How To Find Low Fat Alternatives

By Laurie • Aug 20th, 2008 • Category: Healthy Eating, Today's Kitchen

Finding low fat alternatives to your favorite dishes can be difficult to do especially if they are dishes that are designed to have fat in them. There are a few things however that you can do to still enjoy the foods you love without adding additional fat to your diet. The first thing that you need to consider is the ingredients of your dish.

Pick a favorite dish and sit down and look at the ingredients for example let us say beef stroganoff which is a dish done with unions, and beef in a cream sauce which is then placed over noodles. Sounds good but it has a huge content of fat so usually is wiped off a low fat diet. However with a few modifications even this dish can be made into a low fat alternative.

The first thing to do is look at the beef. You can do this dish with either ground beef or with chunked beef. If you are using ground beef choose ground sirloin instead of ground chuck or regular ground beef. You will want something that is 80/20 or higher. 80/20 refers to the ratio of fat 80% fat free in this case. If you are using chunked beef, then choose a cut of beef that is lean you can even use stew beef since this is usually a lean cut of meat. If you are using stew meat be sure to tenderize it to avoid toughness.

Next look at the sauce it is usually made with things like sour cream and creamed soup. Choose non fat sour cream instead of regular sour cream and a low fat cream soup use water or non fat milk instead of whole milk. Doing this turns this high fat meal into a low fat alternative without a lot of hassles.

You can follow these principles with any dish. However if you are on a low fat diet it is usually best to avoid cream and cheese sauces since naturally these tend to automatically be higher in fat content.

Whenever possible look for low in fat alternatives to the foods you love such as low fat cheeses, like mozzarella, some Swiss cheese and provolone, meats should be evenly marbled without a lot of extra fat and the same goes for chicken.
These are just some examples of what you can do to create low fat alternatives for just about every dish. It starts with ingredients choosing the right ingredients for your dishes can make all the difference when it comes to the fat content. Experiment with different alternatives till you find ones that work best for you.

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