1001 Low-Carb Recipes: Hundreds of Delicious Recipes From Dinner to Dessert That Let You Live Your Low-Carb Lifestyle and Never Look Back (6 page)

I confess, I am at a loss as to how to count the carbohydrate grams that polyols add to my recipes, since I can’t know which of the polyol sweeteners you’ll be using, and they do, indeed, have differing absorption rates. Therefore, I have
left them out of the nutritional analyses in this cookbook, which puts me on the same footing as the food processors, I guess. I have mentioned this in the recipe analyses. Be aware that you’re probably getting at least a few grams of extra carb per serving in these recipes.

Splenda is the latest artificial sweetener to hit the market, and it blows all of the competition clear out of the water! Feed nondieting friends and family Splenda-sweetened desserts, and they will never know that you didn’t use sugar. It tastes that good.

Splenda has some other advantages. The table sweetener has been bulked so that it measures just like sugar, spoon-for-spoon and cup-for-cup. This makes adapting recipes much easier. Also, Splenda stands up to heat, unlike aspartame, which means you can use it for baked goods and other things that are heated for a while.

Be aware that Splenda granular—the stuff that comes in bulk in a box or the new “Baker’s Bag”—is different than the stuff that comes in the little packets. The stuff in the packets is considerably sweeter—one packet equals 2 teaspoons granular. Whenever the ingredients list says only “Splenda,” it means Splenda granular, the stuff you buy in bulk.

However, Splenda is not completely carb-free. Because of the maltodextrin used to bulk it, Splenda has about 0.5 gram of carbohydrates per teaspoon, or about
of the carbohydrates of sugar. So count half a gram per teaspoon, 1½ grams per tablespoon (1.5 g), and 24 grams per cup (25 g). At this writing, McNeil, the company that makes Splenda, has no plans to release liquid Splenda in the United States, but I am hoping that they will change their minds. The liquid, available in some foreign countries, is carb-free. So while it will take a little more finesse to figure out quantities, it will also allow me to slash the carb counts of all sorts of recipes still further! Stay tuned.

Stevia is short for
Stevia rebaudiana
, a South American shrub with very sweet leaves. Stevia extract, a white powder from stevia leaves, is growing in popularity with people who don’t care to eat sugar but who are nervous about artificial sweeteners.

However, stevia extract has a couple of faults: First, it’s so extremely sweet that it’s hard to know just how much to use in any given recipe. Second, it often has a bitter taste as well as a sweet one. This is why some smart food packagers have started blending stevia with fructooligosaccharide, also known as FOS. FOS is a sugar, but it’s a sugar with a molecule so large that humans can neither digest nor absorb it, so it doesn’t raise blood sugar or cause an insulin release. FOS has a nice, mild sweetness to it; indeed, it’s only half as sweet as table sugar. This makes it the perfect partner for the too-sweet stevia.

This stevia/FOS blend is called for in just a few recipes in this book. It is available in many natural food stores, both in packets and in shaker jars. The brand I use is called SteviaPlus, and it’s from a company called Sweet Leaf, but any stevia/FOS blend should do for the recipes that call for it.

My favorite use for this stevia/FOS blend, by the way, is to sweeten my yogurt. I think it tastes quite good, and FOS actually helps the good bacteria take hold in your gut, improving your health.

This is one of those “I knew low carb had really hit the mainstream when . . .” products. I knew we were mainstream when my grocery store started carrying sugar-free imitation honey! This is a polyol syrup with flavoring added to make it taste like honey, and the two I’ve tried, one by Honey Tree and the other by Steele’s, are not bad imitations.

Sugar-free imitation honey is becoming more and more available, and a useful little product it is—in baked goods it adds some extra moisture, while in things like barbecue sauces it adds the familiar syrupy quality. I can get sugar-free imitation honey here in Bloomington at my local Marsh grocery store, and I’ve heard that Wal-Mart now carries a brand. For that matter, many of the low-carb online retailers carry Steele’s brand of imitation honey. In short, it shouldn’t be too hard to get your hands on some.

Remember that sugar-free imitation honey is pretty much pure polyol. Slather it on your low-carb pancakes or biscuits with too free a hand, and you’ll pay the price in gastric distress.

This is actually easy to find; all my local grocery stores carry it—indeed, they have more than one brand. It’s usually with the regular pancake syrup, but it may be lurking with the diabetic or diet foods. It’s just like regular pancake syrup, only it’s made from polyols instead of sugar. I use it in small quantities in a few recipes to get a maple flavor.

Several recipes in this book call for avocados. Be aware that the little, black, rough-skinned California avocados are lower in carbohydrate (and higher in healthy monounsaturated fat) than the big green Florida avocados. All nutritional analyses were done assuming you used California avocados.

Because carrots have a higher glycemic index than many vegetables, a lot of low-carbers have started avoiding them with great zeal. But while carrots do have a fairly high blood sugar impact, you’d have to eat pounds of them to get the quantity that is used to test with. So don’t freak when you see a carrot used here and there in these recipes,
okay? I’ve kept the quantities small, just enough to add flavor, color, and a few vitamins. There’s certainly not enough to torpedo your diet.

You’ll notice that many of these recipes call for frozen vegetables, particularly broccoli, green beans, and cauliflower. I use these because I find them very convenient, and I think that the quality is quite good. If you like, you may certainly substitute fresh vegetables in any recipe. You will need to adjust the cooking time, and if the recipe calls for the vegetable to be used thawed but not cooked, you’ll need to “blanch” your vegetables by boiling them for just three to five minutes.

It’s important to know that frozen vegetables are not immortal, no matter how good your freezer is. Don’t buy more than you can use up in four to six weeks, even if they’re on sale. You’ll end up throwing them away.

Onions are borderline vegetables. They’re certainly higher in carbohydrates than, say, lettuce or cucumbers. However, they’re loaded with valuable phytochemicals, so they’re very healthful, and of course they add an unmatched flavor to all sorts of foods. Therefore I use onions a lot, but I try to use the smallest quantity that will give the desired flavor. Indeed, one of the most common things I do to cut carb counts on “borrowed” recipes is to cut back on the amount of onion used. If you have serious diabetes, you’ll want to watch your quantities of onions pretty carefully, and maybe even cut back further on the amounts I’ve given.

Different types of onions are good for different things. There are mild onions, which are best used raw, and there are stronger onions, which are what you want if you’re going to be cooking them. My favorite mild onions are sweet red onions; these are widely available, and you’ll see I’ve used them quite a lot in the recipes here. However, if you prefer, you can substitute Vidalia or Bermuda onions anywhere I’ve specified sweet red onions. Scallions, also known as green onions, also are mild and are best eaten raw or quickly cooked in stir-fries. To me, scallions have their own flavor, and I generally don’t substitute for them, but your kitchen won’t blow up or anything if you use another sort of sweet onion in their place.

When a recipe simply says “onion,” what I’m talking about is good old yellow globe onions, the ones you can buy 3 to 5 pounds at a time in net sacks. You’ll be doing yourself a favor if you pick a sack with smallish onions in it so that when a recipe calls for just a ¼ or ½ cup (40 or 80 g) of chopped onion, you won’t be left with half an onion. For the record, when I say “small onion,” I mean one about 1½ inches (3.8 cm) in diameter, or about ¼ to
cup (40 to 50 g) when chopped. A medium onion would be about 2 inches (5 cm) in diameter and would yield between ½ and ¾ cup (80 and 120 g)
when chopped. A large onion would be 2½ to 3 inches (6.3 to 7.5 cm) across and would yield about 1 cup (160 g) when chopped. Personally, I’m not so obsessive about exact carb counts that I bother to measure every scrap of onion I put in a dish; I think in terms of small, medium, and large onions, instead. If you prefer to be more exact, that’s up to you.

Tomatoes are another borderline vegetable, but like onions, they are so nutritious, so flavorful, and so versatile that I’m reluctant to leave them out of low-carb cuisine entirely. After all, lycopene, the pigment that makes tomatoes red, has been shown to be a potent cancer-fighter, and who wants to miss out on something like that?

You’ll notice that I call for canned tomatoes in a fair number of recipes, even in some where fresh tomatoes might do. This is because fresh tomatoes aren’t very good for much of the year, whereas canned tomatoes are all canned at the height of ripeness. I’d rather have a good canned tomato in my sauce or soup than a mediocre fresh one. Since canned tomatoes are generally used with all the liquid that’s in the can, the nutritional content doesn’t suffer the way it does with most canned vegetables.

I also use plain canned tomato sauce, canned pizza sauce, canned pasta sauce, and jarred salsa. When choosing these products, you need to be aware that tomatoes, for some reason, inspire food packers to flights of sugar-fancy. They add sugar, corn syrup, and other carb-laden sweeteners to all sorts of tomato products, so it is very important that you
read the labels
on all tomato-based products to find the ones with no added sugar. And keep on reading them, even after you know what’s in them. The good, cheap brand of salsa I used for quite a while showed up one day with “New, Improved!” on the label. Can you guess how they improved it? Right—they added sugar. So I found a new brand.

Here is a small note on ketchup: Commercially-made low-carb ketchup is now available and is often lower carb than my version. All recipes containing ketchup in this book are based on the nutritional analysis of my ketchup recipe.

All of the bread recipes in this book were developed using plain old active dry yeast, not “bread machine yeast” and certainly not “rapid rise” yeast. Indeed, one of my testers had some spectacular failures using rapid rise yeast in her bread machine with one of my recipes, but the recipe worked brilliantly for another tester who used regular yeast.

The best place to buy yeast is at a good natural food store, where yeast is generally available in bulk for a tiny fraction of what it would cost you in little packets at the grocery store. Yeast should be stored in a cooler at the natural food store and the refrigerator at home.

One last note: Don’t buy more yeast than you’re likely to use up in four to six weeks. It will eventually die on you, and you’ll end up with dough that won’t rise. When you’re using expensive ingredients, like we do, this is almost more than a body can bear.

Yogurt and buttermilk both fall into the category of “cultured milks”—milk that has deliberately had a particular bacteria added to it and then been kept warm until the bacteria grows. These bacteria give yogurt and buttermilk their characteristic thick textures and tangy flavors.

If you look at the label of either of these cultured milk products, you’ll see that the nutrition label claims 12 grams of carbohydrates per cup (and by the way, 8 grams of protein). This is the same carbohydrate count as the milk these products are made from. For this reason, many low-carbers avoid yogurt and buttermilk.

However, in
GO-Diet
, Dr. Goldberg and Dr. O’Mara explain that in actuality, most of the lactose (milk sugar) in the milk is converted into lactic acid by the bacteria. This is what gives these foods their sour taste. According to the doctors, the labels say “12 grams carbohydrate” largely because carbohydrate count is determined by “difference.” What this means is that the calorie count is determined first. Then the protein and fat fractions are measured, and the number of calories they contribute is calculated. Any calories left over are assumed to come from carbohydrate.