Low Carb Cooking Class! (LC3) -- Pro Tips for Home Cooks

Class is back in session!

The theme of this series is: if you have time to wait for fried chicken, pizza, or Chinese food to be delivered, then you have time to whip up a completely yummy low-carb, Paleo, or ketogenic meal. In earlier posts, we covered how to stock your freezer, fridge, and pantry to make meal prep a cinch, and tips for cooking in bulk and in advance. That’s sort of “prepping the battlefield,” as they said when I was in the military. Setting the stage, if you will. Now, it’s time to start talking about how to take these ingredients and starting points and turn them into meals.   

Professional chefs will tell you their “secrets” aren’t really secrets at all. They’re actually basic, fundamental things that the pros simply employ differently in the kitchen than home cooks do. Sure, maybe they went to culinary school, did a few years staging under more established chefs, and know way more than you or I do about creating culinary magic, but that doesn’t mean we simpletons can’t hold our own and serve ourselves and our families delicious low carb food. We’re not out to win Chopped All-Stars, after all, just to put some edible food on the table, right? If you want to impress people, then quit reading my blog and go read this one instead, for Paleo. (Or this one, for low carb.) (Or this one, for keto.)

For the rest of us, who just want to make easy and convenient low carb meals, here goes.

Label Madness Monday: Et tu, BBQ? (Or: How to Eat at a BBQ Joint Without Wrecking Yourself)

I love me some good BBQ!

Set before me some nice sliced brisket or a pile of pulled pork and I’m in hog heaven. (Pun intended.) However, depending on what you order, barbecue joints can be a low-carb/Paleo paradise, or they can be a total blood sugar nightmare.

If you’re watching your carbohydrate intake, you already know to steer clear of the cornbread, baked beans, mac & cheese, and the cheap-o bread they usually stick under whatever meat you order in order to sop up the juices. (Confession: Sometimes I eat this bread, ‘cuz, really, what a waste of yummy meat drippings! I also eat the cornbread sometimes, ‘cuz…well, it’s a bit of a weakness.)

That’s the obvious stuff, though. What about things that are harder to avoid at a BBQ place, like the delicious sauces they use to marinate, baste, and slather your food with before serving it to you? BBQ sauce is a sneaky source of large amounts of sugar. (And by “sugar,” I mean cane sugar, molasses, honey, corn syrup, corn starch, and more.) Let’s take a look at a couple of examples from a popular restaurant chain, Famous Dave’s®. (I am a big fan of this place, and am absolutely not writing this to bash it. I only want to point out the ingredients in the sauces and help us make informed choices, wherever we eat.)

Taste Test: Primal Mayo

I have never made any secret of the fact that I’m not perfect when it comes to diet. In fact, with regard to eating not-so-nutritious things, I have a fair bit of experience. Most of the time, though, I do pretty well. If not by my own standards, then at least compared to the average soda-swilling, bagel-munching guy or gal on the street. I’ve been at this low-carb real food “thing” long enough that I’ve never found myself at a restaurant or dinner at a friend’s home and felt like there was nothing I could eat. I’ve learned to make my own no-sugar or lower carb versions of certain foods, and learned to make appropriate substitutions when necessary.

One thing I haven’t been able to replicate in a wholesome version is mayonnaise. Being pretty much just oil, eggs, vinegar, and maybe some salt and lemon juice, mayo is about as low carb as it gets. The problem with mayo isn’t the carb content; it’s the type of oil typically used in commercial brands. I’m not ashamed to say I’m a Hellmann’s gal. (That’s Best Foods to those of you west of the Rockies.) When Ina Garten, one of my favorite Food Network “celebuchefs” uses mayonnaise, she always says “Use a good mayonnaise,” and even though the network isn’t allowed to show the brand label on the front of the jar, you can clearly tell it’s Hellmann’s.

I have tried other brands. I’ve tried Duke’s, Kraft, and the store brands from Safeway, Giant, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods. I’ve tried mayo made with canola oil (gasp!). None of them even came close. A couple of those were okay; others were downright dreadful. I never bothered trying the olive oil mayonnaises. If you look at the labels, you’ll see that while they do contain a little olive oil, so the manufacturer can write OLIVE OIL in big letters on the front of the jar, they are still predominantly soybean oil. (Thanks to our generous tax subsidies, soy is super cheap for food manufacturers to use in their products.)

I’ve even tried making it from scratch a time or two. Let’s just say the results made me want to reach for the Hellmann’s even more. And frankly, considering my lack of dietary sainthood—and lack of desire to attain it—while I generally advise against consumption of large amounts of soy oil, if mayonnaise and the occasional blue cheese salad dressing are pretty much my only sources of it, I’m comfortable with that. (Let me pause while the gasps of horror subside and the whooshing sound in the wake of the purists getting up to leave quiets down.)

The Virtues of Vinegar

(We'll return to the cancer series in a few days.)



I am going to list several popular condiments:

Ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, salsa, Worcestershire sauce, steak sauce, BBQ sauce, pickle relish, hot sauce, and The Oatmeal’s beloved Sriracha.

All of these items, with their diverse flavors and wide range of foundational ingredients, have one thing in common.

Tomatoes?  No.

Oil?  No.

Chili peppers?  Nope.

Hint: It’s VINEGAR!! (Okay, so that was more than a hint.)

It’s true: I challenge you to go to the supermarket and take a good look at the condiments. You will see vinegar listed in the ingredients in almost all of them, and that’s not even taking into account using various forms of vinegar, itself, as a condiment or critical component of salad dressing: apple cider vinegar, balsamic, red wine, champagne, sherry vinegar, and, of course, no proper fish & chips meal would be complete without a generous splash of malt vinegar to go with the newspaper-wrapped, deep-fried deliciousness.

Apart from these modern condiments, which we use on everything from hot dogs at the ballpark, to corn chips on Super Bowl Sunday, to brats at Oktoberfest (not to mention a snazzy new Sriracha beer!), vinegar has been part of traditional ethnic cuisines around the world for centuries. Of course, we can’t assume that an ingredient or culinary technique is beneficial merely because it’s been employed by many disparate groups for a very long time, but we ought to at least give that possibility some consideration. Some traditions deserve to be mothballed to history (footbinding, anyone?), but when it comes to culinary and gastronomic approaches that persist, there’s probably some good reasons lurking behind them. Perhaps the cooks of yesteryear knew something we don’t?

For a while now, I have been promising (threatening?) to write a post about my newfound love for vinegar, so here goes. And instead of writing shorter blog posts, like I have also been promising, it seems I've gone in the opposite direction with this one. It's long. But that's okay. Take your time and read it in stages if need be. It'll still be here when you get back. If you're a bored-to-death cubicle dweller and I've given you a way to kill ten minutes, you're welcome. (*Insert smiley face.*)