With a few healthy ingredient substitutions, you can
prepare delicious, nutritious, guilt-free baked
goods in your own kitchen
Five top baking secrets are revealed—and they
include butter and chocolate
By Dr. Mercola
If you’re like many, the thought of baked goods hot out of
the oven may represent some of your warmest memories. The aroma
of chocolate chip cookies or cinnamon rolls baking may fill you
with excitement—or send you running for cover, in fear of their
repercussions on your health and fitness goals.
But before you head for the hills, realize that there have
never been more options for healthy baking swaps than there are
today.
Unfortunately, there is also a great deal of misinformation
about what constitutes a healthy ingredient
substitution. For example, one of baking’s major assets, butter,
has been unfairly eschewed for decades.
An enormous amount of effort has been put into developing
“better butter substitutes”—needlessly! Fortunately, butter is
making a comeback now that more folks are learning that many
saturated fats are actually good for you.
On the other hand, refined sugar and wheat flour should be
banished from your pantry and replaced with healthier
alternatives.
It really IS possible to fill your home with the
mouth-watering aroma of baked goods—without sabotaging
your health. Read on, as I will be sharing my favorite baking
secrets for delicious, guilt-free baked goods.
Tip #1: Use Butter to Replace Margarine, Shortening, and Refined
Vegetable Oils
The era of butter bashing may finally be coming to an end.
Butter consumption in the US has hit a 40-year high, really
taking off over the past five years. This is largely a result of
the shift in consumer preferences away from processed foods.
Between 1920 and 1960, Americans’ butter consumption declined
by more than 75 percent, yet heart disease went from a
relatively unknown condition to the number one killer.
After decades of believing
the myth that butter clogs arteries, people are now
beginning to realize that partially hydrogenated vegetable oils,
margarine, and shortening are the real enemies, along with sugar
and refined grains.
Instead of the conventional recommendation to replace butter
with margarine, you should be replacing margarine with butter!
Butter, especially raw butter from grass-fed cows, is rich in
beneficial nutrients including vitamins, trace minerals, CLA,
and beneficial fats.
However, butter produced from the milk of cows raised in
confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) is nutritionally
inferior as the cows are fed almost entirely genetically
engineered (GE) grain. Some are also fattened up with additional
sugar from GE sugar beets and cottonseed. So, use butter,
but be choosey about what butter you select.
Tip #2: Use Coconut Oil to Replace Unhealthy Fats
Another saturated fat that is extremely nutritious and works
well for baking is
coconut oil, which you can substitute measure for measure in
place of margarine, shortening or other oils. Try it in pie
crust or in dark chocolate chunk cookies! As explained in
Time:1
“Shortening and coconut oil look similar in that both
are generally white and solid at room temperature. The
difference is shortening is solid because a liquid oil was
hydrogenated to make it solid—a man-made process that’s far
from natural.
Partial hydrogenation creates trans fat, the nutritional villain that’s
been linked to a host of health problems, from heart disease
and type 2 diabetes to fertility challenges.
Fully hydrogenated oil (aka interesterified oil),
while technically trans fat free, may be even worse for your
health. A Brandeis University study2found that subjects who consumed products made with
interesterified oil experienced a decrease in their ‘good’
HDL cholesterol a significant rise in blood sugar—about a 20
percent spike in just four weeks.”
Coconut oil has none of these risks but boasts a large number
of health benefits for your heart, brain, skin, immune system,
and thyroid, among others. It’s rich in lauric acid, which your
body converts to monolaurin, and this special agent has
antiviral, antibacterial, and antiprotozoal properties.
Coconut oil is also rich in capric acid, which further
protects you from infections. Using coconut oil in your baked
goods may even benefit your waistline due to its
medium chain fatty acids (MCFAs), known to stimulate
metabolism.
Tip #3: Replace Wheat Flour with Coconut Flour
You can turn your standard baked goods into delicious
gluten-free treats by replacing the wheat flour with coconut
flour. Coconut flour is 14 percent coconut oil and a whopping 58
percent dietary fiber, which is the highest of any flour. For
comparison, wheat bran is only 27 percent fiber. Coconut flour
is very low in digestible carbohydrates—even lower than some
vegetables.
One word of caution when baking with coconut flour: baked
goods will just fall apart if you substitute it 100 percent for
regular flour. However, if you apply the following trick, you
can avert this culinary blunder.
You can use 100 percent coconut flour IF you add eggs. The
secret is to add one egg per ounce of coconut flour, on average.
Why eggs? Coconut flour has no gluten, and the eggs take its
place by helping your ingredients stick together.
Other gluten-free alternatives to wheat flour that you might
want to experiment with are
amaranth
and quinoa flour, both rich in protein, fiber, and other
nutrients. Amaranth is very dense, so you might want to combine
it with other flours. Quinoa is particularly rich in two
flavonoids, quercetin and kaempferol, which have antioxidant
properties. Quinoa is also being studied for its
anti-inflammatory compounds.3
Tip #4: Replace Refined Sugar with Pureed Fruits and Vegetables
One of the best things about making your own baked goods is
having control over the amount of sugar they contain.
Excess sugar is a primary factor in countless chronic
diseases, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and
Alzheimer’s disease. In one study,4
mice were fed a diet containing 25 percent sugar—the equivalent
of three cans of soda daily—were twice as likely to die as mice
fed a similar diet without sugar.
Added sugars hide in 74 percent of processed foods under
more than 60 different names, even in so-called “health foods.”
A recent Time article5
suggests replacing up to 50 percent of the sugar in your recipe
with pureed fruit, such as bananas, mangoes, papayas, or dried
dates pureed with water. In addition to being bundled with
fiber, vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, the naturally
occurring sugar in fruit is much less concentrated.
For example, a quarter cup (four tablespoons) of mashed
banana contains less than seven grams of sugar, compared to 12
grams in just one tablespoon of table sugar. They recommend
substituting one-quarter cup of pureed fruit for one half cup of
sugar, as a rule of thumb. Fruit has higher water content, so
you’ll also need to reduce the liquid in your recipe, typically
by a quarter cup.
You aren’t limited to just fruits—sugar-rich vegetables can
also be used. For example,
beets add sweetness, nutrition, and flavor complexity to
baked goods, especially those containing chocolate. Beets have
been shown to lower blood pressure, support detoxification, and
fight cancer.
Organic Authority6
has an excellent article about using veggie and fruit purees to
make healthier baked goods, including
avocados, beets, and squash. Pastry chef Marissa Churchill,
and author of Sweet & Skinny, suggests adding
two-thirds of a cup of finely grated raw beets to brownie batter
and reducing the sugar by a quarter cup.7
The Baking Bird has a recipe for Chocolate Beet Loaf Cake8
that looks intriguing—just remember to make the appropriate
substitutions.
If you find that fruit purees don’t make your baked goods
sweet enough, you can add a small amount of one of the natural
alternative sweeteners, such as stevia, Luo Han Guo, or
xylitol. Another alternative is pure glucose (dextrose), which
is less damaging to your body than table sugar, which is 50
percent fructose. Chances are, the more you avoid excess sugar,
the more your sweet tooth will adapt so that your baked goods
will taste sweet enough with only fruit purees. Under NO
circumstances do I recommend adding
artificial sweeteners, which are even WORSE for your health
than refined sugar.
Tip #5: Replace Conventional Chocolate Chips with Dark Chocolate
Chocolate lovers rejoice—chocolate can be a health food! The
key is that your chocolate should be low sugar and as close to
it’s raw state as possible. This means high quality (ideally
raw) organic dark chocolate with minimal processing and
adulteration. Mounting scientific research has linked
chocolate consumption with more than 40 distinct health
benefits. Cocoa powder is rich in minerals and antioxidants, and
the latest studies have discovered anti-inflammatory properties.
New research has shown that your gut bacteria, including
Bifidobacterium and lactic acid bacteria, break down and ferment
components of dark chocolate, turning them into
anti-inflammatory compounds that benefit your health. Most of
the research about chocolate’s benefits has been done with 70
percent dark. Try chopping up a dark chocolate bar or use
organic dark semi-sweet or bittersweet chocolate chips in your
baking recipes. Popsugar has a recipe for Vegan Brownies with
Spinach.9
By making the substitutions I’ve suggested, you’ll end up with a
decadent, mouth-watering and healthy brownie that no
one will believe contains spinach!
Just Desserts
If you love desserts or an occasional “continental”
breakfast, the healthy substitutions suggested above will warm
your heart, while at the same time protecting it. By
preparing these recipes in your own kitchen, you have complete
control over what goes into your food, which is a major step
toward taking control of your health.
Copyright 1997- 2015 Dr. Joseph Mercola. All Rights Reserved.