To varying degrees participants at November’s sixth annual Metropolitan Cooking and Entertaining Show in Washington had their own perspective on healthy cooking--or what constitutes less frequent indulgences in less healthy eating.
One of the trade show’s headliners, Guy Fieri, popular host of the Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, brought his high school age son Hunter to stress the desirability of having young people participate in cooking. A major part of sparking that interest is having them help in the food’s preparation, he said.
Stressing healthier preparing and watching ingredients
While he thinks parents should inform their children about healthy eating habits, at the cooking show Fieri did not specifically address any issues such as childhood obesity. Instead he urged everyone to get kids involved in cooking, with some reference to ingredients, as he and Hunter cooked macaroni and cheese together.
On that point Fieri asked his audience: “What’s a kid friendly recipe? Cinnamon rolls?” In his view, cooking for kids should entail a dish they’ll enjoy but doesn’t necessarily mean something with sweets.
Their mac and cheese recipe was made with flour and bacon fat as the base for the roux used to thicken the sauce, instead of with butter. Having a little moisture from the onions is okay, but a lot of moisture with flour added turns into making dumplings, Fieri said. “But the key here is you’ve got to cook the flour out.”
Because the shallots used in the dish can cook for a long time and have more strength than a regular onion, it is important not to overcook them. When the garlic in the mac and cheese starts to cook, you can start to get the aroma and then slowly temper the milk in, he pointed out.
His objective is to create a warm bath to start adding the cheese gradually but not at too high a temperature to avoid having a lump of cheese with a milky substance around it.
Rather than serving something with powdered orange cheese, Fieri urged feeding kids real mac and cheese with good cheddar and pepper jack cheese. His recipe used panko crumbs for the crunch on top rather than seasoned bread crumbs--to maintain the crispy taste longer.
Fieri thinks Italian bed crumbs are a little too fine and dense and clump a little too much. Panko crumbs are made from Japanese wheat bread which is dried slowly and then shredded into crispy flakes. He also added some bacon to the top.
On TV Fieri tends to go for high calories and fat
Fieri has been criticized for elements of his TV program--some have termed it a “popular carb porn show”--for often featuring and sampling himself high-calorie, high-fat food at locally known and sometimes family run eateries he visits around the United States.
Even while he’s emphasizing such cuisine as barbecue, smoked meat, hamburgers, deep fried food, steak, and regional or ethnic specialties, Fieri will demonstrate on TV how some establishments do use fresh ingredients or even employ culinary cooking methods.
One difference in seeing Fieri do an in-person presentation is the chance to hear him speak at length about food preparation without the constant music soundtrack heard on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives or the quick cutaways on the show during and between segments.
Aside from wanting the young to enjoy a sense of accomplishment from cooking, doing part of the work can highlight the wisdom for them of eating some dishes in moderation while still monitoring (through parents) what goes into the food, he said.
Besides mac and cheese, kids love cheese, crunch, crust, and gooey things, he added. Fieri recommends making pizza at home which is also included in his cookbook. “You don’t have to buy the packaged frozen pizza unless you buy the Guy Fieri dirty dough pizza which is available in stores,” he proclaimed.
One aspect of cooking he finds people frequently misunderstand is the use and sizes of specific kinds of salt, whether iodised, kosher, rock, or Himalayan pink salt. Using the wrong size of a tablespoon of one kind of salt can, in effect, double the amount. “[As a comparison] if you take Tortilla chips and crunch them all up and put them in a cup, it’s going to like be a third of a cup.”
Deen brings penchant for butter and frying
Paula Deen, who also appeared at the D.C. cooking show, is considered synonymous with generous amounts of butter in food and deep frying. She didn’t disappoint when she recommended to one woman in the audience to find a deep fryer for a Thanksgiving turkey.
While on stage she supervised the making of her grandmother’s pound cake and cooking of apple-stuffed pork tenderloin. The pound cake was made with three cups of flour, three cups of sugar, one cup of sour cream, two sticks of butter, six large eggs, and a teaspoon of vanilla.
The pork tenderloin recipe included sautéed peeled and chopped apples, an onion, and fresh sage leaves prepared in a large skillet for garnishing. Objecting that two tablespoons of butter seemed small for the dish, Deen said that thick-cut white bread cubes with the crusts removed should be prepared with butterflied pork loin roast in which stuffing is spooned down horizontally, pausing momentarily to ask the chef assisting her, “Did you rub your meat?”
Deen enticed her audience further with mention of what she called gooey gooey butter layer cake, made with cream cheese and powdered sugar, and an extension of a signature desert dish on the menu at her restaurant, the Lady & Sons, in Savannah, Georgia.
In one of her few concessions to less caloric fare, she said her son Bobby Deen, who runs the restaurant with his brother Jamie, both of whom prefer lighter version’s of their mother’s cooking, cut the calories in half with his own recipe for Krispy Kream bread pudding.
As a dish most people could eat, Deen suggested roasted chicken using Italian or American seasoning “If you want to make that chicken extra special you could stuff a beer can up its butt . . . and put you in the beer can a stalk of rosemary down in that beer and some thyme, you will flavor that bird inside and out.”
Cooking through retained heat and maintaining nutrients
Among some of the show’s vendors was more emphasis on the regular preparation of low-fat dishes and curtailing the use of oil and seasoning in cooking.
At one booth a representative of Americraft waterless cookware demonstrated cookware composed of several layers of steel, aluminum, and cast iron. It is wrapped in stainless steel to retain heat and cook food from all sides when the top is on to function as a mini oven. The purpose is to seal in moisture to cook vegetables and meat without adding any water or oil or seasoning, and not lose any nutrients through high heat or boiling.
The company offers a vegetable chopper--along with an electric skillet and slow cooker--to safely speed the preparation of salad, cole slaw, or stir fry and soup ingredients instead of clopping by knife or using a grater.
The salesman offered his listeners two dietary tips, aside from buying his company’s products: using red or green cabbage over lettuce in salads because both last longer, and washing the wax off cucumbers but leaving the skin on to retain the pectic enzyme to prevent indigestion. The reason is that cucumbers have been thought to trigger stomach acid linked to acid reflux and heartburn.
Source:
- Metropolitan Cooking and Entertaining Show, Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Washington, D.C., November 5, 2011
John Seidenberg - John Seidenberg has worked on newspapers, newsletters, radio news, and produced specialized news publications as well as freelance ...
