Video: Low Fat Substitutes when Baking & Cooking

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Learn from our expert some excellent low fat alternatives for baking in this free how-to video on low fat cooking tips and advice.

- Low Fat Substitutes for Cooking with Vegetable Oil

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Video Transcript

Kirsten Herbes and I am a registered dietician and health educator. Most baking recipes call for fat which is a main ingredient. The typical versions we see in baking recipes are lard, butter or margarine. All of these add a great amount of fat to your recipe but they also serve a function. Fat when you use it in a baking recipe coats the flour that you put into the recipe thus tenderizing your product. Not only are you producing flavor with the fat where you actually have a structural purpose for adding fat to your recipe. Omitting fat is not quite as easy as simply making a substitution. There are a few tricks of the book where you can tweak your fat recipe and reduce the grams of fat but you can’t simply take out the fat. So I am going to show you a couple of tricks that you can apply to reduce the fat grams in your baking recipe slightly. The easiest thing to do is to substitute your fat with a fruit puree such as apple sauce or another one that I will show you how to make in a minute. Apple sauce is the easiest one. You want to try to use unsweetened apple sauce. You can get this at any grocery store. Another puree that you can make at home is made from prunes. These are just regular pitted prunes that I picked up at the grocery store. You want to make sure you get the pitted variety and you want to measure out about a cup and third. I am using our dry ingredient measuring cup for this, the one cup measuring cup and the one-third of a cup measuring cup. You also want to add to this a few tablespoons of water; just use your regular tablespoon measuring cup and throw all of this into the food processor. You do not want to use a blender because it is not going to be strong enough to give you the correct consistency. You want to use the food processor to process this until it is a similar consistency to the apple sauce. Both of these can be substituted directly one to one for the fat in your recipe. The problem that we have a lot of times when we substitute the fat with a fruit puree is that you will have a less tender product. A way to avoid this is substitute some of your flour with cake flour. The difference between cake flour and regular flour is simply that the cake flour absorbs a little bit less of the liquid in your recipe and as a result the recipe stays lighter. So you wan to use a cup and 2 tablespoons of cake flour in place of cup of regular flour.