The Best Light Recipe (The Best Recipe)
Let’s face it. In America’s Test Kitchen our goal has always been clear: develop the best recipe possible. Only rarely have we stopped to consider the fat or calorie content of the food we make …until now.The Best Light Recipe is different. In response to the increasing interest from our readers to shed the same obsessive attention the right ingredients and techniques for the guaranteed foolproof recipe for lighter foods, we are pleased to offer more than 300 guaranteed foolproof full-flavored, lower fat and reduced-calorie recipes, 95% of which are completely new! Each recipe lists calories, fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, protein, fiber and sodium per serving to help you cook smart.
From chunky guacamole to brownies, from macaroni and cheese, lasagna, and spaghetti and meatballs to blueberry muffins and even chocolate cake and cheesecake, we tested and retested our favorite recipes until we arrived at the best recipes that cut calories and fat without sacrificing flavor. We also recognized that we couldn’t do the impossible- so if we weren’t satisfied with the results in our kitchen, the recipe didn’t make it into the book. Nor did we include recipes that relied on smoke and mirrors to reduce fat and calories, like beef stew with only a forkful of beef or cookies the size of quarters.
The Best Light Recipe, packed with more than 100 illustrations and 16 pages of full-color photos, also includes naturally healthy recipes tweaked to be even lighter and healthier, like gazpacho, poached salmon, stir-fry chicken, grilled tuna burgers, and pan-roasted asparagus. And the healthy techniques you’ll learn, including using milk and cornstarch instead of cream and butter to make a simple pan sauce (trust us, it really works), or reserving the good olive oil to lightly drizzle on your pasta before serving (when you use less and get the most flavor), will last over a lifetime of healthy cooking.
The Best Light Recipe also features objective equipment ratings and ingredient tastings, from the best muffin tin and Dutch oven to the best soy sauce and chicken broth, as well as illustrated tips and techniques, from slicing flank steak for stir fries, to creating the best deep-fried crust without actually frying. In short, it is your essential guide to lighter, great-tasting recipes that deliver every time.
From the Inside Flap
A light recipe you make only once isn’t very helpful. Tofu lasagna and brownies made with prune puree might sound interesting, but one taste and you’ll likely go back to your favorite high-fat recipe. Eating sensibly is a more reasonable plan. But night after night of plain broiled chicken breasts and steamed brown rice is not very appealing either. No wonder most cooks stick with the recipes they know—that work and taste great—fat and calories be damned. At America’s Test Kitchen, we think food should taste good. Otherwise, what’s the point? Before starting this book, our goal was simple: Develop lighter recipes that we’d actually want to serve in our homes. We readily admit that we are not experts on diet or health, but our test kitchen knows how to make good food. After testing thousands of recipes, here’s what we learned. A lot of "light" recipes are shockingly bad. Gimmicks (like cookies so small they’re gone in a single bite), odd ingredients (many nonfat dairy products are so awful they will ruin otherwise decent recipes), and flawed techniques (chicken sautéed in cooking spray scorches easily) are the rule, not the exception. In general, we found that successful light cooking often requires new cooking methods in order to produce workable recipes that anyone would want to make more than once. Do you like the flavor and crunch of fried foods, such as eggplant Parmesan and fried chicken, but not all the fat and calories? We came up with a novel method for putting a crisp coating on foods: First, toast the bread crumbs in a bit of oil in a hot skillet before using them to coat the food; second, bake the breaded food on a wire rack set over a baking sheet so that it becomes crisp all over. Using this technique, we removed half the fat from these recipes without compromising their crispy, crunchy appeal. How do restaurant chefs make sauces taste so good? Butter and cream are the easy answers. But we found that when napping a seared chicken cutlet in a sauce you can make something almost as good by replacing the butter with light cream cheese and the cream with milk. Sounds suspicious, but our tasters had a hard time telling the difference between the original and our lightened version. Desserts presented the biggest challenge for our test kitchen. We weren’t willing to settle for some facsimile of cheesecake or to forgo the richness of a traditional brownie or chocolate Bundt cake. For us to deem a recipe successful, it had to come close to the real deal. In fact, after developing many of these recipes, we organized a tasting in which we pitted our recipes against full-fat versions and other low-fat versions. The result? Some of our most experienced tasters thought our light versions were full fat. In our chocolate desserts, we found ways to cut the fat by replacing some of the chocolate with cocoa powder (which has very little fat) and then blooming the cocoa in hot water to release its full flavor. To make our creamy, silky New York cheesecake (pictured on the front cover), we used a combination of yogurt cheese, low-fat cottage cheese, and light cream cheese and fooled everyone on our tasting panel. But we did have some failures. Our attempts to remove substantial amounts of fat from pie crust failed. Sometimes there is just no substitute for butter. Rather than offering a disappointing light recipe for pie crust, we’ve simply left this recipe out of the book. In such cases, our philosophy is, make the real thing or do without. In The Best Light Recipe, you’ll be able to chart our progress, recipe by recipe, as we describe everything we tried and explain what worked and what didn’t. Core technique boxes such as "Sweat Vegetables and Slash Fat" and "Give It Some Juice, and Reduce" will give you ideas for cooking healthier for a lifetime, while no-nonsense ingredient boxes give you the lowdown on that confusing array of low-fat, no-fat, and "lite" products, from "reduced-fat" mayonnaise to "light" peanut butter to "fat-free" cheddar cheese. Best of all, this book gives you 300 foolproof light recipes that won’t let you down. Whether you want to eat light from time to time, or every day, you needn’t skimp on flavor ever again.
Founded in 1980, Cook’s Illustrated magazine is renowned for its near-obsessive dedication to finding the best methods of American home cooking. The editors of Cook’s Illustrated are also the authors of a best-selling series of cookbooks (The Best Recipe series) and a series of companion books to the America’s Test Kitchen public television show (which reaches 2.9 million viewers per episode). Filmed in America’s Test Kitchen (a 2,500-square-foot test kitchen in Brookline, Massachusetts), the show features editors, test cooks, equipment testers, science experts, and food tasters from the magazine’s staff.
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