk for cream in recipes for soups and sauces.
Try low-fat cheeses. Skim ricotta can replace cream cheese on a bagel or in a vegetable dip. Use part-skim mozzarella instead of cheddar cheese in recipes. Try low-fat natural or cheddar cheeses. Use 1 percent cottage cheese for salads and cooking. Use string cheese as a low-fat, high-calcium snack.
Plain nonfat yogurt can replace sour cream in many recipes. (To maintain texture, stir 1 tablespoon of cornstarch into each cup of yogurt that you use in cooking.) Try frozen nonfat or low-fat yogurt for dessert.
Skim sherbet is an alternative to ice cream. Soft-serve and regular ice creams are lower in fat than premium styles.

Chefs showcase unsung flavor of soybeans

For years promoters of soybeans seemed so proud of the healthful qualities of their product that they forgot it actually could taste good. Tofu, tempeh, salted and roasted whole soybeans, soy milk and other products intended for human consumption have made the leap from specialty stores to supermarkets even though they aren’t exactly stiff competition for potato chips.
But chefs have found uses for soybeans that emphasize their flavor, which is earthy and fresh, and the creamy texture they have when pureed.
These days soybeans still in their pods usually are called by their Japanese name, edamame. They have become a popular premeal table snack at Japanese and Asian-fusion restaurants, like chips and salsa in Mexican restaurants. But quite unlike tortilla chips, soybeans have the added public-relations benefit of a ruling by the Food and Drug Administration that says eating 25 grams of soy protein a day might help reduce the risk of heart disease.
“They’ve become an excellent point of sale,” says Daniel Van Der Beek, chef-owner of Babette’s in East Hampton, N. Y. “If I add them to any dish, it jacks up the interest tremendously.”
He sautes them with tempeh, hijiki seaweed and corn kernels, to which he adds garlic-roasted pecans, diced tomatoes, scallion, garlic, marjoram and chervil. He finishes the mixture with butter if it’s being used as a bed for pan-roasted salmon fillet.
For a vegan dish, instead of salmon, he uses house-smoked tempeh marinated in a puree of cilantro, mirin, tamari, dark sesame oil and a little chili sauce and lime. Rather than butter he uses carrot juice and ginger juice reduced by about two-thirds, strained through paper, thickened with kudzu dissolved in mirin, and flavored with sea salt, sherry vinegar and harissa.
“It’s a great upsell on the ticket,” adds Chris Cheung, chef-owner of Tiger Blossom in New York. As a preappetizer, he steams the edamame, salts them and sprinkles them with an “Asian herb dust,” that includes galangal, lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves and a variety of Chinese ingredients. He charges $1.50 for the dish.
Cheung adds steamed, shelled edamame to the vegetable medley he serves with tiger prawns, along with wax beans, haricots verts, snow peas and sugar snap peas. He also uses a puree of steamed edamame as a sauce base for the prawns. “I always loved the flavor of edamame,” says Cheung, who was introduced to the product as a line cook at Nobu in New York. “It has a nice, earthy flavor to it, it purees easily and it has a nice color.”
Ed Brown at the Sea Grill, also in New York, says soybeans make “a beautiful puree,” with a smooth and luscious texture that is an excellent accompaniment to soft-fleshed fish. So he poaches Chilean sea bass in Greek olive oil and serves it on a puree made from soybeans cooked with shallots sweated with thyme. The soybeans are light enough to puree in a sturdy blender, says Brown, who finishes the puree with a little butter, “and it gets super smooth.”
“They just have this weird feel in the mouth that you wouldn’t expect from a bean,” says David Coleman, the new chef at Atlas in New York, intending the remark as a compliment. He compares the taste to the mouth feel of toro, the super fatty premium tuna.
In fact, Coleman uses pureed soybeans for his big eye tuna “cru.” He cuts the fish into cubes a little smaller than an inch and he serves it with pureed fresh boiled soybeans with some cucumber juice.
“I like the refreshing aspect of cucumber, and most people don’t say, ‘Wow, that tastes like cucumber.’ They go, ‘Wow, those are some nice soybeans.’”
The dish is served with a salad of soybeans, micro red shiso, smoked tofu, diced cucumber and tomato jelly tossed with a vinaigrette of white soy and dashi and drizzled with mustard oil.
Michelle Bernstein, executive chef of Azul in Miami Beach, Fla., uses soybeans, both pureed and whole, with her tuna tartare. “[Customers] can nibble on the beans and take on the flavor of the puree,” she says.
She makes vinaigrette out of soybean puree, rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, yuzu, and sauteed ginger and shallot. The whole beans are mixed in with the tuna itself, along with pineapple, ginger and roasted peanuts. The vinaigrette is drizzled around it, and the plate also is garnished with whole soybeans.
“With the vinaigrette I love the color, and after you puree [edamame], they have a great earthy quality,” she says.
Bernstein also adds soybeans, whole and pureed, along with whole and pureed English peas in her risotto.
“Lately I’ve been throwing them in the duck consomme broth for my foie gras,” she adds. More traditional fava beans are in the broth, too, and the difference in color and texture adds variety to the dish, she says.
Back in New York, Alex Lee, the chef at Daniel, buys fresh edamame from farms in upstate New York because, he says, they’re much more tender than the frozen variety. He steams them with sea salt, shells them and purees them with salt and a little garlic and sesame oil. “I find the consistency very much like chickpeas, almost like a hummus,” he says. Since hummus often is served with tahini, a sesame sauce, the sesame oil was a logical addition. As with the butter in the puree at the Sea Grill, the sesame oil makes it “almost voluptuous on the tongue,” Lee says, noting, “It’s creamy; it’s rich.”
The puree goes under a seared tuna dressed in mustard vinaigrette with toasted sesame seeds, and it is served with an herb salad of celery leaves, chives, cilantro, watercress, a little mint and, when it’s available, micro shiso.
At Pod in Philadelphia, executive chef Michael Schulson shells raw edamame and blanches them in a caramelized shallot broth. Then he purees them with heavy cream, butter and truffle oil and uses the result as a filling for ravioli, which he serves with caramelized shallot and Sauternes broth flavored with essence of thyme. “It’s a big seller, a big vegetarian dish,” Schulson says.
He also has made edamame blinis by mixing blanched, pureed soybeans with flour and milk and folding in egg whites. He finishes them with essence-of-wasabi oil and tops them with sesame-crusted scallops.
Rick Laakkonen of Ilo in New York drops a few glistening, green soybeans into each bowl of his “tidal pool,” a clear, briny seafood broth with oysters, sea urchin and gooseneck barnacles. Wakame seaweed and silver ear and wood ear mushrooms also go in the bowl, along with a couple of rings of the pale green part of a leek. The soybeans add “a really nice vegetal note to the dish that you don’t get from the seaweed or other ingredients,” Laakkonen says. Also, he says he likes the effect of the three different shades of green from the wakame, leek and soybeans.