1001 Low-Carb Recipes: Hundreds of Delicious Recipes From Dinner to Dessert That Let You Live Your Low-Carb Lifestyle and Never Look Back (3 page)

•  Remember that some foods you may be thinking of as carb-free actually contain at least traces of carbohydrates. Eggs contain about 0.5 gram apiece, shrimp have 1 gram per 4-ounce portion, natural cheeses have about 1 gram per ounce, and heavy cream has about 0.5 gram per tablespoon. And coffee has more than 1 gram in a 10-ounce mug before you add cream and sweetener. (Tea, on the other hand, is carb-free.) If you’re having trouble losing weight, get a food counter book and use it, even for foods you’re sure you already know the carb counts of.

Most beans and other legumes are too high in carbohydrate for many low-carb dieters, but there is one exception: Black soy beans have a very low usable carb count, about 1 gram per serving, because most of the carb in them is fiber. Several recipes in this book call for canned black soy beans. Many natural food stores carry the Eden brand; if yours doesn’t, I’ll bet they could special-order them for you. Natural food stores tend to be wonderful about special orders.

If you can’t find canned black soy beans, you may be able to find them dry and uncooked; if so, you’ll have to soak them and then cook them for a very long time until they soften—soy beans can be stubborn. I’d recommend using your slow cooker.

I would also recommend not eating soy bean recipes several times a week. I know that soy has a reputation for being the Wonder Health Food of All Existence, but there are reasons to be cautious. Soy has been known for decades now to be hard on the thyroid, and if you’re trying to lose weight and improve your health, a slow thyroid is the last thing you need. More alarmingly, there was a study done in Hawaii in 2000 that showed a correlation between the amount of tofu subjects ate in middle age and their rate and severity of cognitive problems in old age. Since scientists suspect the problem lies with the soy estrogens that have been so highly touted, any unfermented soy product, including our canned soy beans, is suspect.

This doesn’t mean we should completely shun soy beans and soy products, but it does mean we need to approach them with caution and eat them in moderation. Since many lowcarb specialty products are soy-heavy, you’ll want to pay attention there, too.

Personally, I try to keep my soy consumption to 1 serving a week or less.

There are a few recipes in this book that call for raw eggs, an ingredient currently frowned upon by nutritional “officialdom” because of the risk of salmonella. However, I have it on pretty good authority that only 1 out of every 16,000 uncracked, properly refrigerated eggs is actually contaminated. As one woman with degrees in public health and food science put it, “The risk is less than the risk of breaking your leg on any given trip down the stairs.” So I use raw eggs now and again without worrying about it, and we’ve never had a problem around here.

However, this does not mean that there is no risk. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether this is something you should worry about. I generally use very fresh eggs from local small farmers, which may well be safer than eggs that have gone longer distances, and thus have a higher risk of cracking or experiencing refrigeration problems.

One useful thing to know about eggs: Although you’ll want very fresh eggs for frying and poaching, eggs that are at least several days old are better for hard boiling. They’re less likely
to stick to their shells in that maddening way we’ve all encountered. So if you like hard-boiled eggs (and they’re certainly one of the most convenient low-carb foods), buy a couple of extra cartons of eggs and let them sit in the refrigerator for at least three or four days before you hard boil them.

Sometimes you want a bland oil in a recipe, something that adds little or no flavor of its own. In that case, I recommend peanut, sunflower, or canola oil. These are the oils I mean when I simply specify “oil” in a recipe. Avoid highly polyunsaturated oils such as safflower; they deteriorate quickly both from heat and from contact with oxygen, and they’ve been associated with an increased risk of cancer.

When a recipe says butter, use butter, will you? Margarine is nasty, unhealthy stuff, full of hydrogenated oils, trans fats, and artificial everything. It’s terrible for you. So use the real thing. If real butter strains your budget, watch for sales and stock up; butter freezes beautifully. Shop around, too. In my town I’ve found stores that regularly sell butter for anywhere from $2.25 a pound to $4.59 a pound. That’s a big difference, and one worth going out of my way for.

Coconut oil makes an excellent substitute for hydrogenated vegetable shortening (Crisco and the like), which you should shun. You may find coconut oil at natural food stores or possibly in Oriental food stores. One large local grocery store carries it in the “ethnic foods” section with Indian foods. My natural food store keeps coconut oil with the cosmetics. They’re still convinced that saturated fats are terrible for you, so they don’t put it with the foods, but some folks use it for making hair dressings and soaps. Coconut oil is solid at room temperature, except in the summer, but it melts at body temperature. Surprisingly, it has no coconut flavor or aroma; you can use it for sautéing or in baking without adding any “off” flavor to your recipes.

It surely will come as no surprise to you that olive oil is a healthy fat, but you may not know that there are various kinds. Extra-virgin olive oil is the first pressing. It is deep green, with a full, fruity flavor, and it makes all the difference in salad dressings. However, it’s expensive and also too strongly flavored for some uses. I keep a bottle of extra-virgin olive oil on hand, but I use it exclusively for salads.

For sautéing and other general uses, I use a grade of olive oil known as “pomace.” Pomace is far cheaper than extra-virgin olive oil, and it has a milder flavor. I buy pomace in gallon cans at the same Middle Eastern grocery store where I
buy my low-carb specialty products. These gallon cans are worth looking for because they’re the cheapest way to buy the stuff. If you can’t find gallon cans of pomace, feel free to buy whatever cheaper, milder-flavored type of olive oil is available at your grocery store.

Be aware that if you refrigerate olive oil it will become solid. This is no big deal—it will be fine once it warms up again. If you need it quickly, you can run the bottle under warm water. Or if the container has no metal and will fit in your microwave, microwave it for a minute or so on low power.

As you are no doubt aware, flour is out, for the most part, in low-carb cooking. Flour serves a few different purposes in cooking, from making up the bulk of most baked goods and creating stretchiness in bread dough to thickening sauces and “binding” casseroles. In low-carb cooking, we use different ingredients for these various purposes. Here’s a rundown of flour substitutes you’ll want to have on hand for low-carb cooking and baking:

Because fiber is a carbohydrate that we neither digest nor absorb, brans of one kind or another are very useful for bulking up (no pun intended!) low-carb baked goods. I use different kinds in different recipes. You’ll want to have at least wheat bran and oat bran on hand; both of these are widely available. If you can also find rice bran, it’s worth picking up, especially if you have high cholesterol. Of all the kinds of bran tested, rice bran was most powerful for lowering high blood cholesterol.

Finely ground almonds and hazelnuts are wonderful for replacing some or all of the flour in many recipes, especially cakes and cookies. Packaged almond meal is becoming easier to find; the widely distributed Bob’s Red Mill brand makes one. It’s convenient stuff, and you certainly may use it in any of the recipes that call for almond meal. If you can purchase hazelnut meal locally, it should also work fine in these recipes.

However, I prefer to make my own almond and hazelnut meal by grinding the shelled nuts in my food processor using the S-blade. It takes only a minute or so to reduce them to the texture of corn meal, after which I store the meal in a tightly lidded container. Why do I bother? Because the carb count is lower. How on earth can that be? Because I grind my nuts with the brown skins still on them, while commercial nut meal is made from almonds and hazelnuts that are “blanched”—have the skins removed. Since the skins are practically pure fiber, the fiber count of my homemade meal is higher, and the usable carb count per cup is accordingly lower. The carb counts in this book reflect my homemade, high-fiber meal; if you use purchased meal you’ll want to revise your estimated carb count a gram or two higher per serving.

It’s good to know that both almonds and hazelnuts actually expand a little during grinding. This surprised me because I thought they’d compress a bit. Figure that between 2/3 and ¾ of a cup of either of these nuts will become 1 cup when ground.

These sound just dreadful, don’t they? But they’re in lots of your favorite processed foods, so how bad can they be? If you’re wondering what the heck they are, here’s the answer: They’re forms of water-soluble fiber, extracted and purified. Guar and xanthan are both flavorless white powders; their value to us is as low-carb thickeners. Technically speaking, these are carbs, but they’re all fiber, so don’t worry about using them.

You’ll find guar or xanthan used in small quantities in a lot of these recipes. Don’t go dramatically increasing the quantity of guar or xanthan to get a thicker product, because in large quantities they make things gummy, and the texture is not terribly pleasant. But in these tiny quantities they add oomph to sauces and soups without using flour. You can always leave the guar or xanthan out if you can’t find it; you’ll just get a somewhat thinner result.

You’ll notice that I often tell you to put the guar or xanthan through the blender with whatever liquid it is that you’re using. This is because it is very difficult to simply whisk guar into a sauce and not get little gummy lumps in your finished sauce or soup, and the blender is the best way to thoroughly combine your ingredients.

If you don’t own or don’t want to use a blender, put your guar or xanthan in a salt shaker, and sprinkle it, bit by bit, over your sauce, stirring madly all the while with a whisk. The problem here, of course, is there’s no way to know exactly how much you’re using, so you’ll just have to stop when your dish reaches the degree of thickness you like. Still, this can be a useful trick.

Your natural food store may well be able to order guar or xanthan for you (I slightly prefer xanthan, myself) if they don’t have it on hand. You can also find suppliers online. Keep either one in a jar with a tight lid, and it will never go bad. I bought a pound of guar about 15 years ago, and it’s still going strong!

There are several brands of low-carbohydrate bake mix on the market. These are generally a combination of some form of powdery protein and fiber, such as soy, whey, and sometimes oat, plus baking powder, and sometimes salt. These mixes are the low-carb world’s equivalent of Bisquick, although they do not have shortening added. You will need to add butter, oil, or some other form of fat when using them to make pancakes, waffles, biscuits, and such. I mostly use low-carb bake mix in lesser quantities, for “flouring” chicken before baking or frying or replacing flour as a “binder” in a casserole. If you can’t find low-carbohydrate bake mix locally, there are many Web sites that sell it.

A handful of recipes in this book call for oat flour. Because of its high fiber content, oat flour has a lower usable carb count than most other flours. Even so, it must be used in very small quantities. Oat flour is available at natural food stores. In a pinch, you can grind up oatmeal in your blender or food processor.

This is another fiber product. It’s the same form of fiber that is used in Metamucil and similar products. Because psyllium has little flavor of its own, it makes a useful high-fiber “filler” in some low-carb bread recipes. Look for plain psyllium husks at your natural food store. Mine carries them in bulk, quite cheaply, but if yours doesn’t, look for them among the laxatives and “colon health” products. (A brand called “Colon Cleanse” is widely available.)

A few recipes in this book call for pumpkin seed meal—I started experimenting with it after getting a fair amount of e-mail from folks who couldn’t make my baked goods because of an allergy to nuts, and I’ve found it works quite well. (If you’re allergic to nuts and want to make any of my recipes that call for almond meal, I’d try substituting pumpkin seed or sunflower seed meal.)

It’s very easy to make pumpkin seed meal. Just buy raw shelled pumpkin seeds at your natural food store or at any market that caters to a Mexican-American population—sometimes they’ll be labeled “pepitas.” Then put the pumpkin seeds in your food processor and grind them with the S-blade until they reach a cornmeal consistency. That’s all. (Do not try this with the salted pumpkin seeds in the shell that are sold as snacks! You’ll get salty food with a texture like wood pulp.)

By the way, when I first published my recipe for Zucchini Bread, which calls for pumpkin seed meal, a few
Lowcarbezine!
readers wrote to tell me that their bread was tasty, but that it had come out green. I assume this is because of the green color of the seeds. I haven’t had this problem, but it’s harmless.

For savory recipes such as main dishes, you need a protein powder that isn’t sweet and preferably one that has no flavor at all. There are a number of these on the market, and some are blander than others. I tried several kinds, and I’ve found that rice protein powder is the one I like best. I buy Nutribiotics brand, which has 1 gram of carbohydrates per tablespoon, but any unflavored rice protein powder with a similar carb count should work fine. For that matter, I see no reason not to experiment with other unflavored protein powders, if you like.