As a chef attempting to make sugar-free recipes I find myself surrounded by a set of chefs, who are idiots. Listen, I don't care how much experience these other chefs have but when you say that you have a recipe for something that is sugar-free and then you have sugar listed, like maple syrup, corn syrup, HFCS, honey or other things, it is NOT sugar free.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/232686/make_sugar_free_homemade_apple_butter.html
I just finished making apple butter the second time and this time, this recipe, made eleven 8 oz jars and this was done with a completely sugar-free recipe: which means that no sugar was added. No honey was added, no blue agave nectar, no corn syrup or anything like that. It is the most close to nature for these products and as such, this is how sugar-free should be.
In regards to diabetes, which I attempt to make all of my foods work well with, some things are good to eat and others are not. For instance, meats have almost no GL's or glycemic loads so they are okay for people with diabetes while other things like processed white flour is high on the glycemic load list and the sugars therein stay in your bloodstream longer so they are not good. Now, what I love concerning this is the statement on the American Diabetes Website, http://www.diabetes.org/ , stating that "All of our recipes meet the ADA Guidelines and can help you fit nutrition into your busiest days."
So you think, "good, there are recipes that I can make and it will be good for my body." That is not the case though. Some of the recipes use high processed things and then on the bottom of the recipe it states " Not all recipes presented here are necessarily appropriate for all people with diabetes, nor will all recipes fit into every meal plan. No two meal plans are alike. Work with your health care provider, diabetes educator or dietitian to design a meal plan that's right for you, and includes the foods you love".
This is contradicts itself. A website claiming that all articles on the site are written by women and then having articles written by men with an annotation under them, does not still qualify it. So, why did the site say that all recipes are good for Diabetics but not all recipes are good for Diabetics? I have no idea but it would be a good question to ask them. The worse part is that on the site it says that these recipes come from a book that is given out by the ADA. This is as bad as someone saying that they are going to make a Vegan Pumpkin pie and then use butter and not use pumpkins.
Well, to everyone who reads this: Diabetics should not take in that many glycemic loads per day, as your body has a hard enough time dealing with little bits of sugar anyways. My products, use as low GL foods as I can get and I do a bit of molecular gastronomy at times in order to make them as diabetic friendly as possible. These people and most others, seem that they do not care about the consumer.
"Here is my diabetic friendly candy bar, using high fructose corn syrup and all-purpose bleached flour. Enjoy"
Showing posts with label diabetes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label diabetes. Show all posts
Friday, April 23, 2010
Friday, March 12, 2010
A breakthrough in low calorie foods
After 9 trials and 20 pounds of sliced peaches, over one pound of sweetening agent, and over a cup of lemon juice, the first batch of real peach jam has been created by my new company. These trials were new and experimented formulas in making a sugar-free fruit jam that tasted good and still had low calories and low GL's for diabetics. Is this simple? No. A normal recipe that you may find for jam for making 6-8 jars can have as much as 5-6 cups of sugar in it. That comes to almost a cup of sugar in each jar of jam. That is a lot of calories extra; about 774 calories worth of pure sucrose. That is a lot of calories.
I finished my jam with the following information:
Serving size: 1 tablespoon
Calories: 7
Total carbohydrates: 3g
Sugars: 1
That's it!
The best part is, in an 8oz jar, there is 205 grams of finished product and that means that a whole jar has 78.4 calories!
I dare you to find a jar of jam that has less for the whole jar!
I thought my calculations were incorrect and compared it to a sugar free jam called Palamers raspberry spread. A tablespoon of their raspberry spread contained a whopping 40 calories! I thought how my numbers could be so far off and it came to me: I have 4 ingredients. Palamers has 6. Besides raspberries which are low in calories, it also had pear and grape juice. A cup of grape juice has 160 calories and a cup of pear juice has a bit much of the same. So that much extra calories are in a batch of jam from this company. Guess how many calories are in a single cup of sliced peaches? 11 calories. That is it, 11 calories!
This jam will start to make its way around and soon the trials on applebutter will begin. That's right, what about making low calorie and no sugar apple butter.
I finished my jam with the following information:
Serving size: 1 tablespoon
Calories: 7
Total carbohydrates: 3g
Sugars: 1
That's it!
The best part is, in an 8oz jar, there is 205 grams of finished product and that means that a whole jar has 78.4 calories!
I dare you to find a jar of jam that has less for the whole jar!
I thought my calculations were incorrect and compared it to a sugar free jam called Palamers raspberry spread. A tablespoon of their raspberry spread contained a whopping 40 calories! I thought how my numbers could be so far off and it came to me: I have 4 ingredients. Palamers has 6. Besides raspberries which are low in calories, it also had pear and grape juice. A cup of grape juice has 160 calories and a cup of pear juice has a bit much of the same. So that much extra calories are in a batch of jam from this company. Guess how many calories are in a single cup of sliced peaches? 11 calories. That is it, 11 calories!
This jam will start to make its way around and soon the trials on applebutter will begin. That's right, what about making low calorie and no sugar apple butter.
Monday, January 25, 2010
The science behind a cookie.
Cooking is both an art and a skill. It uses creativity, risk, science and math in order to pull out a good dish out of just about anything. Just ask Morimoto about the strange ingredients he is given and the wondrous concoctions that he creates. The biggest thing that draws me into cooking is the science and math, which is thrown together under the gastronomy term: the science of cooking. While there is a simple recipe to making chocolate chip cookies, the hard part is not making them with white chocolate chips instead of milk-chocolate, but instead taking out many or replacing many of the ingredients becomes more of a trail-and-error with science and math.
For example: I am working on a low GL chocolate chip cookie. Whoa, wait, what? What's a GL? Okay, let's start from scratch. A GL is an abbreviation for a Glycemic Load, which is the amount of sugars that enter your bloodstream and how long it stays in your body before being countered by the insulin your body releases. So, if you eat something that has a high GL, say of 50, then that means that even after your body releases insulin to deal with the sugars in it, it will take a longer time for those sugars to dissipate than an item that has a lower amount of GL's. Now GL's measure the sugars in an item and if there is too much sugar in an item, more than your body can handle, the excess sugar in your blood stream can mess with your body, causing headaches, fatigue, mood swings or get stored as fat. So watching your glycemic load levels day-to-day can help you feel healthy, stay healthy, and help you lose wait.
Now, my recipe for chocolate chip cookies calls for 3/4th of a cup of packed brown sugar. A cup of brown sugar has about 1 tablespoon of molasses and 1 cup of white sugar. Well, that means that a 3rd of a cup of brown sugar has about 1 & 1/2 teaspoons of molasses. Molasses is relatively low on the GL scale and when mixed with something that can act as a sweetener in its place, like 3/4ths of a cup of Stevia, you get something that tastes like brown sugar, but has almost no GL's and almost no calories.
But while the math is there, I had to play around with the science. Sugar plays an important roll in cooking and baking. In cookies, it helps create the texture. The first step is to mix butter with the sugars, to creme them together. The idea is that the sugar mixes with the butter while it pulls air into the mixture. The sugar helps to tear pockets in the fat and air fills the gaps. This creates a creamy texture for the base of the cookies. When they tell you that the butter needs to be room temperature, this is important as the temperature and the softness of the butter determines how easy it is to create the fluffiness of the cookies. If the butter is too cold, you will have super fluffy cookies that would come up as large and crunchy and if your butter is warm then your cookies will become flat and soft and chewy.
That texture, shows through to when the cookies are cooked as well. As if the cookies have air pockets made from the sugar and butter, then the air heats up and cooks its little cell, creating a crunchy cookie. If there are not as many air pockets, then the air only heats up it's immediate area, which normally is just the whole cookie, allowing for cookies that are still soft and chewy.
In the case of my stevia/molasses use, it functions the same way, as far as tearing through the butter to create the air pockets for the cookie. However without the addition of unnecessary calories, it works better for everyone will delivering the same thing. The glycemic load of the molasses and stevia would be 4.5 GL's. Whereas the glycemic load of 3/4ths of a cup of brown sugar would normally have roughly 113 GL's.
What this is leading up to, is a low GL sugar-free chocolate chip cookie. One that doesn't taste like the sugar-free cookies in the store, but one that tastes like a normal fat filled, sugary and rich cookie. No one one a sugar-free diet will touch a sugar-free cookie, unless it tastes good. As my mantra of a chef, "if it doesn't taste good, don't eat it", there is no reason that diabetics and dieters should be forced to eat anything different than the rest of us.
For example: I am working on a low GL chocolate chip cookie. Whoa, wait, what? What's a GL? Okay, let's start from scratch. A GL is an abbreviation for a Glycemic Load, which is the amount of sugars that enter your bloodstream and how long it stays in your body before being countered by the insulin your body releases. So, if you eat something that has a high GL, say of 50, then that means that even after your body releases insulin to deal with the sugars in it, it will take a longer time for those sugars to dissipate than an item that has a lower amount of GL's. Now GL's measure the sugars in an item and if there is too much sugar in an item, more than your body can handle, the excess sugar in your blood stream can mess with your body, causing headaches, fatigue, mood swings or get stored as fat. So watching your glycemic load levels day-to-day can help you feel healthy, stay healthy, and help you lose wait.
Now, my recipe for chocolate chip cookies calls for 3/4th of a cup of packed brown sugar. A cup of brown sugar has about 1 tablespoon of molasses and 1 cup of white sugar. Well, that means that a 3rd of a cup of brown sugar has about 1 & 1/2 teaspoons of molasses. Molasses is relatively low on the GL scale and when mixed with something that can act as a sweetener in its place, like 3/4ths of a cup of Stevia, you get something that tastes like brown sugar, but has almost no GL's and almost no calories.
But while the math is there, I had to play around with the science. Sugar plays an important roll in cooking and baking. In cookies, it helps create the texture. The first step is to mix butter with the sugars, to creme them together. The idea is that the sugar mixes with the butter while it pulls air into the mixture. The sugar helps to tear pockets in the fat and air fills the gaps. This creates a creamy texture for the base of the cookies. When they tell you that the butter needs to be room temperature, this is important as the temperature and the softness of the butter determines how easy it is to create the fluffiness of the cookies. If the butter is too cold, you will have super fluffy cookies that would come up as large and crunchy and if your butter is warm then your cookies will become flat and soft and chewy.
That texture, shows through to when the cookies are cooked as well. As if the cookies have air pockets made from the sugar and butter, then the air heats up and cooks its little cell, creating a crunchy cookie. If there are not as many air pockets, then the air only heats up it's immediate area, which normally is just the whole cookie, allowing for cookies that are still soft and chewy.
In the case of my stevia/molasses use, it functions the same way, as far as tearing through the butter to create the air pockets for the cookie. However without the addition of unnecessary calories, it works better for everyone will delivering the same thing. The glycemic load of the molasses and stevia would be 4.5 GL's. Whereas the glycemic load of 3/4ths of a cup of brown sugar would normally have roughly 113 GL's.
What this is leading up to, is a low GL sugar-free chocolate chip cookie. One that doesn't taste like the sugar-free cookies in the store, but one that tastes like a normal fat filled, sugary and rich cookie. No one one a sugar-free diet will touch a sugar-free cookie, unless it tastes good. As my mantra of a chef, "if it doesn't taste good, don't eat it", there is no reason that diabetics and dieters should be forced to eat anything different than the rest of us.
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