Low Fat Substitutes for Cooking Ideas for Flavoring

Video Transcript

I’m Kirsten Herbes and I am a registered dietician and health educator. Let’s talk about some alternative flavorings to vegetable oil. Oil serves two purposes in your cooking. The first is for flavor, the second is to prevent sticking of your food item to whatever pan or pot you are using to cook the food or if you are broiling the food, to keep it from sticking to the pan that is in the oven. However, obviously oil has a lot of calories, a lot of extra fat and oil for flavoring can easily be substituted in your meals. The main items that you want to consider when flavoring your food are aromatic vegetables such as onions. A lot of people stay away from onions because they think they are going to over power their food. A little bit of onion goes a long way. There are also different varieties of onion. The first one you probably won’t want to look at if you are a little bit sensitive to the taste of onions is the yellow onion which is a sweeter variety which is called a Vidalia onion. Yellow onions usually don’t have that sharp bite a regular onion has so this is easy to use in cooking particulate with a food such as pasta, vegetables or chicken, something that does not have much flavor on its own. Another variety to consider is the white onion but the white onion is the one we traditionally know as the onion that is going to have the after taste or bite. The white onion goes really well with something like fish, heavier meat, such as beef or pork something that has little bit more flavor to it on its own. Lastly an onion that is real good to use with raw foods such as a salad or raw vegetables is the red onion the red onion again will have a fairly strong taste but does not quite have that bite that the white or yellow onion has. Another item that you want to use is garlic. We are all familiar with garlic. Many people are not as comfortable with the scent of garlic as their cooking it but actually the garlic flavors it and the food is not going to quite a strong as the scent while you are cooking garlic. Again, with garlic a little lick goes a long way. You can use either fresh variety as I am showing here or you can get pre-minced garlic at the grocery store so you will avoid chopping up and have that taste in that kitchen even before you start cooking. Another item really easy to use is another variety of onion. A lot of people stay away from this because they simply don’t know what to do with it but a green onion is another variety of onion. You can use both the green part and the white part of this onion and you want to cut off the very ends with these little roots on here. You want to wash them, chop them up, sauté them in the pan, you can put them in a stew and you can add to your pasta sauces the same way you would use a regular onion. These do have a fairly strong bite and fairly strong after taste so again, a little goes a long way. Lastly of course, seasoning. Everybody is familiarly with the basic salt and pepper. Salt you want to limit as much as possible for many health reason. Salt easily over powers the taste of your food. Pepper is an easy substitute to use for fat because it provides a lot of flavoring. White pepper as I am showing right here is just another variety of pepper. Red pepper tends to be stronger and white tends to be lighter taste and your regular black pepper that you probably have a shaker at your kitchen table at home, pretty much goes with everything.

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