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Pan

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    Low-salt recipes

    in Cooking

    Posted

    It's OK to use a bit of salt in bread, as long as it isn't very much. I spent a couple of weeks over New Years visiting relatives in California, and one of the things we found out is that Wasa crackers are quite low in salt (the Whole Grain "crispbread" has 50 mg per cracker).

     

    In terms of beans, you can get dried ones and soak them (or just cook them longer).

     

    Deli meats are a rough one. I don't know how much salt a small amount of bacon adds to a big dish, but I am avoiding those. I don't love them so much that that's a hardship for me, though. The really difficult things for me are not being able to go to Xi'an Famous Foods or get most types of Sichuan food, and having to avoid cheese.

    No salt Iron Chef: What would the winner's secrets be?

    in Cooking

    Posted

    For those of you who are unable to imagine anything without salt: Have you tried saltless Indian food with a lot of a variety of different spices? If you can't stand that without salt, I think it must just be habitual for you.

     

    huiray, I definitely never thought of cooking nasi ulam here, where I can't get cashew leaves and the various pokok tumbuh sendiri (wild plants) I used to pick in Terengganu! Nasi kerabu also looks way more complicated to cook and normally dependent on salty ingredients like budu than I want to deal with. I actually think Southeast Asian food is very difficult to cook without salt, and yes, I am completely avoiding adding any salt to anything, because don't forget that sodium also naturally occurs in many foods. I do wonder whether I could make a good version of some dishes like rendang or some curry or asam dishes without any belacan or dried shrimps, though. That might work for me, and I also like the ikan bakar idea. The Cantonese ideas are definitely workable, too.

    • Like 1

    Low-salt recipes

    in Cooking

    Posted

    Thanks for the Crepes, I hope you can somehow induce him to stop using salt (or at least so much of it). It took a really scary blood pressure crisis to scare me straight, and I think I did it without any serious permanent damage, but I am now under the care of a cardiologist and going soon for a battery of tests. I was literally afraid I might die that night, and it took me a while before my blood pressure (even under heavy medication) got closer to normal again. Today, it was 124/85 about an hour and a half after I woke up and 124/82 a half hour ago. I hope the person you cook for doesn't wait until he suffers a scare like that or something worse before he wises up.

     

    Does he like spices and herbs a lot, so that, for example, he might like Indian food with a lot of spices? If so, that's a way you can go.

    • Like 2

    Low-salt recipes

    in Cooking

    Posted

    Oh, one thing I've been thinking about: I like to drink hibiscus tea, which is also a diuretic known to lower blood pressure. Do any of you have good ideas of ways to use it in cooking? Like, do you think it would be good to use some highly concentrated hibiscus tea along with lemon juice, herbs, spices and onions when roasting a chicken?

    No salt Iron Chef: What would the winner's secrets be?

    in Cooking

    Posted

    To follow up on my own post, I found zippo of low-salt recipes on RecipeGullet, though I'm not positive I searched right (I searched that forum only for "low salt"). A lot of people have the idea (illusion, I'd say) that salt is essential for taste. It decidedly is not. However, so many recipes use salty ingredients that are tasty. I love cheese, to take one example, but right now, I can't eat more than tiny amounts of it. Anyway, that's enough for one night. I'll check back in a day or two and see if there's been any traffic in this thread.

    • Like 1

    Low-salt recipes

    in Cooking

    Posted · Edited by Pan (log)

    Hi, everyone. I've been on a low-salt diet (<2 grams of sodium per day) for just over a month now. I have mostly been making Indian and Indian-influenced recipes and also doing simple things like frying eggs in good extra virgin olive oil with some fragrant spices and a splash of vinegar. However, I was hoping there would be some low-salt recipes in RecipeGullet. I did a search for "low salt" in that forum and came up with nothing at all. Did I miss anything? If not, the advice I've gleaned from some other threads was to use sour and acidic ingredients, which I'm already doing (vinegar and lemon juice, and yogurt has some sourness), herbs (I've used basil, cilantro and curry leaves, so far) and spices (which I use plenty of). I also posted to another forum, where I got various kinds of recommendations, including some for Italian dishes (I love Italian food). But if any of you have any other ideas or favorite sites for recipes that would adapt well to a low-salt diet, I'd love to know about them.

    • Like 1

    No salt Iron Chef: What would the winner's secrets be?

    in Cooking

    Posted

    On 6/6/2013 at 9:05 PM, Ttogull said:

    I think this is covered above, but maybe I have a slightly different approach. Having recently become interested in the vegan lifestyle, I find it somewhat interesting that some want to replicate the omnivore diet using vegan ingredients. Why (IMO), when purely vegan dishes without omnivore counterpart are so outstanding?

    Something similar here. Why try to replicate the sense of or give the illusion of salt? There are so many incredible salt-free dishes that one does not need to replicate. Salt-free fries? Please! They will always taste like cr*p. But give me the choice between salt-free collard greens roasted in the oven for 1 hour or ANY version of salted fries, and I will pick the greens every time. It's hard to explain, but I don't think there is a global solution. No version of fake salt will suffice in every dish. Instead, smart substitutes, perhaps dependent on the individual and the dish, will be preferred.

    I'm replying over 3 1/2 years later, but I never liked salt on my fries. I always like the taste of the fried potatoes without salt. I also never liked salted nuts. Now, however, I'm also on a genuinely low-salt diet, which means that I'm cooking a lot for the first time since grad school (I never add salt when I cook, though I sometimes used to add hot sauces or masalas that included salt) and mostly can't go out to restaurants anymore. I'm wondering if RecipeGullet has a category for low-salt dishes, and will try to find out. Meanwhile, in case anyone is still reading this thread, what I've found over the years (because I also used to cook for my parents when they were on low-salt diets) is that Indian food is great without salt, because it uses so many aromatic spices! A great favorite of mine and (when they were alive) my parents is Madhur Jaffrey's Chettinad Fried Chicken, except that we love the nutty taste of urad dal and always use at least 4x as much as her recipe calls for. We also cut down on the oil and ghee. I've found that my stomach is usually upset after I eat out at even really good Indian restaurants in New York like Awadh, because though their food may be delicious, they really overuse oil and ghee. I may have more to say if anyone is reading. :-)

    • Like 3

    Chiang Mai

    in New York: Dining

    Posted

    I don't know. They still look like shrimps to me. Udang galah used to be a lot larger in the 70s, but I take your point, in that a lot of these Google image search results for "udang galah bakar" do resemble what was in the picture above: https://www.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1536&bih=755&q=udang+galah&oq=udang+galah&gs_l=img.3..0l10.31.1581.0.1767.11.9.0.0.0.0.324.882.2-1j2.3.0....0...1ac.1.64.img..8.3.880.bfS1RPyAu8w#tbm=isch&q=udang+galah+bakar

    Chiang Mai

    in New York: Dining

    Posted

    Thanks for the article. It's interesting, but do note this, please:

    "A shrimp in the USA is a prawn in Australia!

     

    But that is not the end of the story. There is a large fishery for penaeids [which Australians call "prawns"] in the southern USA, especially in the Gulf of Mexico, and Americans call them shrimp!"

    Chiang Mai

    in New York: Dining

    Posted

     

    Pan, do you remember this from your time in Malaysia? (生蝦麵; "Sang har meen", which uses these large-headed big-clawed freshwater prawns; expensive, because the prawns are not cheap, especially when they are wild-caught from the rivers.)

    P.s.: If one had a dish looking like this, but with "normal" smaller non-big-headed-shrimp/prawns, it would NOT be called "生蝦麵"), if the restaurant/stall did not want to be labeled as a cheater.

     

    As for saltwater shrimps vs prawns, this is also a useful article even though it relates more specifically to Australian waters.

     

    I'll have a look at the article, but the picture is of what's called udang galah in Malay. Despite the word udang (shrimp, prawn what have you) being part of "udang galah", that is definitely not a shrimp and more like a langoustine. I don't know Chinese names, only Malay ones.

     

    My experience growing up in New York is that the word "prawn" was not used, only "shrimp". I encountered the word "prawn" for the first time in Asia (probably Malaysia), and ascribed it to British influence.

    Chiang Mai

    in New York: Dining

    Posted

    In common parlance, the names 'prawn' and 'shrimp' are used interchangeably. 'Shrimp' is more common in the USA, whereas 'prawn' is more common in the UK and Commonwealth.

     

    However, technically they are NOT the same thing. There is a good explanation of the difference here.

     

    According to Wikipedia, "shrimp" and "prawn" are not scientific terms and have no fixed meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrimp#Shrimp_versus_prawn:

    "Taxonomic studies in European on shrimp and prawns were shaped by the common shrimp and the common prawn, both found in huge numbers along the European coastlines. The common shrimp, Crangon crangon was categorised in 1758 by Carl Linnaeus, and the common prawn was categorised in 1777 by Thomas Pennant. The common shrimp is a small burrowing species aligned with the notion of a shrimp as being something small, whereas the common prawn is much larger. The terms true shrimp or true prawn are sometimes used to mean what a particular person thinks is a shrimp or prawn.[12] This varies with the person using the terms. But such terms are not normally used in the scientific literature, because the terms shrimp and prawn themselves lack scientific standing. Over the years the way shrimp and prawn are used has changed, and nowadays the terms are almost interchangeable. Although from time to time some biologists declare certain common names should be confined to specific taxa, the popular use of these names seems to continue unchanged."

    NYC for 1st time: Chef on the loose

    in New York: Dining

    Posted

    Two things really struck me about your Blanca post, other than how disappointing the experience was: (1) How much wine was in those 7 pours, such that you could still hold your camera steady and get really clear pictures of almost everything? (2) Plankton?? People eat plankton? Were you able to isolate the taste?

    NYC for 1st time: Chef on the loose

    in New York: Dining

    Posted

    I really wouldn't go by Michelin ratings in New York. I've posted on other boards that, excuse my French, they don't know what the fuck they're doing in New York (for example, there's a long discussion on Chowhound, but I'm not in a mood to link it because of their attitude toward any linking from Chowhound exile boards like Food Talk Central and Hungry Onion). There seems to usually be some place they give a star to that's just insane and would never come remotely close to getting a star if they used their French standards. This year, the one I can attest to personally is Somtum Der, one of the better neighborhood Thai restaurants in Manhattan, but not one that's good across its whole menu, let alone star-worthy. I doubt it would even get a Bib Gourmand if it were transplanted to Paris. They make several dishes very well, but that's not star-worthy. And what makes their having a star even more insane is that Kyo Ya, with incomparably higher ambitions, higher-quality ingredients, and where I had a kaiseki meal a few years ago (with no indication from anyone's comments that I've read that they've deteriorated one iota) that was sublime and redefined the meaning of several dishes for me (miso soup, chawan mushi and claypot rice among them, not to mention sake), was also given but one star. The one star wouldn't be an injustice if Michelin hadn't debased their ratings in New York, but the juxtaposition is ridiculous! I'm happy Somtum Der is in my neighborhood, but nothing I ever have there will be anywhere close to so sublime it redefines an entire category of dish for me.

    • Like 2

    NYC for 1st time: Chef on the loose

    in New York: Dining

    Posted

    I've enjoyed cider with my girlfriend at Wassail but have yet to have any food or cocktails there. What cocktails do they make well?

     

    My preference at Katz's is to get a pastrami sandwich and pickles, and occasionally coleslaw, and I usually get Cel-Ray to drink. If I'm with someone else and we're really hungry, we might try a really juicy brisket sandwich, too.

    NYC for 1st time: Chef on the loose

    in New York: Dining

    Posted

    If you want to go to Flushing for dim sum, I had a very good meal some time ago at Asian Jewels. If you want to stick to Manhattan, go to Dim Sum Go Go, but consider not ordering any buns there, only other items (they have very good dumplings). Some people recommend Hakkasan, which is much more expensive than the places I've mentioned, and which I have not been to. If money is no object, you might consider going there.

    • Like 1
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