Healthy Cooking: A Guide to Recipe Substitutions
Everyone has a recipe or meal that is a favorite. Unfortunately, sometimes those foods do nothing to help your heart or your waistline. Recipe substitutions can help you enjoy your favorite foods while decreasing the amount of fat, sugar, salt, and calories. When changing your recipes, you may want to eliminate, reduce, or replace.
Eliminate
When you look at your favorite recipe, ask yourself, “which of these ingredients is essential?” For example, salting or adding fat to water before cooking pasta, rice, or vegetables is not essential to the finished product. Try to identify any ingredients that can be left out or substituted without affecting the food.
Reduce
Sometimes you can reduce the amount of fat, sugar and salt in a recipe without affecting taste and texture. For example, you can sauté vegetables or meat in cooking spray in a non-stick pan instead of using oil. You can decrease the salt in baked goods by at least half without affecting the final product, and fat can often be decreased by at least one-third without affecting taste or texture.
Replace
Try substituting a more healthful ingredient for one that is higher in fat and salt. For example, you can use canned vegetables with no salt added in place of regular canned vegetables, and use fat-free or “light” versions of sour cream and cream cheese in most recipes. When seasoning your foods, try using low-salt or salt-free seasonings, lemon juice, vinegar, and herbs. When you are making baked goods, you can often substitute applesauce or prune puree for at least one-half of the fat.
Here are some more ideas to replace fat, sugar, and salt in your favorite recipes:
| Instead of this: | Try this: |
| Sour cream | Fat free or light sour cream Plain yogurt |
| Heavy cream | Fat-free evaporated milk |
| Fat in baked goods | Applesauce or prune puree for ½ of fat in recipe |
| Salt at table | Salt-free seasonings Lemon juice Dried and fresh herbs |
| Cream cheese | Fat free cream cheese or “light” cream cheese (Neufchatel) |
| Salad dressing | Fat free or reduced fat salad dressings |
| 1 cup sugar | ½ cup sugar + ½ cup Splenda® |
| Canned vegetables | Canned vegetables with no salt added |
| Chicken broth | Fat-free low sodium chicken broth |