Healthy Baking Alternatives

Jessica Cox, RD wrote . . . . . . .

According to the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a healthy diet limits the amount of calories people should consume from added sugars and saturated fat. Does that mean no desserts?

While many baked goods are a major source of both added sugars and saturated fat, dessert still can be an enjoyable part of a full and well-balanced eating pattern. Follow these tips for delicious baked goods with more healthy nutrients and less added sugar and saturated fat.

Watch Portion Size

Keeping portion sizes in check is a primary strategy for healthfully incorporating baked goods into a healthy eating pattern. Make portion control easier by preparing miniature desserts such as mini-cupcakes. Or cut brownies and sheet cakes into two-inch squares and portion cookie dough using a one-tablespoon scoop.

Ingredients Matter

Use high-quality ingredients for a more flavorful product that will satisfy cravings even with smaller portions. For example, use vanilla beans instead of extract, opt for high-quality chocolate and make sure your spices are fresh for the boldest flavor.

Incorporate Nutrient-Rich Ingredients

Instead of focusing on what to cut out, why not add something nutritious to your recipe?

Add a Fruit or Vegetable

Try adding shredded or pureed apple, carrot, banana and pumpkin to recipes to boost nutrients, flavor and moisture. For some recipes, you can use these ingredients to replace some or all of the butter or oil.

Try a Whole-Grain Flour

White whole-wheat flour can be substituted one-for-one for all-purpose flour in most recipes. You also can replace up to half the all-purpose flour in a recipe with a whole-grain flour without making any major adjustments to the recipe.

Experiment with Recipes That Use Less-Common Flours

Try experimenting with recipes such as savory pancakes and waffles that call for chickpea flour. Or try recipes with almond flour, which works well for crusts and can be incorporated into dough for a big punch of flavor and added nutrients.

Use Low-Fat Dairy Products

Use low-fat milk, low-fat buttermilk and low-fat yogurt in baking recipes to contribute protein and calcium. Consider swapping cream cheese frosting, which is high in calories and saturated fat and has minimal nutritional value, for a protein-rich frosting made from Greek yogurt.

Reduce Saturated Fat and Added Sugars

You can do this in a number of ways. For instance, try these modifications:

Swap Butter for Heart-Healthy Oil

When modifying a favorite recipe, you generally can trade some of the butter for a heart-healthy oil, such as canola oil. Don’t replace all of the butter with oil or you’ll sacrifice texture.

Simply Cut Sugar

As a general rule, you can reduce sugar in a given recipe by about 25 percent without noticeable differences. For instance, if a recipe calls for 4 tablespoons of sugar, reduce the amount to 3 tablespoons. When reducing sugar, you may need to increase the liquid in a recipe.

There is room for all foods, even baked goods, in a healthy eating pattern. Focus on occasionally enjoying small portions of your favorite treats and experiment with creating healthier versions of favorite recipes for more nutrients in each delicious bite.

Source: Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics


3, 2, 1 … Bake Off! The Mission To Make Bread In Space

Crumbs may seem harmless here on Earth, but they can be a hazard in microgravity — they could get in an astronaut’s eye, or get inhaled, causing someone to choke. Crumbs could even float into an electrical panel, burn up or cause a fire.

That’s part of the reason why it was a very big deal in 1965 when John Young pulled a corned beef sandwich out of his pocket as he was orbiting the earth with Gus Grissom.

“Where did that come from?” Grissom asked Young.

“I brought it with me,” Young said.

Young took a bite and then microgravity took over, spreading bread crumbs throughout the spacecraft.

Today, instead of bread, astronauts usually eat tortillas: They don’t crumble in the same way and they’re easy to hold with one hand as the astronaut floats about.

But for many Germans, tortillas just don’t cut it. So when a man named Sebastian Marcu heard that German Astronaut Alexander Gerst is returning to the International Space Station in 2018, that got him thinking: “Shouldn’t we do something to enable him to have fresh bread in space?”

Bread is a really big deal in Germany — there are thousands of variations of different kinds of bread there. To Marcu, a German astronaut in space without fresh bread seemed like a preventable problem.

Marcu was working in the space sector, and he and his friend, an engineer, started a company called Bake in Space in March 2017.

They’re partnered with the German Aerospace Center, which is basically Germany’s NASA. Their goal is to make an oven that can successfully bake dough on the International Space Station by 2018.

But there are a lot of obstacles that make baking in space difficult.

First, the oven needs to function on about a tenth of the power an oven here on earth does.

And it’s pretty much impossible to preheat the oven, because if it gets hot and then the door is opened, a giant hot air bubble could leave the oven and float into the spacecraft.

“It could just sit there in mid air and the astronauts could basically burn himself if he flies through it,” Marcu says.

Which is clearly not ideal.

Then there’s the problem of the dough — at low heat, bread has to bake for a longer period of time, but the longer it bakes, the drier it gets. And crumbling must be avoided at all costs because of the havoc bread wreaks in space.

Despite all the technical challenges, Marcu predicts that his company will be able to have Alexander Gerst bake the first loaf of sourdough in space next year.

“It’s not just about making one German astronaut happy with fresh bread,” Marcu explains. “There’s really a deeper meaning to bread in space.”

He says bread is ubiquitous. It’s made its way onto our dinner tables, into our religion, our slang. Breadwinner and dough stand for money, for well being, for quality of life. We break bread with strangers as a gesture of good faith.

“Well, it would definitely be a big symbol of peace to break bread with an alien life form I think,” he says.

But most importantly to Marcu, freshly baked bread in space will offer astronauts a little slice of home.

Source: npr

The “No-Knead Bread” Chef Now Has the Secret to Sourdough

Kate Krader wrote . . . . . .

How do you explain America’s ever increasing obsession with bread, even as the ranks of gluten-free adherents continue to expand?

Credit one pioneer in the world of artisanal bread: Jim Lahey. At his Sullivan Street Bakery, which began in a tiny storefront in Soho in New York in 1994, Lahey baked monumental loaves such as the long, oval, pane pugliese with a sturdy, almost-burnt crust and chewy, moist interior. Soon, he was supplying bread to prestige restaurants around the city, including Jean-Georges and the Spotted Pig, as well as to upscale markets like Dean & Deluca.

Since then, Lahey has embarked on a mission to empower home cooks to bake their own bread. Through the University of Bread seminars he teaches at his bakery headquarters in New York’s Hells Kitchen, the “no-knead” method he introduced more than a decade ago has become a sensation, turning an army of hobbyists into passionate bread makers. No-knead bread, as the saying suggests, is a loaf made with minimal ingredients and work; the only thing you need a lot of is time—at least 24 hours.

But Lahey’s no-knead bread has become a victim of its own success. “Everyone is an expert now; no one wants to take those no-knead classes,” he told me, referring to “They want to learn the next thing.”

That new thing? Sourdough bread, with its yeasty, lightly tangy flavor and buoyant crumb. If no-knead is the beginner loaf for home bread bakers, sourdough is firmly in the intermediate category. No-knead bread is made with pre-packaged bakers yeast, a fast fermentation that works fine, according to Lahey in his forthcoming The Sullivan Street Bakery Cookbook (W. W. Norton & Co., November 2017). “But it tends to preclude the development of more interesting flavor.”

Lacey continues: “If you are like me and want breads that are not merely predictable but awe-inspiring—with an open crumb and a bouquet of unbelievable flavors—then you’re going to need a different kind of fermentation, one that relies on a sourdough starter.” He prefers a liquid-y starter style mixture that he calls a ‘biga’ to help the dough ferment and rise.

In his upcoming book, Lahey devotes plenty of room to topics like “a beautiful fermentation,” and he counsels readers on how to make their own. (His secret ingredient is a kale leaf, which has natural yeast clinging to it.) It’s a three-day process at minimum and can often take up to five days just to get the starter started, plus a couple of additional days to let it refresh.

For those who like short cuts, though, there is good news: Excellent ready-made starters are out there. The venerable baking company King Arthur sells a very good one, and Sullivan Street expects to have its own commercial product by this summer. Your local bakery or passionate bread baking neighbor might also be persuaded to give you starter for your bread.

In this exclusive preview, here is Lahey’s sourdough bread recipe, adapted from the The Sullivan Street Bakery Cookbook, co-written with Maya Joseph. It takes four steps and, with a starter, can be done in about four hours.

The Ultimate Fast Sourdough

“Often I counsel patience when baking—so very often, the only secret to making a good bread better is to wait a bit longer, and let the flavors, fermentation, and rise develop, “writes Lahey in the book. “But as an impatient guy, and there are sometimes when I want to mix, bake, and eat a loaf not tomorrow, but today. Here is a recipe for those moments. It’s not instant bread, but it is faster bread. ”

Yield: One 9-inch round loaf.

Equipment: A 4½- to 5½-quart heavy pot with lid; a large piece of parchment paper.


100 grams prepared starter (such as King Arthur Classic Fresh Sourdough Starter)
200 grams (about 1 1/4 cups, plus 2 tablespoons) unbleached all-purpose flour
100 grams (about 2/3 cup) whole wheat flour
6 grams (about 1 teaspoon) fine sea salt
230 grams (about 1 cup, plus 1 tablespoon) 65ºF-70ºF water
Wheat bran, for dusting


1. In a large bowl, combine the white flour, wheat flour, and salt and whisk to combine. In a small bowl, whisk the starter and water until the starter is fully dissolved. Pour the starter mixture into the flour, and use a flexible spatula to quickly mix. Cover the bowl loosely with a clean kitchen towel, and let the dough sit at room temperature for 30 minutes.

2. Turn the dough, pulling it off the sides of the bowl and folding into the center as you turn; work it as little as possible. Cover loosely and let rest for 30 minutes before turning the dough again. After approximately 5 turns, or 2 ½ to 3 hours, the dough should be ready. (Don’t expect to see a big increase in size in this dough—by turning the dough every half-hour, you are doing what I call the lazy man’s version of kneading the dough—improving the texture without much effort.)

Note: How do you tell when it’s ready? You want it to get to the point where it is capable of holding a shape, and not ooze into a pancake when you shape it into a ball. It should be so interested in sticking to itself that it easily peels off the bowl when ready to shape.

3. Place a large piece of parchment paper on a sheet pan and cover with wheat bran, so that you can no longer see the paper. Transfer the dough to a lightly floured surface and form it loosely into a ball: hold it with both hands and gently tug the sides down and under, into the middle of the dough, to make a taut ball; don’t let the dough tear. Set the dough seam side down on the bran-coated paper. Dust the top of the dough lightly with more bran. Cover loosely with the towel and let it sit at room temperature until doubled in size, about 2 hours.

4. Preheat the oven to 500ºF (450ºF if your oven runs hot). Preheat a cast-iron ovenproof pot with tight-fitting lid, such as Le Creuset, in the oven. Carefully remove the lid and transfer the dough on the parchment into the pot. Use a serrated knife to score the loaf with a long slash, to allow the dough to expand. Cover the pot immediately and place the pot in the oven.

5. Bake the bread for 35 to 40 minutes with the lid on. Carefully remove the lid and tear off any excess parchment. Bake for another 10 to 15 minutes with the lid off, until the crust is a very, very dark brown. (I urge you to let the bread cook, uncovered, until the top of the bread nearly blackens and the sides reach a very, very, very dark brown.) Remove the loaf from the pot. Cool the loaf on a wire rack. The loaf will continue to cook as it cools, so try to wait an hour or so before cutting into it.

Source: Bloomberg

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