I’m not a fan of ingredient substitutes. For most of my life, substitutions were a way of replacing a real food that people were being taught to fear with a man-made product that turns out — after a few decades of people eating it — to be worse than the original.
There’s margarine instead of butter, shortening instead of bacon fat, powdered egg whites instead of whole eggs, agave instead of sugar. Now we know that margarine and shortening are loaded with trans fats, which actually are bad for you; the cholesterol in eggs has absolutely no impact on serum cholesterol levels; and agave is at best the same as sugar, and possibly much worse.
But sometimes, substitutions are good.
Why would I promote a course full of substitutions?
Jenny at Nourished Kitchen talks about substitutions all the time. But she’s going the opposite direction. She writes about how to make the recipes we’re familiar with, but with the ingredients our great-grandmothers would have used: No white flour, no prepared mayo or ketchup, no modern food-like products.
For this course, she covers the traditional holiday fare from end to end:
- Brine and slow-roast a turkey
- Make a fantastic pie crust – without refined flour
- Roast and puree a pumpkin
- Make your own mayonnaise, ketchup and mustard
- Make healthy gifts for friends and family
- Ditch white flour and white sugar in your cookies & sweets
- Make gluten-/grain-/dairy-free versions of your best holiday treats
- Convert your favorite recipes to healthier versions
- Entertain friends and family with over 30 menus and 175 included recipes
Some people need substitutions
My family is fortunate enough not to have any food allergies. But we know people who do, and it can be really hard to deal with. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find food without wheat gluten in it?
In other words, just because I don’t need to think about alternatives doesn’t mean no one else does.
If you need to know how to make pie crust without flour … If you want to enjoy the holidays without stressing out about your health … If you just want to know how to slow-roast a turkey … check out the Happy & Healthy Holidays online course.
[Standard disclaimer applies.]
Want more like this? For more recipes like this, that you can hold right in your hands, and write on, take notes, tear pages out if you want (Gosh, you're tough on books, aren't you?) you might be interested in How To Cook Like Your Grandmother, 2nd edition, Illustrated. Or to learn your way around the kitchen, check out Starting From Scratch: The Owner's Manual for Your Kitchen.
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4 Comments
Isn’t agave an all natural product? I’ve seen the agave plants growing in Mexico. It’s what they use for tequila.
Andrew sums up my opinion on Agave pretty well right here.
Good to know. I never paid attention to it until I was down there and had been thinking about picking it up. I just picked up some pure cane sugar to use once I get rid of the white sugar. Any bad things about it?
Ultimately no sugar is really good for you, whether it’s fructose, glucose or sucrose. Honey seems to have some benefits, and can be used as a preservative. All the other sweeteners claim to be “no worse than” cane sugar, but studies keep showing that’s not true. And many of them cost far more.
Bottom line: If you’re eating any kind of sweetener the best you can hope for is “least bad”. So you might as well choose the one that gives the best results. And for most baking, cane sugar is better than beet sugar.
So use cane sugar to make the most perfect brownies in the world, then just eat one.
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