#slow-cooking

[omnivorescookbook]

Chinese BBQ Ribs

Delicious, fall-off-the-bone tender, and finger-licking good Chinese BBQ ribs are the way to shake things up for the holidays and other special occasions.

Recipe => https://omnivorescookbook.com/chinese-bbq-ribs/

[hardcollectionzombie]

Our Whole Duck is fresh, tender, and ideal for creating gourmet meals at home. Known for its rich flavour and succulent meat, duck is perfect for roasting, braising, or slow-cooking. Impress your guests with a beautifully cooked duck centrepiece for any special occasion or family feast.

[gsproffit]

On How an Egg Teaches the Fine Art of Patience

On How an Egg Teaches the Fine Art of Patience #biggreenegg #patiencegrasshopper #brisketisgoodforthesoul

I remain a mere novice at the feet of Patience. To aid in my learning journey, several years ago, I purchased a Big Green Egg. (Can you see what I did there. By assigning a moral imperative to an $1100 purchase, I baptized it. As if by magic, I transformed it from a Want to a Need).  Sign up for my master classes and I can teach you, too, how to affect this transformation, forever banishing the…

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[recipesandcookingtip]

The 3 Healthiest Ways to Cook Vegetables

The 3 Healthiest Ways to Cook Vegetables

1.  Slow-Cooking

Slow-cooking vegetables is one of the gentler ways to prepare them, which makes it an excellent choice. You might lose some nutrients that leach into the slow-cooker water, but that’s only a problem if you don’t use the water.

2. Steaming

Steaming is an extremely gentle cooking method without a lot of water loss. This helps vegetables keep their nutrients.

3. Frying

Did you know…

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[gmx15aa-blog]

Can salmon be a rich source of calcium?

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Removing the bones from cooked fish, before eating the flesh, is not only a waste of mineral nutrients. In some cases it can be difficult, and lead to a lot of waste of meat. We know that many ancestral cultures employed slow-cooking techniques and tools, such as earth ovens (a.k.a. cooking pits; see citeN=citeN+1;document.write(Number(citeN))). Slow-cooking fish over a long time tends to soften the bones to the point that they can be eaten with the flesh. The photo below shows the leftovers of a whole salmon that we cooked recently. We baked it with vegetables on a tray covered with aluminum foil. We set the oven at 300 degrees Fahrenheit, and baked the salmon for about 5 hours.

The end result is that we can eat the salmon, a rich source of omega-3 fat, with the bones. No need to remove anything. Just take a chunk, as you can see in the photo, and eat it whole. It is a good idea to marinate the salmon for a few hours prior to baking it. This will create enough moisture to ensure that the salmon does not dry up during the baking process. If you are a carnivore, you can make a significant contribution to sustainability by eating the whole animal, or as much of the animal as possible. This applies to fish, as I discussed here before (citeN=citeN+1;document.write(Number(citeN)), citeN=citeN+1;document.write(Number(citeN)), citeN=citeN+1;document.write(Number(citeN))). Add eating less to this habit, and your health will benefit greatly.

[gmx15aa-blog]

How to make white rice nutritious

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One of the problems often pointed out about rice, and particularly about white rice, is that its nutrition content is fairly low. It is basically carbohydrates with some trace amounts of protein. A 100-g portion of cooked white rice will typically deliver 28 g of carbohydrates, with zero fiber, and 3 g of protein. The micronutrient content of such a portion leaves a lot to be desired when compared with fruits and vegetables, as you can see below (from Nutritiondata.com). Keep in mind that this is for 100 g of “enriched” white rice; the nutrients you see there, such as manganese, are added.

White rice is rice that has had its husk, bran, and germ removed. This prevents spoilage and thus significantly increases its shelf life. As it happens, it also significantly reduces both its nutrition and toxin content. White rice is one of the refined foods with the lowest toxin content. Another interesting property of white rice is that it absorbs moisture to the tune of about 2.5 times its weight. That is, a 100-g portion of dry white rice will lead to a 250-g portion of edible white rice after cooking. This does not only dramatically decrease white rice’s glycemic load (citeN=citeN+1;document.write(Number(citeN)) ) compared with wheat-based products in general (with some exceptions, such as pasta), but also allows for white rice to be made into a highly nutritious dish. If you slow cook almost anything in water, many of its nutrients will seep into the water. All you have to do is to then use that water (often called broth) to cook white rice in it, and you will end up with highly nutritious rice. Typically you will need twice as much broth as rice, cooked for about 15 minutes – e.g., 2 cups of broth for 1 cup of rice. You can add meats to the white rice, such as pulled chicken or shrimp; add some tomato sauce to that and you’ll make it a chicken or shrimp risotto. You can also add vegetables to the rice. If you want your rice to have something like an al dente consistency, I recommend doing these after the rice is ready; i.e., after you cooked it in the broth. For the white rice-based dish below I used a broth from about two hours of slow cooking of diced vegetables; namely red bell peppers, carrots, celery, onions, and cabbage. After cooking the rice for 15 minutes, and letting it "sit" for a while (another 15 minutes with the pan covered), I also added the vegetables to it.

As a side note, the cabbage and onion tend to completely dissolve after 1 h or so of slow cooking. The added vegetables give the dish quite a nutritional punch. For example, the cabbage alone seems to be a great source of vitamin C (which is not completely destroyed by the slow cooking), the anti-inflammatory amino acid glutamine, and the DNA repair-promoting substance known as indole-3-carbinol (citeN=citeN+1;document.write(Number(citeN)) ). The good folks over at the Highbrow Paleo group on Facebook (citeN=citeN+1;document.write(Number(citeN)) ) had a few other great ideas posted in response to my previous post on the low glycemic load of white rice (citeN=citeN+1;document.write(Number(citeN)) ), such as cooking white rice in bone broth (thanks Derrick!).

[gmx15aa-blog]

Beef meatballs, with no spaghetti

There are pizza restaurants, whose specialty is pizza, even though they usually have a few side dishes. Not healthy enough? Well, don’t despair, there are meatball restaurants too. I know of at least one, The Meatball Shop, on 84 Stanton Street, in New York City. Finally a restaurant that elevates the "lowly" meatball to its well deserved place! Meatballs are delicious, easy to prepare, and you can use quite a variety of meats to do them. Below is a simple recipe. We used ground grass-fed beef, not because of omega-6 concerns (see this post), but because of the different taste. - Prepare some dry seasoning powder by mixing sea salt, parsley, garlic power, chili powder, and a small amount of cayenne pepper. - Thoroughly mix 1 pound of ground beef, one or two eggs, and the seasoning powder. - Make about 10 meatballs, and place them in a frying pan with a small amount of water (see picture below). - Cover the pan and cook on low fire for about 1 hour.

There is no need for any oil in the pan. On a low fire the small amount of water at the bottom will heat up, circulate, and essentially steam the meatballs. The water will also prevent the meatballs from sticking to the pan. Some moisture will also be released by the meat. Part of the fat from the meat will be released and accumulate at the bottom of the pan. If you add tomato sauce and mix, the fat will become part of the resulting red sauce. This sauce will add moisture back to the dish, as the meatballs sometimes get a bit dry from the cooking. Five meatballs of the type that we used (about 15 percent fat) will have about 57 g of protein and 32 g of fat; the latter mostly saturated and monounsaturated (both healthy). They will also be a good source of vitamins B12 and B6, niacin, zinc, selenium, and phosphorus. Add a fruit or a sweet potato as a side dish to 3-5 meatballs and you have a delicious and nutritious meal that may eve impress some people!

[gmx15aa-blog]

High-heat cooking will AGE you, if you eat food deep-fried with industrial vegetable oils

As I said before on this blog, I am yet to be convinced that grilled meat is truly unhealthy in the absence of leaky gut problems. I am referring here to high heat cooking-induced Maillard reactions (browning) and the resulting advanced glycation endproducts (AGEs). Whenever you cook a food in high heat, to the point of browning it, you generate a Maillard reaction. Searing and roasting meat usually leads to that. Elevated levels of serum AGEs presumably accelerate the aging process in humans. This is supported by research with uncontrolled diabetics, who seem to have elevated levels of serum AGEs. In fact, a widely used measure in the treatment of diabetes, the HbA1c (or percentage of glycated hemoglobin), is actually a measure of endogenous AGE formation. (Endogenous = generated by our own bodies.) Still, evidence that a person with an uncompromised gut can cause serum levels of AGEs to go up significantly by eating AGEs is weak, and evidence that any related serum AGE increases lead the average person to develop health problems is pretty much nonexistent. The human body can handle AGEs, as long as their concentration is not too high. We cannot forget that a healthy HbA1c in humans is about 5 percent; meaning that AGEs are created and dealt with by our bodies. A healthy HbA1c in humans is not 0 percent. Thanks again to Justin for sending me the full text version of the Birlouez-Aragon et al. (2010) article, which is partially reviewed here. See this post and the comments under it for some background on this discussion. The article is unequivocally titled: “A diet based on high-heat-treated foods promotes risk factors for diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular diseases.” This article is recent, and has already been cited by news agencies and bloggers as providing “definitive” evidence that high-heat cooking is bad for one’s health. Interestingly, quite a few of those citations are in connection with high-heat cooking of meat, which is not even the focus of the article. In fact, the Birlouez-Aragon et al. (2010) article provides no evidence that high-heat cooking of meat leads to AGEing in humans. If anything, the article points at the use of industrial vegetable oils for cooking as the main problem. And we know already that industrial vegetable oils are not healthy, whether you cook with them or drink them cold by the tablespoon. But there are a number of good things about this article. For example, the authors summarize past research on AGEs. They focus on MRPs, which are “Maillard reaction products”. One of the summary statements supports what I have said on this blog before: "The few human intervention trials […] that reported on health effects of dietary MRPs have all focused on patients with diabetes or renal failure." That is, there is no evidence from human studies that dietary AGEs cause health problems outside the context of preexisting conditions that themselves seem to be associated with endogenous AGE production. To that I would add that gut permeability may also be a problem, as in celiacs ingesting large amounts of AGEs. As you can see from the quote below, the authors decided to focus their investigation on a particular type of AGE, namely CML or carboxymethyllysine. "...we decided to specifically quantify CML, as a well-accepted MRP indicator ..." As I noted in my comments under this post (the oven roasted pork tenderloin post), one particular type of diet seems to lead to high serum CML levels – a vegetarian diet. So let us see what the authors studied: "... we conducted a randomized, crossover, intervention trial to clarify whether a habitual diet containing high-heat-treated foods, such as deep-fried potatoes, cookies, brown crusted bread, or fried meat, could promote risk factors of type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular diseases in healthy people." Well, “deep-fried potatoes” is a red flag, don’t you think? They don’t say what oil was used for deep-frying, but I bet it was not coconut or olive oil. Cheap industrial vegetable oils (corn, safflower etc.) are the ones normally used (and re-used) for deep-frying. This is in part because these oils are cheap, and in part because they have high “smoke points” (the temperature at which the oil begins to generate smoke). Let us see what else the authors say about the dietary conditions they compared: "The STD was prepared by using conventional techniques such as grilling, frying, and roasting and contained industrial food known to be highly cooked, such as extruded corn flakes, coffee, dry cookies, and well-baked bread with brown crust. In contrast, the STMD comprised some raw food and foods that were cooked with steam techniques only. In addition, convenience products were chosen according to the minimal process applied (ie, steamed corn flakes, tea, sponge cakes, and mildly baked bread) ..." The STD diet was the one with high-heat preparation of foods; in the STMD diet the foods were all steam-cooked at relatively low temperatures. Clearly these diets were mostly of plant-based foods, and of the unhealthy kind! The following quote, from the results, pretty much tells us that the high omega-6 content of industrial oils used for deep frying was likely to be a major confounder, if not the main culprit: "... substantial differences in the plasma fatty acid profile with higher plasma concentrations of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids […] and lower concentrations of omega-6 fatty acids […] were analyzed in the STMD group compared with in the STD group." That is, the high-heat cooking group had higher plasma concentrations of omega-6 fats, which is what you would expect from a group consuming a large amount of industrial vegetable oils. One single tablespoon per day is already a large amount; these folks were probably consuming more than that. Perhaps a better title for this study would have been: “A diet based on foods deep-fried in industrial vegetable oils promotes risk factors for diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular diseases.” This study doesn’t even get close to indicting charred meat as a major source of serum AGEs. But it is not an exception among studies that many claim to do so. Reference H Birlouez-Aragon, I., Saavedra, G., Tessier, F.J., Galinier, A., Ait-Ameur, L., Lacoste, F., Niamba, C.-N., Alt, N., Somoza, V., & Lecerf, J.-M. (2010). A diet based on high-heat-treated foods promotes risk factors for diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular diseases. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 91(5), 1220-1226.