saturated fat

Cheddar-garlic Biscuits: In Defense of Garlic Powder

Posted by Margot | Filed under:
Mar 8 2010

Lobster not included 

I have been carefully trained to look upon garlic powder with great disdain.

—S.J. Sebellin-Ross

At the third Ann Arbor Ignite last Thursday, the audience cheered and applauded when the last speaker exhorted us to use fresh garlic instead of dried or powdered (about 41:40 here). And sure, in a recipe like the bolognese he was describing, I’d probably use fresh garlic, too, but that’s hardly a reason to cheer. The crowd’s reaction instead seemed symptomatic of the emblematic status fresh garlic has achieved. Its superiority has become one of the central commandments of the “food revolution,” and no wonder, it hits all the right notes: seems more “natural” and more “authentic,” supposedly better-tasting, and possibly healthier (although, as that site notes, it’s possible to dehydrate garlic without deactivating the enzymes with therapeutic value, which cooking can destroy). It also has the added bonus of a built-in villain in the form of its dehydrated, powdered counterpart, which for many people is associated with the industrial food system, bland mid-century midwestern cooking, and laziness.if you're afraid of losing foodie cred, click on the picture for instructions on how to make your own powdered garlic (assuming you have a dehydrator) from The Deliberate Agrarian

But aside from being slightly more convenient for busy or novice cooks, garlic powder really works better for numerous applications—it dissolves in dips and gravies, it keeps dry rubs dry, and it can be sprinkled to taste on popcorn or pizza or whisked into the dry ingredients of any bread recipe. Instead of thinking of it as a bad substitute for the fresh stuff, I prefer to think of it as a pedestrian version of the powders made by bleeding-edge chefs like Alinea’s Grant Achatz and WD-50’s Wylie Dufresne. Sure, they often taste different than the non-powdered versions, but they open up a whole array of different uses. Of course, you could make biscuits with a garlic-infused fat or stud the dough with chunks of raw or roasted garlic, but neither of those options is going to give you the same intensity of flavor or evenness of distribution as garlic powder. And these biscuits definitely challenge the notion that powdered garlic can’t be delicious.

Most recipes for cheddar-garlic biscuits, even Paula Deen’s, simply suggest adding garlic powder and grated cheddar to a baking mix like Bisquick. That would probably be pretty good too, but I don’t have enough uses for Bisquick to keep it around (especially given that rumors about toxic molds developing in expired pancake and biscuit mixes turn out to be true, if somewhat overblown). So instead, I added garlic powder and grated cheddar to the recipe I use for rich, buttery biscuits. The recipe has a higher proportion of fat : flour than most baking powder biscuit recipes, so it makes biscuits that are rich enough to eat plain (and too rich to make a very good vehicle for gravy or butter). Whatever fat you use, it must be solid so chunks of it will remain in the dough. Those chunks melt during baking to create the flaky layers. Lard or shortening work slightly better than butter or margarine because they don’t contain water. However, butter is delicious, so I used half butter and half lard. If you don’t eat butter or lard, margarine or vegetable oil shortening should work equally well (although if you’re avoiding trans-fats, you should stick to ones composed largely of palm oil or produced by fractionation).

Recipe: Cheddar-garlic Biscuitsfats cut into pieces before chilling

  • 1/2 cup solid fat—I used 4 T. butter and 4 T. lard
  • 9 oz. all-purpose or cake flour (about 2 cups)—I used bread flour with 2 T. replaced by cornstarch
  • 2 1/2 t. baking powder
  • 1/2 t. baking soda
  • 1 t. kosher salt
  • 1 pinch sugar
  • 1 1/2 t. powdered garlic
  • 1 T. dried parsley and/or chives (optional)
  • 4 oz. grated sharp cheddar (about 1 cup)
  • 3/4 cup buttermilk (or regular milk soured with 1 T. lemon juice)
  • extra flour for dusting
  • extra milk for brushing biscuit tops

1. Preheat the oven to 500F. Cut the fat into pieces and chill while you prep the remaining ingredients.

2. Whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, sugar, garlic, and herbs if using.

3. Toss the chilled pieces of fat with the flour and and combine them with a pastry cutter, crisscrossing knives, a food processor, or your bare hands—just don't melt the bits of fat. You want the largest pieces of fat to be about the size of small peas.

Criss-crossing knives = less dishwashing even if it takes a little longer than the food processor. My hands tend to be too warm for the bare hands method. Just a minute or two later: big chunks of fat remaining, but fat relatively well distributed throughout the flour

4. Mix in the grated cheddar and the buttermilk or milk. Stir just until most of the flour is moistened—you don’t want gluten to form so the goal is to handle the dough as little as possible once you’ve combined the wet and dry ingredients.

the sharper the cutter, the less it will squish the edges, which can prevent rising brushing with milk isn't strictly necessary, but it does promote nice browning

5. Dust a table or countertop with flour, dump the dough onto it and press or knead together just enough to form a dough. Flatten the dough to between 1/2” and 1” thick and cut desired shapes—if you don’t have a biscuit cutter, a glass or empty jar will work, or you can just cut the dough into squares or triangles.

6. Place on an baking sheet (ungreased) and brush the tops with buttermilk. Place in preheated oven, and reduce the oven temperature to 450F and bake for 7 minutes. Rotate the baking sheet and bake another 5-7 minutes, or until the biscuits are golden brown.

neglected, sprouting rutabega in the background warm, garlicky, cheese-studded biscuits. kind of hard to beat.

Things That Might Kill You Volume 1: Trans-fats

Posted by Margot | Filed under:
Feb 10 2010

Trans-fats have been in the news sporadically in recent years, thanks largely to the bans passed by the New York City Health Department and the Indiana State Fair. Even consumers who don’t read the news have undoubtedly become familiar with the term because of food manufacturers labeling their products “0 Trans Fats!” (often with a small-print “per serving” which usually means there are trans fats in the product, just less than .5 g per serving) or “Trans-fat free!” whether or not they ever contained trans-fats in the first place.

from Ritz 100 calorie packs: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_QEJr8TD2el0/Sgh4AvvhknI/AAAAAAAAACw/6Ljvrf8r5hU/s1600-h/transfat4.jpg from http://fastfood.freedomblogging.com/2008/07/30/is-fast-food-complying-to-the-new-california-trans-fat-ban/just don't ask them about their msg content

But there still seems to be considerable confusion about what trans-fats are and why they might be bad for your health, which has likely been complicated by the long, stupid demonization of fats qua fats and saturated fats as a supposed cause of high cholesterol and heart disease.

Trans-fats are trans isomers of fatty acids, and although they occur naturally in small amounts in meat and dairy products from ruminants like cows and goats (in the form of vaccenic acid), the primary source of trans-fats in most Americans’ diets is hydrogenated vegetable oils. Most vegetable oils are composed primarily of unsaturated fats, which tend to be liquid at room temperature. criscoIn the early 20th Century, when the U.S. started importing soybeans as a source of cheap protein, soybean oil became readily available as a byproduct and was far cheaper than butter or lard. However, liquid and unsaturated fats get rancid much more quickly than solid fats, have a lower smoke point, and were unsuited to many American culinary traditions—biscuits and pastry crusts or all “short breads”* absolutely depend on solid fats to create their flaky texture, as explained in the note at the end.

Hydrogenation, a process first developed by French and German chemists around the turn of the century,  provided the solution: heating the liquid, unsaturated fats in the presence of hydrogen turned them into solids at room-temperature. Apparently, cottonseed oil was also far cheaper than the beef tallow used in candles, so that one of the first uses of hydrogenated oils. It took a little marketing work to convince people it was also good eating--the major campaign for years was “Use Crisco, it’s digestible!” (okay, actually that probably just reflected the central nutritional concerns of the early 20th C: indigestion and dispepsia, see Hillel Schwartz’s Never Statisfied.

from a 1915 Saturday Evening Post advertisement, see the whole thing at http://freetheanimal.com/2009/05/know-your-fats.html

However, the process of hydrogenation also creates trans fats, and a different kind from the ones present in beef and dairy products. Unlike saturated fats, trans-fats produced through hydrogenation have been repeatedly correlated with coronary heart disease, including fatal heart attacks, in large, long-term epidemiological studies, including the Framingham Study. A review article on the available research on the relationship between dietary fat and coronary heart disease (CHD) published this past September concluded:

According to the classic ‘diet-heart’ hypothesis, high intake of SFAs [saturated fatty acids] and cholesterol and low intake of PUFAs [poly-unsaturated fatty acids] increase serum cholesterol levels and risk of CHD. However, few within-population studies have been able to demonstrate consistent associations with any specific dietary lipids, with the exception of trans fats and n–3 fatty acids.

In other words, everything you've heard in the last decade about trans fats (bad) and omega-3s (good) actually seems to be supported by the available research, unlike everything you've been told for the last five decades about saturated fats.

However, many of the claims about the threat posed by trans-fats allege that trans-fats raise LDL levels. And it's not at all clear to me that anyone should be concerned about the fact that trans fats might be associated with increased cholesterol, even "bad" cholesterol, for reasons I discuss in the second entry on saturated fat. The only thing makes me think trans fats might actually be bad for people's health is the consistent, strong association between trans fat consumption and increased risk of CVD and myocardial infarction. I know correlation =/= causation, and I haven’t found any good evidence about a proposed mechanism. On the basis of the current evidence, it seems like there’s a difference between the naturally-occurring trans-fats and the ones produced by hydrogenation:

The association was only seen for for trans fatty isomers from hydrogenated vegetable oils. The mainly different trans isomers from ruminant fats did not show such an association. A case-control study in 239 people suffering an acute myocardial infarction found that after adjustment for age, sex and energy intake, intake of trans fatty acids was directly related to risk of myocardial infarction [241]. Those with the highest intake of trans fatty acids had twice the risk of myocardial infarction as those with the lowest intakes after adjusting for other cardiovascular risk factors. As with the Nurses Health Study, the association was only seen for trans isomers from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. (from a 1995 lit review in the British Food Journal)

Is that because the hydrogenated oils contain linoleic acid, and meat and milk with naturally-occurring trans-fats don’t? I don’t know. I think the most interesting finding from Harvard's Nurse's Health Study, which is one of the studies that did show a weak but significant correlation between saturated fat consumption and CVD, is that the consumption of trans fats was associated with a much higher incidence of CVD than saturated fats. That finding, which is nearly two decades old, should probably be pretty infuriating to anyone who’s eaten hydrogenated-vegetable-oil margarine or shortening in the last two decades because it was supposedly a “healthier” alternative to butter or lard. Similar findings in several other studies prompted the more recent review article to conclude:

The observational evidence that TFA are independently associated with increased risk of CHD events is convincing, though based on a more limited body of evidence.

However:

There is probably no direct relation between total fat intake and risk of CHD.

So the persistent recommendation from public health and nutrition authorities to reduce total fat consumption? Not supported by the available evidence. But the reason this isn’t a  "things that won't kill you" entry is because, well, trans-fats might.

What it means for how I eat

The short version: lard before margarine or shortening, except when the lard is shelf-stable or the margarine/shortening is produced using fractionation and palm oil.Read more

Things That Won't Kill You Volume 4: Saturated Fat Part II: Cholesterol Myths

Posted by Margot | Filed under:
Feb 5 2010

image In retrospect, this probably could have been an entirely separate article in the "things that won't kill you" series, as many people still believe that dietary cholesterol (i.e. cholesterol in food) is a bad thing. For example, the article that image was taken from claims:

If you get too much dietary cholesterol (over 300mg a day) the extra cholesterol will accumulate in the walls of the blood vessels, making your LDL (bad) blood cholesterol levels rise. Over time, your arteries will become narrower, which can cut off the blood supply to your heart (causing a heart attack), or your brain (causing a stroke).

However, that's pretty easily dismissed—even Ancel Keys, "Monsieur Cholesterol" himself, never argued that dietary cholesterol was related to serum cholesterol or heart disease. In a 1952 article in Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, Keys noted that although rabbits and chickens that eat high-cholesterol diets will develop high cholesterol and atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries:

No animal species close to man in metabolic habitus has been shown to be susceptible to the induction of atherosclerosis by cholesterol feeding…. Moreover, even in the favorite species for such  experimentation, the herbivorous rabbit, the necessary concentration of cholesterol in the diet is fantastically high in comparison with actual human diets. Moreover, there is reason to believe that man has a greater power of cholesterol regulation than does the rabbit or the chicken. From the animal experiments alone the most reasonable conclusion would be that the cholesterol content of human diets is unimportant in human atherosclerosis.

Two "moreovers" in one paragraph, people! “Most reasonable conclusion”! Moreover, five decades of subsequent research haven't given anyone any reason to think differently. In 1997, Keys was even more direct:

There’s no connection whatsoever between cholesterol in food and cholesterol in blood. And we’ve known that all along. Cholesterol in the diet doesn’t matter unless you happen to be a chicken or a rabbit.

Research done in the interim on the relationship between diet and heart disease in humans like the Framingham and Tecumseh studies showed no relationship between cholesterol consumption and blood cholesterol or heart disease. I'm not even going to modify this with "probably" or "as far as we know": There is no reason to believe that how much cholesterol you eat has any effect on your health.

But that doesn’t stop the AHA from recommending that “most people…limit cholesterol intake to less than 300 mg per day” and claiming that “an egg can fit within heart-healthy guidelines for those people only if cholesterol from other sources — such as meats, poultry and dairy products — is limited.” Despite repeated studies showing that egg consumption is not associated with higher serum cholesterol, myocardial infarction, cardiovascular disease, or all-cause mortality.Read more

Things That Won't Kill You Volume 4: Saturated Fat, Part I

Posted by Margot | Filed under:
Dec 14 2009

I know this is misleading because lard is mostly unsaturated, but it's been one of the major icons of "bad" fat and also, how graet is this image? from http://www.npnworldwide.com/lard

This is probably going to be an even harder sell than MSG, but I swear I'm not just trying to be contrary. It's true that all the major sources of public health and nutrition advice, including the Harvard School of Public Health, Mayo Clinic, CDC, and American Heart Association continue to refer to saturated fats as "bad fats" and suggest that people avoid them as much as possible, limit them to <7-8% of their total caloric intake, and replace them with "good," i.e. unsaturated fats, whenever possible. It's also true that there are a few studies that suggest that increased saturated fat consumption is correlated (albeit weakly) with cardiovascular disease (CVD).

However, many other studies have found no increase in CVD associated with saturated fat consumption. And several recent review articles have concluded that the evidence for a connection between saturated fat consumption and CVD is inconsistent, insufficient or nonexistent.

There are basically three things that have convinced me that saturated fat isn't independently responsible for heart disease or death:

1) groups of people who eat vastly more saturated fat than most Americans frequently have lower rates of CVD—or no apparent CVD at all

2) the study that first inspired many people to think saturated fat was a bad thing had a lot of obvious flaws and has been thoroughly discredited

3) there's no good evidence that the proposed mechanism actually works—briefly: saturated fat supposedly causes heart disease by raising serum cholesterol levels because cholesterol is what clogs arteries and causes heart attacks and strokes, but serum cholesterol turns out to be a really poor predictor of CVD 

1) The French (and Polynesian and Melanesian and Masai and Fulani and Sri Lankan) Paradox 

photo by Arun Ganesh http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:PlaneMadThe most confounding phenomenon for the theory that saturated fat consumption causes heart disease (sometimes called the lipid hypothesis or lipid-heart hypothesis or diet-heart hypothesis) is the virtual non-existence of CVD in multiple populations that eat way more saturated fat than most Americans. This has primarily been documented in the Pacific islands where coconuts, which are very high in saturated fat, are a staple food. For example, before the 1970s, the inhabitants of the island Tokelau got an estimated 55% of their calories from saturated fat, but heart disease was virtually unknown (according to Gary Taubes and Stephen Guyenet; notably, since their diet has shifted to include less saturated fat but more sugars and refined carbohydrates, many health indicators have worsened). Read more