A Healthy Jam or Pickle.

The nice thing about traditional jam is that it is sweet, a mix of about 50% each of sugar and an almost infinite variety of fruit and fruit mixes.

Jam goes so well with toast, muffins and crumpets as well as cakes and biscuits.

The other good thing about jam is that it is a preserve and thus will be good for years. Now we have refrigerators we can do with out the sugar to make the jam keep.

The bad things about jam are the sugar content and the manner of its preparation wherein the fruit is cooked at great heat in the sugar and thus this annihilates any nutrition the undamaged fruit might offer.

What I propose is a washed fruit pulp mixed or gently blended with pectin and/or psyllium with lemon pulp and juice.

The pectin and the psyllium produces the set and the lemon juice and pulp a hefty compliment of tart.

I recently bought about half a kilogram of tamarind from our local Indian shop,  soaked it in about half as much water again to free up the pulp from the seeds and skin. Having removed the skin and seeds I gently blended it with the psyllium and lemon.

I decanted all of it into large size ice cube trays and popped it in the freezer.

I take a cube or so before I need it, let it defreeze and it's good for two or three days at least in a smallish lidded container.

I must say the tart of this tamarind version  is enough for it to be called a pickle and spread over cheese it’s just great.

Not the most convenient having to remember to defreeze some but no sugar and whatever fruit pulp you use it has not been irreparably damaged by heat.

The principle of this jam is choose your fruit, blend it’s pulp with lemon and psyllium and or pectin, freeze and use as necessary. You will find your own amounts but go easy on the psyllium in the beginning - dissolve it in the lemon juice or  a litte very hot water before adding to mix.

Play around using finely chopped onion, swedes, anything in fact to bulk out the volume if you want to make more of a chutney.

Make better bread

                 

Most of the bread in the supermarkets of the world is sadly high in gluten and starch and very low in fibre, effectively  making ‘the staff of life’ a very refined carbohydrate, much of it having a glycemic index close to that of sugar, and of course potentially diabetogenic and responsible for gut stasis, and gastrointestinal disease, including cancer.

If you make your own bread, not the lolly, loot or lucre kind for which you mustn’t get caught, but the kind which you can eat, and if you would like to bump up its fibre content, please make a comment below, I shall tell you what I have done and hopefully we shall get some dialogue going. Your involvement could contribute one day  to new standards for bread. I hope to hear from you.

The Trouble With Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Cooking chicken can be an art, keeping it tender and moist. The use of batter is a brilliant idea and it does this splendidly; and it this that has made it the winning recipe for KFC being so enticing and thus successful. It is the encasing completely of  every bit of surface in batter, and then deep frying it, sealing it so the juices don't escape into the cooking oil and which offers what will be that marvellous crunch as the diners break through that golden casing into hot moist chicken  that can't fail to please. The batter also offers a perfect way of flavouring the chicken underneath in any manner wished for so that variations in local taste can be made by just adding spices, herbs and smoky sauces and extra salt to get Cajun, Texan,New York etc.
   The deep frying and the batter tends to act a visual gloss over of the perhaps not so glamorous irregularities of chopped up chicken impossible to achieve easily in a fry pan.
The problem is this. The batter is burned flour laden with fat of from an undefined or indeterminate standard.
Repeated use of the oil has to be part of the economics of KFC to make it profitable.
So it is well to think on this as the default scenario. The fat is old, it has turned the batter, itself in its uncooked state being a slurry of refined carbohydrate, into what is probably an acrylamide spiked,and heat damaged product offering that so desired crunch..
Sadly much the same issues can be directed to fish and chips, bought from a fish shop, that is. In the old days beef dripping was used and I can remember seeing those big cookers at the back of the shop white first thing in the morning having gone solid being turned off overnight.
Now fish and chips are cooked in vegetable oil which I suspect is healthier than animal fat in the beginning but might deteriorate more quickly with prolonged and repeated heating.
If you need to have your chicken ( the pieces should be flattish or at least not too irregular ) or your fish battered do it at home not in your deep oil frier but in a fry pan with a minimal of fat and watch it carefully so it doesn't stick.
Sorry to be a spoil sport but one is just better without batter!

A simple and really safe way to sample food

While we are in the business of talking about safe food might I suggest keeping the following in mind when sampling food in the kitchen or anywhere for that matter.

Patently if there is a utensil at hand and one you don’t need to share, such as a spoon or fork, and which you can wash or discard afterwards, this is the answer.

But if you have one spoon and want many to taste think of the following: The back of the hand - this is of course washed as a matter of hygiene in many situations but as it's not prehensile it seldom has contact with the unsanitary or toxic situation - also this fact makes it easy to remember if that has not been the case.

Even at lavatory visit, unless one washes the basin  tap handle before turning it off, or wipes the handles of the toilet doors etc fomite connection to the fingertips is certain - whether infection will occur is another matter.

If you wash your hands properly, soaping at least to the wrist crease, the back of your hand is as a clean plate and perfectly nice to eat off.

Now in the kitchen, where tasting is often de rigueur, or in any  other tasting scenario,  a teaspoon or fraction thereof of the warm or cool food in question in the centre of the back of your hand is just fine and of course it can be carefully  licked clean in a second, without any slobbering, and be ready for as many tastings as you like. With care even runny food can be sampled. You must know that the sample is not hot as the skin on the back of the hand is very thin and sensitive, and burns there can be serious!

Mentioning  tasting while cooking, I see chefs sampling from teaspoons etc over or near food and so even this may not be as safe as careful application of what I have described.

As for accepting samples to try in other situations where there is limited or no utensils I think this is pretty foolproof.
Not having to use dirty fingers and worrying about having to clean them afterwards is something to think about!

The disgrace of the breadmakers

What I mean here is the continuance of a philosophy of bread making that is based on selling water and depleting the nation(s) of fibre. The capacity of the protein complex gluten to hold water works for the bread industry like water has for the pork industry. I can't speak exactly for the meat side of things but putting water into meat must mean making it heavier, or bigger or both., but with bread it changes the whole game of making money from bread. It does this by way of enabling the product to weigh heavier, the degree of rise  using less grain, the keeping and the shelf life being extended. The amount of fibre in the ordinary loaf is laughable and varies from 1.5 to 3.0% max.
Patently at the upper end of this will be boutique and specialist loaves where a range of grain, seed and even herb particulates are added and rarely this will push the fibre up to 5 or 6%.
   The spectrum of the effect of gluten is wide, from overt illness like coeliac disease to just being bloated. There is a mile on gluten on the web but to one aspect of it short it's a protein complex which challenges the immune system - this is something we all can do without - exhaustion of this system makes us vulnerable to infection and cancer. I am uncertain whether there is a straight line relationship between the amount we are exposed to and the body response but it would seem reasonable to think so, as absolute and immediate calamitous reactions are rare.
In the making of bread it is the gluten that gives the elasticity of the dough and which stabilises the fabric of the dough when cooked along with gelatinisation of the starch component.

Roast or Fried Food and the Wastefulness of Oven Cooking

There are many of reasons for using an oven and principally they centre around cooking food. Keeping food warm and warming plates and offering a warm place for yeast to act on bread and buns are others.

An oven is  a massive and mostly metal box with adjustable shelves which may or may not be open wired or closed.

The whole shebang requires a great deal of heat to raise to an appropriate temperature at which recipes provide a base-line.This heat and the heat that remains after the cooking is done is, most of the time, wasted and this is a serious drawback of ovens especially for heating prepared dishes which have been bought. The packaging almost 100% insists on the over being brought up to a certain high temperature and the waste here is even more marked because the heating up (and cooling down)  time occupies a large percentage of the total paid for. Obviously the cost of heating up is the real loss but in moderate and warm climates the cooling down cost is one involving the air conditioner.

So much would be oven cooking can be done in a fry pan with a lid or in a pot with a lid as in pot roast and can be done on a flicker of flame.

In the case of a pot roast the lid is usually a good fit and this means the heat is intense and will tend to quickly cook the meat shrinking it somewhat as the flesh contract and expresses the juices. If however the lid can be just raised a bit throughout the cooking the escaping moisture will dry the skin off a little and allow it to seal the meat and keep the juices in the flesh.

The same applies to using a pan and here I use a couple of chopsticks to raise the lid from the rim again allowing a drying effect rather than a wet stewing effect on the surface of the meat.

In a way we are trying to reduce the amount of energy used in an oven and I must admit it sometime difficult to get a really small flicker of flame from a gas ring and then I use a diffuser -  a perforated metal plate that sits under the pot or pan.

Quite often cooks will dust meat in a mixture of flour, herbs and spices and this in hot fat will quickly caramelise and produce a skin and then the heat can be really cut down. Also after dipping in flour like this the meat can be dipped in a batter again with salt and spices. Then the meat is put into a deep fryer where fat instantly seals the batter around the meat and the meat cooks through quickly and without losing its juices. This is the basis of Kentucky Fried Chicken and of course you can do this at home.  But I hope you won’t - because the batter hold a mass of fat even when the meat is cooked and sat to drain and this fat is typically bad for you having been heated many times and possibly in the first instance not being an upmarket or healthy fat - Repeatedly heated fat is really bad for you usually as it contains a lot of trans fats. Also it requires a lot of energy heating up the volume of fat needed for deep frying and that is what we are trying to avoid.

An overview of the way we find food in the world today

Almost certainly there is the world today enough food to feed every person healthily but as we know issues of distribution intrudes on this ideal. Perceptions of what is healthy from one country to another cloud this too and, within any country, notions of what is an acceptable standard affects the impression of the standard of life in that country.

In the UK there are food banks where poor people can supplement their food stocks. Even here people with wealth enough to not need these food banks abuse the system. Yet there are no standards which the outside observer can relate as to  what the poor get and what they need for good health.                    Tesco, a large supermarket here in the UK, periodically encourage their customers to donate from a list of items to a basket at the front door as they leave. Reasonably these are items that won’t rot, are easily opened and don’t necessarily need much in the way of heating or cooking - biscuits, tinned and packaged soups etc. Perhaps this in itself reflects the dire state that the recipients are in - maybe unable to cook or heat their food, or only have the strength to open a packet but maybe also the inadequate way we are brought up to understand how to fend for healthy survival.

This is the beginning of a discourse on what we ultimately want to achieve for the world in healthy nutrition.