How To Make A Chinese Dish Low Calorie
If you're like a lot of people, you have an interest in eating healthy. Unfortunately, eating healthy and eating your favorite foods are not always in harmony. This is particularly true when talking about Chinese food, which is notoriously high in fat and calories when you order it in your favorite restaurant. This doesn't need to be the case, though. If you know a few basic tricks, you can learn how to transform high-calorie Chinese dishes into low calorie masterpieces.
By changing your techniques and making intelligent compromises, you can slash the amount of calories in your dish dramatically. For the purposes of this example, let's consider the popular dish called Sweet and Sour Chicken. If you order Sweet and Sour Chicken in a Chinese restaurant, you will get a plate full of deep fried chicken topped with a sweet, thick sauce. A typical serving of this dish can contain more than a thousand calories, or half a day's worth of food for one person. Most of the calories in this dish come from deep frying the chicken and from the sugar used in the sauce. To offset these extra calories, we can do a few things.
First of all, we need to eliminate the deep fried chicken element of the dish. Reducing the amount of oil in your food is very important because oil is very high in calories. One tablespoon of oil contains approximately 120 calories and when you deep fry things, they soak up oil in large amounts. If the cook is unskilled and fries at low temperatures, the food can absorb even more fat. One way to get rid of the extra oil is to turn to baking rather than deep frying. To do this, you will need to modify your recipe slightly. Most Sweet and Sour Chicken recipes call for dipping the chicken pieces into a batter and then deep frying. Instead of doing that, eliminate the batter and bread the chicken pieces with some Japanese panko bread crumbs. Once you have done that, put the pieces onto a baking sheet and give them a light spray with vegetable cooking spray, which contains less than 10 calories per spray. From there, place the chicken into the oven till it is golden brown. The final result will be chicken that has a crunchy exterior like the deep fried version but with a whole lot less fat and calories.
Next, you can lower the amount of calories in the dish by making wise decisions on what cut of meat that you use. In this example, you should opt for skinless chicken breasts rather than dark meat, which is higher in saturated fat and calories. If you're cooking other dishes, switch to leaner cuts of meat. In general, olej konopny cbd cena cuts of meat that are named "loin" (tenderloin, sirloin, etc) are lower in fat and thus in calories.
Another reason that Sweet and Sour Chicken is so high in calories is that its sauce contains an enormous amount of sugar. Sugar is high in calories and has no nutritional value. In order to slash the calories and the amount of sugar in your dish, switch to sugar substitutes like stevia or sucralose. These substitutes can be used like regular sugar but contain zero calories.
When you're looking to cut the calories out of your Chinese dishes, remember that the most important thing you can do is to reduce the amount of oil that you are using. If the recipe calls for deep frying, choose other methods of preparing the food like baking. Moreover, if the recipe calls for oil for stir frying, try to substitute the oil with cooking spray. In the end, by reducing the amount of oil and sugar in your cooking, you can transform an unhealthy dish into a healthy, low calorie Chinese meal.
