Cooking with Fats (oils)

scarlett3257
scarlett3257 Posts: 1 Member
in Food and Nutrition
My boyfriend and I cook at home all the time (he assumes homecooked = healthy) but then he uses butter, olive oil or canola oil for EVERYTHING and it adds up!! I need a substitute that we can cook with.

What do you all suggest for sauteeing, roasting etc?
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Answers

  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,943 Member
    Any pure fat comes in at 9 calories per 1gr. Thus it doesn't matter whether you use various oils or butter. But neither of these is bad for you. Especially olive oil is super healthy. But yeah, oil contains a lot of calories. The only solution is to use less.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,216 Member
    I just use a minimum amount of oil, or choose cooking methods that minimize the need for oil.

    When I started losing weight, I was surprised at how little oil I needed to fry or roast something, if I experimented with it, rather than just gooping everything up with generous pours of it. Some people use non-stick pans, but I use well-seasoned cast iron, and rarely need more than a few grams of oil to get the job done. For roasting vegetables and that sort of thing, IME spraying with a good oil can result in less oil than tossing the food in a bowl or bag with oil.

    (Don't believe commercial spray oils when they say a spray is zero calories, implying something that isn't true. Put the spray on a food scale, tare/zero, spray however much oil you want to use, then put the sprayer back on the scale: The negative number of grams is the amount you used.)

    I'm not a fan of boiling or steaming everything, but it is possible to stir-steam veggies in a bit of broth or soy sauce or whatever, rather than stir-frying them.
  • neanderthin
    neanderthin Posts: 10,220 Member
    edited February 3
    Health and calories are not the same thing. One (food) has mass and effects our metabolism and health while the other (calories) doesn't have any mass and is just a unit of heat, period. Healthy people will have consumptions of fat that encompass the whole spectrum. It's basically reductionist thinking and dogma that pits one against the other, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Personally I use mostly animal fats for cooking as well as olive oil, coconut oil as well as using nuts and seeds mostly to keep my omega balance in check. Basically it's excess food intake that is problematic and home cook foods if using whole foods is going in the right healthy direction, imo, just don't overeat.
  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 10,092 Member
    yirara wrote: »
    Any pure fat comes in at 9 calories per 1gr. Thus it doesn't matter whether you use various oils or butter. But neither of these is bad for you. Especially olive oil is super healthy. But yeah, oil contains a lot of calories. The only solution is to use less.

    Butter is not a pure fat. It has water, so the calories by weight or volume are not the same as oil (roughly 100 calories for 14 grams of butter compared to roughly 130 calories for 14 grams of oil). I suspect that effectively that doesn't matter, because if you're using it to cook in, what you need is the fat, and will likely need more butter to get sufficient fat for what you're trying to accomplish. Also, it has a lower smoke point than most (probably all) oils, so unless you're looking specifically for the taste of butter, or cooking something at a pretty low temperature, like eggs, you might as well use oil.'

    OP, if you want to cut calories from added fat, you need to shift to cooking methods that don't require fat (e.g., raw, steaming, stewing, boiling, poaching, grilling, braising, and possibly roasting, although some veggies don't do so great being roasted without at least a little fat.

    Your body needs fat, so if you try to eliminate it from your cooking methods, you may need to think about where you're going to get it from (avocados, olives, nuts, seeds, eggs, dairy, meat, poultry, fish -- although some cuts of meat and poultry and some species of fish don't have a lot of fat, and some don't have much of the essential fatty acids your body can't make itself).
  • SafariGalNYC
    SafariGalNYC Posts: 1,469 Member
    edited February 4
    When I was cutting my calories, I had to omit some of the olive oil for cooking. I’ve always been an EVOO enthusiast and yeah, the calories add up.. 120 per tablespoon of oil.

    I started baking more, roasting, steaming, poaching, parboiling, working with sous vide.

    There is a whole world of cooking that can happen at home that doesn’t involve oil.

    I’ve continued with some of the alternate methods of cooking.. saves me a few hundred calories per week.

    I roast veggies in oven on cast iron. Instead of frying fish, I bake it or poach it.

    I have one stoneware pan that I use for stir fry’s that is more nonstick.. helps use less oil.

    I also use broth on the bottom of pan with aromatics instead of oil. It helps..
  • cey2022
    cey2022 Posts: 4 Member
    I agree with lynn_glenmont that I have learned to steam most all of the foods I would've fried....mostly because I'd rather EAT my fats than cook with them. I eat ovo-lacto veg and prefer avocado, nuts, seeds, and olives, so eliminating/reducing cooking fats gives me balance. Choosing to eat my fats also fills me up nicely.

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