Modern cooking is not only about taste and presentation but most cooks also prefer cooking healthy and low-fat recipes these days. However, you need not be a master chef to prepare healthy and low-fat meals as there are numerous simple tips that you can follow to cook light and health-friendly recipes.
Here are some simple rules that you can follow for cooking low-fat yet delicious meals:
- In India, most of the recipes need oil to sauté vegetables, fry spices, etc. You can use a minimum quantity of oil to sauté the vegetables.
- Also, if the oil is insufficient, you can also add some salt to the vegetables as adding salt brings out the natural juices from the veggies and it gets easy to sauté them.
- You can use low-fat oil like rice bran oil which is healthy for the heart as well.
- For limiting the usage of oil while frying spices and condiments, you can use a small non-stick frying pan. Baking, steaming or microwaving food items is a better choice than frying.
- Use fatless or low-fat dairy products such as low-fat cream (sour), low-fat yogurt, low-fat cheese, etc. These low-fat dairy products cut down both fat and calorie content from a recipe.
- Smaller amounts of concentrated and strong-flavored cheese can be substituted in place of larger amounts of mild-flavored cheese.
- You can substitute sour cream with buttermilk wherever possible as it contains only 1 percent of fat.
- Use of nuts should also be controlled in dishes as they contain a high percentage of fat and calories. You can roast them before using to bring out maximum flavor from a limited number of nuts.
- Use lean portions of meat as they contain high protein and lesser fat percentage. While making ground meat recipes, you can replace ground beef with ground turkey or chicken breast. This will change the taste a bit but it contains much less fat content as well.
- People around the world are also using soy milk or rice milk as they prove to be a low-fat alternative to dairy products.
- Instead of using heavy cream in casseroles and soups, you can use fat-free milk (skimmed milk).