Comfort Food Makeovers: All Your Favorites Made Lighter Author: The Editors at America's Test Kitchen | Language: English | ISBN:
B00BJ6SMWW | Format: PDF
Comfort Food Makeovers: All Your Favorites Made Lighter Description
You can find lightened versions of feel-good favorites like mac and cheese, fried chicken, and fudgy brownies anywhere you can find recipes: books, magazines, and all over the Internet. But be honest: Have you ever made one of these so-called makeovers more than once? At America’s Test Kitchen, we test recipes over and over—long after the other guys have thrown in the towel. Simply put, good enough doesn’t cut it with us. In Comfort Food Makeovers, we redesigned the dishes you crave from the ground up, so you can enjoy them again and again. Popular restaurant dishes like loaded nachos and velvety cheesecake from the Factory (you know which one) have been reengineered, too. Fat has been cut in half—or more—and calories have been reduced by at least one-third in almost every recipe. But just because we trimmed the fat and calories doesn’t mean we sacrificed good taste or resorted to teeny portions. How did we do it? We started with the worst offender of high-fat cooking techniques: deep frying. To revamp mozzarella sticks, eggplant Parmesan, and fried shrimp, we nixed the fryer and turned to the oven instead. Dunking these foods in egg whites and coating them with panko and a thin sheen of vegetable oil spray before baking gave us the same golden, ultra-crisp exterior. Steaming egg rolls, then uncovering the pan so moisture could evaporate, made them light and crispy—not heavy and greasy like takeout.
We also ramped up the flavor of our lightened dishes by turning to some well-chosen powerhouse ingredients. Trading ground turkey for the ground beef in our Bolognese sauce was an easy way to cut fat, but to boost its savory richness, we added dried porcini mushrooms, an anchovy, and a bit of pancetta. Rather than loading up our shrimp scampi with lots of butter like so many restaurants do, we reached for light cream cheese, which imparted a rich, silky texture but with far fewer calories.
Most light desserts are worth skipping. Not ours. Just a spoonful of chocolate syrup made our brownies super-fudgy but added surprisingly few calories and no fat. Honey Nut Cheerios (who knew?!) stood in for a portion of the nuts in our lighter, yet ultra-nutty, pecan bars. And “special occasion” desserts like tiramisù are no longer off-limits. Feel free to dig into our luscious lightened version—we swapped out high-fat mascarpone for a lightly sweetened mix of light cottage cheese, yogurt, and cream cheese whipped together in a food processor.
With Comfort Food Makeovers, you’ll be able to enjoy the dishes you love more often. We guarantee it.
- File Size: 15533 KB
- Print Length: 336 pages
- Publisher: America's Test Kitchen (February 20, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00BJ6SMWW
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #52,034 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
I always look forward to cookbooks from America's Test Kitchen. Their exhaustive approach to recipe-building, tinkering each aspect one at a time, ensures that the end product is spot-on. Although I love many of their past cookbooks, it's no secret that some of their best comfort food recipes are laden with fat, calories, and sodium. This cookbook starts over from scratch to build healthier, cleaner versions of classic comfort foods.
The book begins with an introduction that includes tips to cut fat and calories from food, important staple ingredients for a healthier diet, and necessary kitchen tools or equipment. In traditional America's Test Kitchen style, each recipe contains an introductory paragraph or two that details the recipe-building process. These can be great ways to gain insight into the methods used to cut calories and fat from classic dishes, and many of the techniques can be employed to tweak your own favorite dishes. The rest of the book is laid out in the following sections:
Appetizers and Snacks
Salads, Sandwiches, and Pizza
The Soup Bowl
Classic Casseroles
Baked Not Fried
A Chicken in Every Pot
Favorites from Land and Sea
Pasta Night
On the Side
Breakfast and Brunch
Chocolate Desserts
Cookies and Bars
More Sweet Treats
I have tried several of these recipes thus far (Roasted Artichoke Dip, Creamy Tomato Soup, and Spaghetti Carbonara). Each of them has been delicious -- well-balanced flavors that don't taste like a bland "health food" version of the original. I also appreciate that the folks at ATK don't shy away from using stereotypical "unhealthy foods" (bacon, butter, etc.); they just cut back wherever possible and make substitutions when necessary.
I have a lot of cookbooks - you could almost say I am addicted to them, though I prefer the term "collector" ;) Anyway, very few of them are for the healthier side of life, simply because I have a husband who believes he is allergic to the word "healthy". We've been married for 14 years, and it's taken this long for him to accept that low-fat won't kill him, and that it isn't necessary to eat meat every. single. night. So I was really looking forward to trying this cookbook, figuring what he didn't know wouldn't hurt him - and then I could have the pleasure of "I told you so".
This book did not disappoint. Before I get into the recipes I tried, let me give you an overview of the book itself. The chapters are broken down into these categories:
Appetizers and Snacks
Salads, Sandwiches, and Pizza
The Soup Bowl
Classic Casseroles
Baked Not Fried
A Chicken in Every Pot
Favorites from Land and Sea
Pasta Night
On the Side
Breakfast and Brunch
Chocolate Desserts
Cookies and Bars
More Sweet Treats
Nutritional Information
Conversions and Equivalencies
There are between 8 and 18 recipes in each category. There are some meatless ones, but not a large amount so if that is what you're looking for, you're better off looking elsewhere or being comfortable converting.
As my personal policy, any time I review a cookbook, I have to make at least 3 different recipes within the cookbook and I have to follow the recipe to the letter. Hard to review something when I've changed it. Anyway...being as there are so many different sections, I also decided that each recipe I tested needed to come from a different section within the book, in order to get as wide a range as possible.
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