Full Video Transcript
Presenter: Bailey Carr, Culinary Dietician
Video link: https://youtu.be/G2lQxuvZld0
Slide 1 – Introduction with Bailey Carr
Alrighty, well, Hi there. My name is Bailey Carr. I am a culinary dietician at Colorado State University’s Kendall Reagan Nutrition Center. Really quickly, a culinary dietician means that I’m a registered dietician, but I have also gone through training and I am a classically trained chef. So, I am here to talk to you all today about how cooking for health is actually cooking with flavor.
Slide 2 – Objectives
By the end of today’s presentation, hopefully you all will be able to examine the myth that healthy cooking is bland cooking. You will be able to describe how to enhance flavor and cooking by using various ingredients and cooking techniques, and you’ll be able to identify the health benefits of cooking with flavor.
Slide 3 – Cooking for health is (Fill in the blank)
So, when you hear cooking for health, what do you think? There’s many things you could think, so feel free to fill in the blank, but as you’re running through that mental Rolodex of what word is best, is cooking for health, expensive, bland, flavorable, scary, time consuming, approachable, delicious, fun, all are valid. But hopefully by the end of today’s presentation you have some more positive words to pop in there.
Slide 4 – What is cooking for health?
So let’s define these a little bit. What is cooking for health exactly, and then what does it mean to cook with flavor? There’s two pictures here, so I want to ask you all which of these do you think is cooking and dining for health? The picture on the left shows many nutrient dense foods. The picture on the right shows a couple out enjoying a meal likely at a restaurant. So as you’re looking these over, I actually am going to spoil and give the answer that there’s no right or wrong here.
There’s not only one picture that’s cooking or dining for health. It’s really both of these pictures while one picture shows the nutrient dense food, the other picture shows the importance of the joy and social connectedness found in eating and that uniquely eating can provide.
Slide 5 – Cooking for health includes
To break it down a little bit more though, cooking for health includes preparing foods that provide your body with the essential nutrients needed for energy and daily functioning. Cooking for health includes eating lots of colorful foods and plants that protect against disease, but it includes sharing meals as a form of social connectedness and spending time with loved ones. So not something specific to the food itself, but more how it’s consumed and how it’s eaten. And cooking for health, as crazy as it may sound, also includes using cooking in real time as a means of self-care, decompression enjoyment and stress relief. That may be surprising to hear because sometimes meals and family meals can become the opposite of these, or a little bit high stress or a little bit exhausting to think about what to eat all the time. But if we can really tap in to the joy and relaxation found in cooking, how much could that actually decrease our stress levels and improve our health over time?
Slide 6 – Cooking for flavor
Now, cooking for flavor, it’s very fun to talk about, but cooking for flavor first includes honoring your food and flavor preferences. Know your palate, know how you grew up, know the foods you’re used to, and it’s okay to recognize that you have strong preference for some foods or want to taste some more flavors in your meals compared to others, but it doesn’t mean not trying new foods or not experimenting with new flavors. Cooking with flavor involves using culturally relevant ingredients and cooking practices, adding acid, salt, fat, heat and herbs, spices and aromatic ingredients to meals to wake them up and make them quite interesting. Cooking for flavor involves exploring what cooking method is best suited to each ingredient and your preferences, and it includes challenging the avoidance mentality, which is the idea that while there are stigmatized foods and maybe the ideas of black or white foods, eat this, not that, never eat this, maybe that’s not so much the case. Can we challenge those ideas and see that some of those “no foods” or “don’t foods” that we may enjoy can actually have great impacts on flavor and adherence to nutrient-dense meals?
Slide 7 – How are these related?
So, cooking for health and cooking for flavor are related because the way to receive maximum health benefit from food is to meet is eat as many nutrient-dense foods as possible, as consistently as possible across the lifespan. The main way to achieve consistency in that exposure day in and day out to nutrient dense foods is to enjoy what you eat and then find the meals that you enjoy approachable enough to make and serve yourself regularly.
Slide 8 – What are the techniques behind cooking for health and flavor?
Slide 9 – Explore flavor foundations
Now it’s time to get into the how to. So what are the techniques behind cooking for health and flavor? In this slide, we’re going to explore flavor foundations. So there’s a lot going on here, but flavor foundations can originate with cooking methods and the type of heat that is used. We will get into this more in a future slide, but flavor foundations with the type of heat we use include wet heat, dry heat and combination heat, and now flavor foundations can include how we experience food on our palate. There are five different tastes that we’re able to recognize as humans, and these include sour, sweet, salty, savory, or umami and bitter. But there’s a lot more to describe food beyond just those basic tastes. So more complex flavors can include herbal foods or spicy foods, rich foods, et cetera.
Slide 10 – Cooking methods
To start to break down the cooking methods and how they affect flavor, we’re first going to define the cooking methods. So wet heat is using water to heat and cook foods. So this includes preparing foods through boiling, simmering, steaming, poaching, or using a crockpot dry heat. Cooking methods include using hot air or hot surfaces, so this is baking, roasting, grilling, frying, broiling, sauteing, or searing. Do note that here, oil cooking with oil is included in dry heat cooking methods because it is still not using water. And now combination cooking methods mean that we’re going to cook an ingredient such as meat over a dry heat to get it nice and brown, and then we’re going to cover it with a liquid and allow it to continue to cook and break down. Now how these affect flavor is that wet heat cooking methods impart much more gentle flavors and don’t necessarily change the flavor of the ingredient being used.
I’m going to flip to talking about dry heat cooking methods, which oftentimes create a more colorful exterior and change the flavor of a food a little bit to give it a more complex rich flavor. The best comparison I can think to provide for these would be thinking about eating a boiled piece of chicken versus eating a nice grilled piece of chicken. The boiled chicken probably won’t be as flavorful as that golden brown grilled piece, and that’s all because of the heat that was used to prepare it.
And now, combination cooking, the most common term used here is braising, which once again is cooking that meat or even a vegetable, getting it brown and then covering it with the flavorful liquid. The benefit of this is that you get two layers of flavor, the layer of flavor from browning, and then the layer of flavor from that liquid that is used to allow it to cook down. These foods oftentimes become very tender and also reheat well, which is something to think about in meal preparation of what makes good leftovers.
Slide 11 – How to increase flavor: Herbs
Now, beyond cooking methods and the type of heat we’re, there’s lots of additions that are going to impact the final flavor of our meals. The first one I’m going to start by defining is cooking with herbs. Oftentimes many people like herbs and finding foods outside the home prepared with herbs or ordering these items at a restaurant, but it can just feel a little intimidating how to cook with these in the home. So I’ve divided out two camps of herbs on this table. On the left, you’ll see the idea that green and leafy herbs pair well whether they are fresh or dried, but items like mint basil, partially scallions, or even chives, any mix and match of those combinations is going to go over very well. Also, I want to include cilantro in there. That’s another green leafy herb that pairs well with any of the other ones listed.
These also pair well, especially if you’re using fresh herbs because the stems are tender and flavorful, so you can chop up the whole herb instead of having to pick off the leaves. These green leafies you can throw into dips made with Greek yogurt and cream cheese and eat those with veggies or put it on a sandwich. You can make dressings or marinades with them to flavor the fruits, excuse me, flavor proteins and veggies in that regard.
And now, the other camp of herbs would be the woody and woolly options. What I mean by this are the herbs that have tree branch like stems where you’re definitely going to want to pick the leaves off, or if they’re wooly, that one is kind of like sage that almost feels like felt. If you’ve ever rubbed it between your fingers, these all tend to pair well. You may see them even sold together as poultry herbs. And right now with what’s in season, they pair very nicely with winter squash, such as butternut squash. They pair well with potatoes and other root vegetables, but all sorts of meats as well.
Slide 12 – How to increase flavor: Spices
Now, spices, this is a little similar to the herbs if many people enjoy eating foods prepared with spices, it’s just a little overwhelming to figure out where to start if you’ve never blended them before or paired them before. And it can also feel a little bit expensive and intimidating to try it out and to go to the spice aisle and get all of these options and not really know how they’re going to go over. So some ideas for getting used to using spices in the kitchen are to look to global cuisine recipes for inspiration. Many world and global cuisines have been pairing various spices together for centuries and have it down patch, so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel, but rather just look to different cuisines for inspiration. If anybody is wondering where to start, I want to mention that the Kendall Reagan Nutrition Center has blogs featured on our website that are currently going through a global cuisine series and contain many ideas for how to combine spices.
Another idea for where to get started with spices is making a house seasoning mix, so your own little concoction. An idea here is to mix equal parts of salt, garlic powder, onion powder, turmeric, paprika, black pepper and oregano together, and just shake that across food quite universally. The benefit here is allowing yourself a somewhat familiar introduction to new spices because they’re paired with some familiar flavors, but also each time this house blend is sprinkled across the food to bring it some flavor, it’s adding less salt because the salt in this mixture is quite diluted compared to one found in just a straight up salt shaker. So it’s just one way to get your palate used to some new flavors over time.
Slide 13 – How to increase flavors: Liquids
A way to introduce flavors to cooking or through the liquids we use to heat up food. So this is commonly or an idea that’s commonly used in cooking beans or cooking grains like rice or quinoa, but it can also include cooking proteins, especially if you’re brazing them. So ideas here are to look for low to no sodium added stalks or broths to add some flavor to beans and grains. Just make them a little more savory if you’re doing any type of shredded meat where you may be cooking it down in a barbecue sauce. One way to reduce the sugar is to do about half barbecue sauce, half no sugar, added apple juice, and that apple juice is going to taste sweet, but is not so highly concentrated in sugar as table sugar or a really high sugar barbecue sauce. So allowing that blend to happen and the apple juice will also impart a nice flavor. And then cooking meats with liquids such as low sodium salsas can also make for nice tender meats and highly flavorful meals.
Using liquids or flavoring liquids in cooking is also a great way to use up the scraps and odds and ends we may produce in the kitchen. So you can add a little pop of flavor to rice or grains cooking, even if you just cover them with water by adding in a smashed garlic clove or maybe some whole spices that are easy enough to fish out at the end of cooking. Maybe add in a citrus wedge of a lime lemon or orange into the grain as it’s cooking, and especially that zest or that rind will impart some lovely flavor, use odds and ends of herbs, especially if you just have a few sprigs left over and just throw them into the cooking pot. Or you can even use the rinds from hard cheeses like Parmesan to add some extra savory flavor to whatever you’re cooking.
Slide 14 – How to increase flavor: Control heat
Now we’ve briefly discussed how high heat and dry heat imparts flavor, but on this slide, I really want to encourage everyone cooking at home to not be afraid of cranking up that dial on the oven or on the stove to an extent or maybe even increasing that number. You see, reflecting on the air fryer to be between four to 500 degrees, this is really, really helpful for vegetables to get them nice and brown and impart that sweeter, more mild flavor. If anyone has ever roasted vegetables at home on a baking sheet at around 350 degrees, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But if it didn’t seem restaurant quality or it didn’t come out exactly as brown and crispy as you’d imagine it to or as you would imagine it would, maybe you don’t need more oil or to add anything to it except just the higher heat.
And then when cooking meats on the grill, but especially the stove top this time of year when it’s a little bit cold, a great temperature is between a medium or medium high to lay your protein down to encourage that nice browning. A method of ensuring that your protein like this chicken on the screen, it’s nice and evenly brown is actually to let it sit undisturbed in the pan for anywhere from three to five minutes, depending on how thick it is. If it’s thicker, you might want to let it sit on there, undisturbed for a little bit longer, so closer to five minutes. But what that does is allows enough contact and time with the protein and that hot pan to create that crust or create that sear something I come across in cooking classes often, or folks being a little bit jittery with the heat and wanting to turn the meat too quickly and it just doesn’t get so evenly brown or the exact culinary term we would use in the industry is GBD, which means golden brown and delicious. So just trusting your meat, giving a little bit of time. One way to know your protein is searing on the bottom is actually by looking at the surface that’s facing you in that pan. If you see that the color is changing from a lighter color to a darker color, or in the case of chicken pinkish color to a white color, it generally indicates that that bottom is going to be nice in GBD, golden brown and delicious.
Slide 15 – How to increase flavor: Fat
Now, fat, this is a fun slide to talk about because oftentimes there’s recommendations to avoid fats or not used fats or that fats are bad and that’s not the full picture. There’s a lot more details in this story. Plant-based fats such as nuts and seeds and avocados and olive oils all provide many nutritional benefits for our bodies and anti-inflammatory benefits, and they also impart lovely flavors, but it doesn’t mean to never eat animal fat again or never include it as part of a meal. Something I would like to challenge with this is actually just flipping how we view fats instead of viewing them as maybe the base of a meal or the main part of the meal and veggies and herbs as the garnish, can we flip it so that veggies and herbs become the base of a meal and the type of fat we’re using becomes the nice garnish?
In the case of really flavorful fats like chorizo or bacon or sausage crumbles, a little goes a long way because of their dense flavor compounds inside of them. So maybe there’s the idea of a sprinkle of those across or various crumbles of those meats across dishes that contain beans or grains or vegetables really help wake them up and make them exciting. When we get a little bit of that fat to coat our palate, the flavor likely is going to linger on our taste buds and it will flavor each additional bite of the meal we take even without having to have that ingredient present. So one piece of bacon bit on there and one bite might linger in your mouth and continue to flavor each of the following bites where a little can truly go a long way without having to avoid that food completely. Other ideas for highly flavorful fats to include in meals would be herb infused olive oils. There’s many recipes for how to do this online, but also using herb butters or compound butters or even brown butters, which just a teaspoon or a drizzle of that can impart a long lasting flavor across a meal.
Slide 16 – How to increase flavor: Acid (and zest)
And now the final way to flavor meals and increase the intrigue in each bite is by using acid and zest in cooking. Acid is quite helpful in allowing us to really taste our foods because it causes us to salivate more. When we salivate more, we’re able to dissolve more flavor compounds across our tongue and notice a lot more about the meal. That acid also helps increase our ability to taste saltiness, meaning we can possibly use less salt, but notice it more. So some ways to use acid to accent our meals are to add a squeeze of citrus juice or use flavorful vinegars like balsamic vinegars. We can add fermented foods to meals for some acidity or sourness, so this can include pickles or kimchi or sauerkraut. And then we can use the zest from citrus juice to grate across meals. It goes really well with veggies and grains and helps wake them up. The difference between acid and zest is that acid or citrus juice is acidic more likely to taste sour, where the citrus zest is more likely to taste bright, but not necessarily sour. So citrus zest can really wake up a meal without changing its whole flavor profile.
Slide 17 – Conclusion
Slide 18 – Tying it altogether
So, in conclusion, to tie together cooking for health and cooking with flavor, cooking with flavor promotes optimal health by encouraging diet variety, use of anti-inflammatory herbs and spices and flavorful additions. Beyond adding extra salt and sugar to meals, flavorful foods are more likely to be enjoyed and consumed more frequently over time. And many ideas for flavorful cooking do not require exclusive or expensive ingredients or kitchen equipment. There’s always a starting point you can find in there somewhere to add rich flavor to meals.
Slide 19 – Recipe and Cooking Resources
If anybody is interested in some resources for recipes and cooking, the Kindle Reagan Nutrition Center has quite a few links you can navigate too for some inspiration as well as CSU Extension has many recipes and ideas for the how to of cooking. Thank you so much for your time.
Website links mentioned above:
