Cooking with Fats
Fats are an important part of cuisine. They carry flavor throughout a recipe, bind and emulsify ingredients, and of course, add flavor. The key to healthy cooking is knowing which fats to use.
Oils
Oil is an essential part of a salad. Without oil, the dressing would slip off the lettuce, and pool at the bottom of the bowl. Just think about the way oil feels when it gets on your hands. Oil spreads flavor throughout a recipe like it spreads on your hands. You need it in recipes, but you don’t need that much.
Whenever possible, use mainly monounsaturated oils, which contribute to high-density lipoproteins. Olive and peanut oils are good choices. They have fairly distinctive flavors, and can easily overpower a dish, so use a light hand. If a neutral oil is called for, canola is a good monounsaturated choice.
Alert
Labels are allowed to read “0 grams” trans fat when there is 0.5 of a gram or less. This means that eating more than one serving can quickly add 1 gram or more of trans fat. It is best to generally limit, if not eliminate, all foods that contain partially hydrogenated oil.
Fats
Like oil, fats are added to recipes to tenderize, moisten, and prolong shelf life. Because they change their consistency when heated, the temperature indicated in the recipe is important.
The most frequent fat used for baking is butter. Unsalted butter is preferred by most bakers and chefs for its superior flavor. The lack of salt gives the cook control over the amount of salt in a recipe.
Salted butter can always be detected, as it makes the dish saltier than necessary. If you have no choice but to use salted butter, you should omit the salt from the recipe.
Fact
The USDA suggests that you consume no more than 7 teaspoons of fat and oil each day. This includes not just the added butter on your baked potato, but also the fats and oils found naturally in foods and those added to prepared foods.
Margarine is never a good choice. Its flavor is inferior, and because it is typically a trans fat, it is an unhealthy food. Also, its higher melting point leaves behind an unpleasant aftertaste. Because vegetable fats do not melt at body temperatures, as animal fats do, margarine coats the tongue, and lingers on the palate long after the food is swallowed.
Butter, although a saturated animal-based fat, is preferable to margarine in maintaining a healthy diet. However, problems occur with any saturated fats when eaten in excess. They are the healthier alternative but should be eaten in moderation, as all fats should be.
Lard is less popular than in the past, but it is often preferred by bakers, especially in pie dough. It creates a superior flakiness that cannot be achieved with butter or shortening, and because it is an animal product, it leaves behind no unpleasant aftertaste. Like butter, lard is preferable to margarine. It is generally rendered from pork, although in other parts of the world it is made from other animal fats too.
