An article by Joanne Camas from epicurious.com helped me to indulge Indian Food healthily!
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Love Indian food, hate the grease left in the takeout containers. I'm sure top-notch Indian restaurants go lighter on the fat, but my experience of local mom-and-pop dinners has been of fat-heavy meals.
Cue London's Tower Hamlets Council and the local Healthy Borough Programme. It's offering classes to Indian chefs who want to serve healthier meals, reports the BBC. The council tested Indian meals and found that an average 336 gram (12 ounce) portion of lamb curry with boiled rice clocked a whopping 920 calories, 10.15 grams of saturated fat, and 3.2 grams of salt.
The cooks are happy with the results of their classes: Meals with less fat, but no loss of flavor. And it's cost-effective, too.
To find out how Indian food in the U.S. could be made more healthful, I caught up with Monica Bhide, an authority on Indian cooking, cookbook author, and syndicated spice columnist for Scripps. Her most recent book is Modern Spice: Inspired Indian Flavors for the Contemporary Kitchen.
Monica, do you think Western Indian cooking has tended to be less healthy than traditional recipes, with more cream, salt, etc.?
Actually, in my opinion, it is not Western versus traditional but more home cooking versus restaurant cooking. Most restaurant cooking does have a lot of unhealthy elements, but at home, dishes are really prepared differently, since the home cook is in control over how much salt, butter, ghee, cream, etc., is going into a dish.
Are there easy tricks for lightening up Indian recipes?
Yes, for sure. Typically Indian recipes (other than the deep-frying category) can be lightened up a lot if you consider how the oil is used. Unlike many Western cuisines where butter or fat is used to contribute to the taste of the final dish, in Indian cuisine, we can primarily focus on using oil simply as a carrier of the spices.
Let me explain: In a typical Indian dish, we first heat the oil and then add the spices we will be using in the dish. The hot oil helps the spices release their flavors, so it is being used in a dual capacity: being a carrier of flavor and also as a cooking medium for the food. One does not need a lot of oil to help spices release their flavor, nor do we need a lot of oil to actually cook the ingredients.
What healthy cooking methods do you use?
Using fresh spices adds a lot of flavor to dishes. In my cooking classes, nine out of ten times I will leave out the salt and no one will notice when they taste the final dish. Fresh spices add just oomph and taste to a dish, so the absence of salt is rarely noticed.
Also, I tend to cook my vegetables quickly with a little bit of oil, lots of fresh herbs and spices, and on high heat. Once they brown, then I lower the heat and cover and cook until they are cooked through. This helps cook vegetables without much oil.
Read on for Monica's low-fat advice for home cooks. . .
So, do you have any other tips for people who enjoy cooking Indian food at home?
Smart substituting can help you enjoy Indian dishes without giving up the flavors: For instance, many Indian dishes use yogurt in their preparation. You can substitute low-fat for full-fat yogurt, and in most cases, the difference is taste is barely noticeable. Same for coconut milk: Switch to the light coconut milk.
One trick I have learned with Indian cooking is to halve the amount of fat or oil the recipe asks for and see how the recipe fares. Most times the dish turns out just fine; sometimes, I need more oil.
Use ghee smartly. Instead of using it as a cooking medium (I use vegetable oil and not a lot of it), I use ghee at the end of cooking the dish. I heat a little bit of ghee, season it with spices, and then pour it over the cooked dish. It adds great flavor and a delightful buttery flavor to the dish without a lot of fat. (And when I say little, I mean little--a tablespoon at most for a dish that serves four).
Of course, another simple way is to switch your basmati rice from white to brown.
When we're eating Indian food in restaurants, what are the healthiest choices?
There are plenty of healthy choices on Indian menus, such as a lot of the tandoori items that are roasted instead of fried. Also many dishes on the menus of South Indian restaurants are very intrinsically healthy--like idlees (rice and lentil batter cakes that are steamed) or dosas (rice and lentil batter crisp crepes prepared with barely any oil).
Do you think it's time for more healthy Indian options?
Oh, yes. I think it is definitely time to stop drowning curries in oil and butter, and start showing how the cuisine can be good for your palate and your heart.
The cuisine uses spices a lot, so it is intrinsically healthy as long as you don't load the recipes with butter, oil, cream, etc. The American Journal of Epidemiology reported that a diet high in curry (which typically includes turmeric) may help the aging brain. Ginger has always been used in India as aid for digestion. Cinnamon is used for taste, but it comes with the added benefit of possibly helping lower cholesterol and is one of the most powerful natural antioxidants out there.
Curry Hotline; Bristol's best delivery service
Saturday, February 12, 2011
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