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    raw blueberry pie with microwaveable filling and graham cracker crust

    This mostly-raw blueberry pie is a snap to make and very versatile--the filling microwaves in a few minutes, and you don't even have to bake the zippy gingered graham cracker crust--perfect for a hot Fourth of July and all summer long.

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On the inevitable hot dog eating contests

Posted on July 5, 2011 by DebbieN

I did something at my in-laws’ Fourth of July cookout that I haven’t done in years: I ate a hot dog. So did my husband. I think my daughter ate two and a half hot dogs (actually, I think she ate more and gave us a story, but her grandfather maintains that someone else may have gotten the extras in the pack). Given how crappy hot dogs generally are, you may be wondering why we did this: because my in-laws made the effort to buy kosher ones for us, and because Hebrew National hot dogs don’t have much in the way of carb, and my daughter is fairly crazy about them (because we don’t cook enough meat for her tastes at home).

What hot dogs, kosher or otherwise, do have–and this is why I have to put in a huge caveat–is sodium. And saturated fat. A regular H-N hot dog has about 490 mg sodium. A knockwurst (which we decided against; the flavor’s not really very different, it’s just bigger) has 810 mg. Plus more calories and saturated fat, though the regular’s no great bargain–as much fat as protein, easily.

I have to admit they taste a lot better grilled outdoors on an actual grill than they do indoors in a grease-laden cafeteria service pan, especially since you can dress them up significantly with sharp mustard, crusty French rolls instead of whitebread buns, and sauerkraut and browned onions instead of the usual insipid cafeteria ketchup. So I can go with the “once a year, enjoy, and just eat a little more carefully the rest of the week” argument.

However. Hot dog eating contests are just wrong. Sixty-two or however many hot dogs appear in the “ain’t it amazing?” recordbreaking stories section of your local newspaper the next morning? Enough hot dogs for 30 people or so? That’s not enjoyment, that’s not even tasting the food–tasting slows one down, and possibly triggers the dire appetite signal to retreat or suffer an immediate reversal of fortune after just a few hot dogs. Even for teenage contestants.

For the non-contestants among us (such as my daughter), I say, two hot dogs is probably the outer limit of sanity in one day–so just figure you’ll eat the other sixty another time. Two is about half your recommended daily max for sodium intake and about the max for saturated fat. And it’s not really delivering much in the way of protein. What’s true of bologna is just about as true for hot dogs–they’re made of meat, but they don’t add up nutritionally to actual meat (about 6 or 7 grams of protein per dog), and they sure have a lot of downsides without delivering the really distinctive flavors and variety of, say, gourmet specialty sausages.

There aren’t a lot of kosher specialty sausages made widely available in the US at this point. Actually, according to my father-in-law, there aren’t enough true (pork) and high-quality bratwurst distributors either anymore, and the owner of the one available to them, who happens to operate in my mother-in-law’s native state of Wisconsin, has openly supported political causes and candidates that are thoroughly repugnant to them.

I suspect that leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth on the Fourth of July.

 

Filed under: cooking, Food Politics, holiday cooking, meat and poultry, nutrition, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , | Comments Off on On the inevitable hot dog eating contests

A Closer look at Einstein Bros. Bagels

Posted on March 24, 2011 by DebbieN

A few weeks ago I bought a challah from Einstein Bros. Bagels, which had taken over from the Noah’s in my town sometime last fall. Noah’s had supplied my daughter’s school on Fridays and their challah was pretty good for store-bought–this tasted the same. I hadn’t been in the store since the takeover so I didn’t really know what to expect, but other than the name change outside, it looked the same and had more or less the same offerings as ever.

I’m not sure what prompted me to go online and look for their nutrition information sheet, but I wanted an idea of what was in the challah, so I looked. I couldn’t find it on the Einstein Bros. site, but there was a pointer to the Noah’s web site–still up after the takeover, apparently, and that had the challah listed. What I found for the challah itself wasn’t incredibly shocking or anything, ingredients more or less kosher, not too bad on any of the nutritional factors. In fact, it’s probably one of the best bets at our former Noah’s, although you have to order a couple days ahead for Friday morning pickup.

On the other hand, the bagels and other menu items really stood out for sodium–most were over 500 mg per bagel, and some of the “gourmet” varieties of bagels were in the 700-900 range, even without lox. A few sandwiches soared as high as 3500 mg sodium (more than a day’s worth even for today’s average intake, and about two days’ worth according to the CDC and AHA guidelines)–just for a sandwich. Anything with chicken on it was astronomical as well–above 1600. Which sounded like Denny’s or Chili’s to me.

I started to wonder just who designed the food and how “designed” it was. Were we talking mostly bagel joint, or were we talking fast food with a highly engineered, set-in-stone formulation? If I wanted to contact them to ask about lowering the sodium in their dishes, was there a real person I could talk to?

The Einstein’s web site doesn’t have a lot on it other than Flash bells and whistles–the site is extremely corporate as far as information goes. The only thing I found that seemed worth noting here is the management team, and even that–maybe it was the Flash, or maybe there was some programming in the web site, but after three management biographies it failed to load any others. I had to shut my browser, clear my cache, and try again.

What I found surprised me (I’m kind of naïve, I know it). Even with all the evidence to the contrary–my sister once did a comprehensive marketing survey of west coast bagelries and concluded none of them had the real, crackle-crusted thing, it was all just ring-shaped white bread–I still harbor a faint hope that if it’s a bagel shop, it must be Jewish. Especially since the founder of Noah’s is, and Einstein Bros.–well, what would you conclude? But you would be wrong. Continue reading →

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Age, salt and the new USDA dietary guidelines

Posted on February 7, 2011 by DebbieN

Last Monday the USDA released its latest version of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (nominally dated “2010”). I was driving home and NPR carried USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack’s speech, in which he listed a few of the new highlights: eat less, eat less food with solid fats, eat less processed food, eat more vegetables and fruits, eat less sodium.

How much less sodium? About 2300 mg or 6 grams (1 teaspoon) of table salt per day, he said, is the recommended maximum for healthy adults, in line with the long-standing National High Blood Pressure Education Program’s guidelines, which are shared by the American Heart Association and many other professional medical groups.

There’s a second lower-sodium recommendation for anyone overweight, African-American, with heart or kidney disease or high blood pressure or diabetes, and anyone middle-aged or older. This year, as the more specifically heart-health-oriented professional organizations already recommend, the USDA guidelines set the lower maximum at 1500 mg per day, or about 3 grams of table salt.

And you’d think that was great, and I do, that the USDA guidelines have finally caught up with what the medical associations have been demanding based on the overwhelming weight of studies on dietary sodium intake as it affects blood pressure, cardiovascular disease including stroke, and kidney disease.

But there are two catches hidden in the midst of all this, and I’m not even sure Vilsack was aware of it. Smaller one first: Middle-aged? How old is middle-aged?

“Fifty-one and older,” Vilsack said. Whew, I thought. Four more years before I have to start thinking of myself as middle-aged. By the time I get there, I’m hoping the standard will have gotten fudged upward by at least another decade or so.

Because, you know, if you’re not 50 yet, 51 sounds reasonable–and comfortably remote for a lot of younger adults. Which I am, thank you very much. Don’t look at me like that.

So here’s Catch-51: When I was working at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute back in the mid-’90s, the general working recommendation for lowering sodium to 1500 mg/day was all the other high-risk groups Vilsack mentioned…and healthy adults 40 and up. Not 51 and up.

The choice of a cutpoint at age 40 for otherwise healthy people was based on the risk data from the first three National Health and Nutrition Education Surveys, which began collecting data across the nation starting in the 1970s. The latest version collected data around 2006 and its findings were just released last spring by the Centers for Disease Control. All the NHANES studies correlate  in-depth interviews about diet, exercise and lifestyle patterns, and cardiovascular history along with clinical health measurements (height and weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, urinary sodium excretion, blood iron, etc.) from thousands of ordinary Americans. Even early on, there appeared to be an independent higher risk and a greater need to lower sodium at 40 and older, all other health risk factors being equal.

But of course 40 seems too young to be middle-aged. And the USDA, which issues the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, tends to downplay certain elements of the risk statements so that no one, or at least not the agency’s chief constituents, gets upset. The no one in this case might easily be the Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Diabetes, Eating out, Food Blogs, Food Politics, history, nutrition, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Age, salt and the new USDA dietary guidelines

Selling salt, one con at a time

Posted on May 30, 2010 by DebbieN

Michael Moss’s new investigative piece,   “The Hard Sell on Salt” at the New York Times, traces the strategies used by the processed food industry over the past 30 years or more to fight any regulation on the amount of salt they dump into everything.

I have wondered for years why TV chefs (Moss ticks Alton Brown on this for having shilled in an ad for Cargill, a major salt producer), the Culinary Institute of America, big-name restaurant chefs and their fans (prominently Michael Ruhlman), and the food processing industry have all pushed salt so hard and why the discussion about reducing salt always, always turns to “what can we substitute” rather than “why not just leave it out.”

It’s not as if any of these players, other than the actual salt production companies, have an intrinsic mission that requires them to sell salt.

Moss turns up a few of the answers. Not surprisingly, products like low-salt tomato sauce require actual fresh ingredients (vine-ripened tomatoes, fresh herbs) to make up the difference in flavor from the current formulas for salted jar sauces, which contain dried herbs and low-grade tomatoes and range from 450-700+ mg. sodium per serving.The low-salt sauces are more expensive to produce. On the other hand, they’re higher quality and they do actually taste good.

But that’s about the simplest case. Tomato sauce actually is made from tomatoes, whether high- or low-grade, and is therefore (if you discount the addition of starch or gum thickeners, sugar or corn syrup, spice “extractives” and preservatives in so many brands) about as close to the actual homemade product as processed food gets. Most of the major processed foods aren’t so recognizable.

Peanut butter should be in the same category as tomato sauce–something with a simple real main ingredient that tastes like what it is. And a number of smaller companies do offer unsalted natural peanut butter–peanuts-only, and it tastes just fine. But the major brands insist that if you take out any of the salt (notably, not “all”) from their formulations, you “have to” add sugar or something else to compensate for the loss of flavor. Read the major brand labels and you realize why: their peanut butters are already mixed with corn syrup sweeteners and solids, gums and emulsifiers and mono- and diglycerides and starches and fillers. The salt is there not so much to highlight the peanuts but to cover all of that extra gunk. You have to wonder whether the nutrition is reduced as well–something like the case of bologna vs. actual meat.

Particularly telling (and entertaining, from my point of view), are the taste consequences of cutting salt in some very popular products:

Even as it was moving from one line of defense to another, the processed food industry’s own dependence on salt deepened, interviews with company scientists show. Beyond its own taste, salt also masks bitter flavors and counters a side effect of processed food production called “warmed-over flavor,” which, the scientists said, can make meat taste like “cardboard” or “damp dog hair.”

I have to admit I really adored that one. My general reaction to things like Lean Cuisine, South Beach Diet, etc microwave meals-for-one is that, with so much sodium per serving (up to 1200 mg or worse) you’d be better off tossing out the “meal” and eating the box. Tastes about the same, salt’s gotta be lower, and at least you’d get some fiber. Now we know it’s true.

As a demonstration, Kellogg prepared some of its biggest sellers with most of the salt removed. The Cheez-It fell apart in surprising ways. The golden yellow hue faded. The crackers became sticky when chewed, and the mash packed onto the teeth. The taste was not merely bland but medicinal.

“I really get the bitter on that,” the company’s spokeswoman, J. Adaire Putnam, said with a wince as she watched Mr. Kepplinger struggle to swallow.

They moved on to Corn Flakes. Without salt the cereal tasted metallic. The Eggo waffles evoked stale straw. The butter flavor in the Keebler Light Buttery Crackers, which have no actual butter, simply disappeared.

Perhaps there’s a lesson here. Kellogg’s certainly not the only company that’s been selling Americans the food equivalent of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Perhaps all the food execs should be required to eat their own products, without “benefit” of salt, and preferably in front of an FDA regulatory panel or a Congressional committee?

Filed under: Eating out, Food Politics, nutrition, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

FDA Regulation–Too Slow on Salt?

Posted on April 20, 2010 by DebbieN

The Washington Post carried a story today that the FDA is finally getting a move on and planning how to regulate salt in processed foods–after numerous and repeated failures of laissez-faire voluntary self-regulation attempts. It’s been a long time coming; the FDA has been petitioned repeatedly by the American Heart Association, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and many other organizations, both private and governmental, and has always maintained up to this administration that salt was a “generally recognized as safe” ingredient.

So I’m glad that the FDA is finally making some effort to regulate sodium in food and drop the “generally recognized as safe” status. I’m unfortunately not amazed at all that they’re trying to drag it out to a 10-year process. People’s taste for salt can be downshifted significantly in two or three weeks on average, so there’s really no excuse for such a gradual decrease except for the manufacturer’s cost of reformulation. They seem to be pacifying the processed food manufacturers–all the classic  prechewed food industry claims about reduced customer satisfaction appear to be overtaking discussion and usurping the issue of health risk.

But what really gets me is the last quote in the article:

“Historically, consumers have found low-sodium products haven’t been of the quality that’s expected,” said Todd Abraham, senior vice president of research and nutrition for Kraft Foods. “We’re all trying to maintain the delicious quality of the product but one that consumers recognize as healthier.”

Tell the truth: Those foods aren’t really all that delicious now. It’s like admitting that heavy salt is the predominant flavoring (the other being cardboard).

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