1001 Low-Carb Recipes: Hundreds of Delicious Recipes From Dinner to Dessert That Let You Live Your Low-Carb Lifestyle and Never Look Back (5 page)

If you don’t have a food processor or a coffee grinder, you’ll just have to buy flaxseed meal pre-ground. If you do, keep it in an airtight container, refrigerate or freeze it, and use it up as quickly as you can.

The only peanut butter called for in this cookbook is “natural” peanut butter, the kind made from ground, roasted peanuts, peanut oil, and salt—nothing else. Most big grocery stores now carry natural peanut butter; it’s the stuff with the layer of oil on top. The oil in standard peanut butter has been hydrogenated to keep it from separating out (that’s what gives big name-brand peanut butters that extremely smooth, plastic consistency) and it’s hard to think of anything worse for you than hydrogenated vegetable oil—except for sugar, of course, which is also added to standard peanut butter. Stick to the natural stuff.

Natural food stores carry not only natural peanut butter but also almond butter, sunflower butter, and sesame butter, generally called “tahini.” All of these are useful for low-carbers. Keep all natural nut butters in the refrigerator unless you’re going to eat them up within a week or two.

Bouillon or broth concentrate comes in cubes, crystals, or liquids. It is generally full of salt and chemicals, and it doesn’t taste notably like the animal it supposedly came from. It definitely does not make a suitable substitute for good-quality broth if you’re making a pot of soup. However, these products can be useful for adding a little kick of flavor here and there, more as seasonings than as soups, and for this, I keep them on hand. I use a paste bouillon concentrate product called Better Than Bouillon, which comes in both chicken and beef flavors; I do find it preferable to the other kinds. But, use what you have on hand; it should be okay. If you can get the British product Bovril, it might even be better!

This is a traditional Asian ingredient, consisting mostly, as the name strongly implies, of hot chilies and garlic. If, like me, you’re a chili-head, you’ll find endless ways to used the stuff once you have it on hand. Chili garlic paste comes in jars and keeps for months in the refrigerator. It’s worth seeking out at Asian markets or in the international foods aisle of big grocery stores.

Chipotle peppers are smoked jalapeños. They’re very different from regular jalapeños, and they’re quite delicious. Look for them, canned in adobo sauce, in the Mexican foods section of big grocery stores. Because you’re unlikely to use the whole can at once, you’ll be happy to know that you can store your chipotles in the freezer, where they’ll keep for months. I just float my can in a bowl of hot tap water for 5 minutes until it’s thawed enough to peel off one or two peppers, then I put it right back in the freezer.

Just a few recipes in this book call for Diet-Rite tangerine soda. I’ve specified Diet-Rite brand because it’s sweetened with sucralose (Splenda) rather than with aspartame. This is important because aspartame loses its sweetness when heated for any length of time while sucralose does not. Diet-Rite is nationally distributed, I understand, so you should be able to find it. If you can find another brand of tangerine- or orange-flavored diet soda that is sweetened with sucralose instead of aspartame, feel free to substitute it (and let me know!). However, do not substitute aspartame-sweetened soda. Your recipe won’t come out right.

This is a salty, fermented seasoning widely used in Southeast Asian cooking. It’s available in Asian grocery stores and in the Asian food section of big grocery stores. Grab it when you find it; it keeps nicely without refrigeration. Fish sauce is used in a few (really great) recipes in this book, and it adds an authentic flavor. In a pinch, you can substitute soy sauce, although you’ll lose some of your Southeast Asian accent.

Say “fruit two-oh,” as in H
₂
O with fruit flavor added. Fruit
₂
O is a new, nationally distributed beverage line consisting of water with natural fruit flavors and a touch of Splenda. It’s a wonderful, refreshing thing to drink. More important for our purposes here, however, is the fact that it lets us add fruit flavors to recipes without adding carbohydrates or calories. You’ll find a few recipes calling for peach-flavored, lemon-flavored, and orange-flavored Fruit
₂
O in this book. Look for Fruit
₂
O in the water aisle of your grocery store.

Garlic is a borderline vegetable. It’s fairly high in carbohydrates, but it’s very, very good for you. Surely you’ve heard all about garlic’s nutritional prowess by now. Garlic also, of course, is an essential flavoring ingredient in many recipes. However, remember that there is an estimated 1 gram of carbohydrates per clove, so go easy. A “clove,” by the way, is one of those little individual bits you get in a whole garlic bulb. If you read “clove” and use a whole bulb (also called a “head”) of garlic, you’ll get lots more carbs—and a lot stronger garlic flavor—than you expected.

I only use fresh garlic, except for in the occasional recipe that calls for a sprinkle-on seasoning blend. Nothing else tastes like the real thing. To my taste buds, even the jarred, chopped garlic in oil doesn’t taste like fresh garlic. And we won’t even talk about garlic powder. You may use jarred garlic if you like; ½ teaspoon should equal about 1 clove of fresh garlic. If you choose to use powdered garlic, well, I can’t stop you, but I’m afraid I can’t promise the recipes will taste the same either. Figure that ¼ teaspoon of garlic powder is roughly equivalent to 1 clove of fresh garlic.

By the way, the easiest way to crush a clove or two of garlic is to put the flat side of a big knife on top of it and smash it with your fist. Pick out the papery skin, which will now be easy, chop your garlic a bit more, and toss it into your dish. Keep in mind that the distinctive garlic aroma and flavor only develops after the cell walls are broken (that’s why a pile of fresh garlic bulbs in the grocery store doesn’t reek), so the more finely you crush or mince your garlic, the more flavor it will release.

Many recipes in this book call for fresh ginger, sometimes called gingerroot. Fresh ginger is an essential ingredient in Asian cooking, and dried, powdered ginger is not a substitute. Fortunately, fresh ginger freezes beautifully; just drop your whole gingerroot (called a “hand” of ginger) into a resealable plastic freezer bag and toss it in the freezer. When the time comes to use it, pull it out, peel enough of the end for your immediate purposes, and grate it. (It will grate just fine while still frozen.) Throw the remaining root back in the bag and toss it back in the freezer.

Ground fresh ginger in oil is available in jars at some very comprehensive grocery stores. I like freshly grated ginger better, but this jarred ginger will also work in these recipes.

In particular, I find low-sugar apricot preserves to be a wonderfully versatile ingredient. I buy Smucker’s brand and like it very much. This is lower in sugar by far than the “all fruit” preserves, which replace sugar with concentrated fruit juice. Folks, sugar from fruit juice is still sugar. I also have been known to use low-sugar orange marmalade and low-sugar raspberry preserves.

If you’ve read my newsletter,
Lowcarbezine!
, you know that I’m a big fan of Vege-Sal. What is Vege-Sal? It’s a salt that’s been seasoned, but don’t think “seasoned salt.” Vege-Sal is much milder than traditional seasoned salt. It’s simply salt that’s been blended with some dried, powdered vegetables. The flavor is quite subtle, but I think it improves all sorts of things. I’ve given you the choice between using regular salt or Vege-Sal in a wide variety of recipes. Don’t worry, they’ll come out fine with plain old salt, but I do think Vege-Sal adds a little something extra. Vege-Sal is also excellent sprinkled over chops and steaks in place of regular salt. Vege-Sal is made by Modern Products and is widely available in natural food stores.

What the heck is molasses doing in a low-carb cookbook? It’s practically all carbohydrates, after all. Well, yes, but I’ve found that combining Splenda (see page 28) with a very small amount of molasses gives a good brown-sugar flavor to all sorts of recipes. Always use the darkest
molasses you can find; the darker it is, the stronger the flavor and the lower the carb count. That’s why I specify blackstrap—the darkest, strongest molasses there is. It’s nice to know that blackstrap is also where all the minerals they take out of sugar end up, so it may be full of carbs, but at least it’s not a nutritional wasteland. Still, I only use small amounts.

Most natural food stores carry blackstrap molasses, but if you can’t find it, always buy the darkest molasses available, keeping in mind that most grocery store brands come in both light and dark varieties.

Why not use some of the artificial brown sugar–flavored sweeteners out there? Because I’ve tried them, and I haven’t tasted even one I would be willing to buy again. Ick.

Polyols, also known as sugar alcohols, are widely used in sugar-free candies and cookies. There are a variety of polyols, and their names all end with “tol”: sorbitol, maltitol, mannitol, lactitol, xylitol, and the like. (Okay, there’s one exception: isomalt. I don’t know what happened there.) Polyols are, indeed, carbohydrates, but they are carbohydrates that are made up of molecules that are too big for the human gut to digest or absorb easily. As a result, polyols don’t create much rise in blood sugar, nor much of an insulin release.

This does not, however, mean that polyols are completely unabsorbed. I have seen charts of the relative absorption rates of the various polyols, and I am here to tell you that you do, indeed, absorb carbohydrates from these sweeteners, in varying degrees. Sadly, the highest absorption rate seems to be for maltitol, which is the most widely used of the polyols. You absorb about 2.5 calories for every gram of maltitol you eat. Since you would absorb 4 calories for a gram of sugar, simple arithmetic tells us that you’re absorbing more than half of the carbohydrate in the maltitol you eat.

Why do manufacturers use polyols instead of sucralose (Splenda)? Polyols are used in commercial sugar-free sweets because, unlike Splenda and other artificial sweeteners, they will give all of the textures that can be achieved with sugar. Polyols can be used to make crunchy toffee, chewy jelly beans, slick hard candies, moist brownies, and creamy chocolate, just as sugar can.

However, there are one or two problems with polyols. First of all, there is some feeling that different people have differing abilities to digest and absorb these very long-chain carbohydrates, which means that for some people, they may cause more of a derangement of blood sugar than for others. Once again, my only advice is to pay attention to your body.

The other problem with polyols is one that is inherent in all indigestible, unabsorbable carbohydrates: they can cause gas and diarrhea. Unabsorbed carbs ferment in your gut, you see, with intestinal gas as a result; it’s the exact same thing that happens when people eat beans. I find
that even half of a low-carb chocolate bar is enough to cause me social embarrassment several hours later. And I know of a case where eating a dozen and a half sugar-free taffies before bed caused the hapless consumer forty-five minutes of serious gut-cramping intestinal distress at four in the morning.

Don’t think, by the way, that you can get around these effects of polyol consumption by taking enzymes that help you digest complex carbohydrates, such as Beano. It will work, but it will work by making the carbohydrates digestible and absorbable—meaning that any low-carb advantage is gone. I’ve known folks who have gained weight this way.

What we have here, then, is a sweetener that enforces moderation. Personally, I think this is a wonderful thing!

Polyols have become available for the home cook. I have started to use them in my recipes, because they do, indeed, offer a textural advantage. In particular, my cookie recipes were often too crumbly and sometimes too dry. Polyols solve this problem.

However, I have become increasingly wary of using polyols in any great quantity, because I am convinced we absorb more carbohydrate from them than the food processors want to let on. So here’s what I do: When I feel that adding polyol sweetener to a recipe will improve the texture, I use just enough of the sweetener to get the effect I want, and then I add Splenda to bring the recipe up to the level of sweetness I’m looking for. This has worked very well for me. It also makes the resulting food easier on both your gut and your blood sugar than it would be if I’d used all polyol.

I use erythritol whenever possible, in preference to maltitol, isomalt, or any of the other granular polyols. Why? Because erythritol has the lowest digestion and absorption rate of all the polyols—you get only 0.3 calories per gram of erythritol, which tells us that we’re absorbing very little indeed. Erythritol also seems to be easier on the gut than the other polyols.

There are, however, recipes where I use other polyols. I use sugar-free dark chocolate not infrequently (and if you haven’t tried the sugar-free chocolate yet, you’re missing something!). I also use sugar-free pancake syrup and the new sugar-free imitation honey. Obviously, with these products, I’m stuck with whichever polyol the manufacturer used.

I also have found one application in which I can get only maltitol to work: Chocolate sauce. I have tried repeatedly to make a decent no-sugar-added chocolate sauce with erythritol, and it simply isn’t happening. The stuff starts out looking all right, but as soon as it cools, it turns grainy on me. Maltitol makes a perfectly textured chocolate sauce. So for that purpose alone, I keep a little maltitol in my pantry.