Healthy Cooking Columns

In Your Pantry: Fats

What should I have in my kitchen?

Butter: Use butter it in sparing amounts. Because it’s so high in saturated fat, use it to finish a sauce and measure out about a teaspoon or so to help tighten up the sauce, add flavor and a rich taste in the mouth.

Purchase unsalted butter. Keep it tightly sealed in the fridge because it will pick up flavors from almost anything else that it is stored nearby.

Olive oil: This is the granddaddy of “healthy” fats and well established as being really good for you. It is chock full of all kinds of great stuff, the most important being monounsaturated fat (the type that helps prevent you from getting heart disease). There are some research studies that even show that you can use as much olive oil as you want and not gain weight, but you will still significantly improve your cholesterol profile. Even so, measure your fats and oils and use them carefully.

Purchase a good quality extra virgin olive oil for making salads, dressings, sauces and the like. Use less expensive olive oils for cooking if you are on a budget. By using an oil sprayer because it lets you easily coat a pan or food without using a lot of additional oil.

Canola oil:  Canola oil is essentially flavorless and works well in dressings and recipes where you don’t want any additional flavor. It also works great in baked goods.

Mayonnaise: You probably don’t think of mayo as a fat, but you should. Regular mayonnaise is pretty high in fat and calories, but there’s great low-fat and non-fat ones on the market. Choose the reduced-fat versions for making salads, like potato and pasta salad, and for dressings.

Cream cheese: Like mayo, you might not really have put cream cheese in the fat category, but it’s got almost as much as butter. The great thing is that reduced-fat cream cheese or Neufchatel is a perfect alternative, and there’s never much reason for the full-fat version.

Spreads: Just don’t buy margarine because most solid and even a lot of the tub margarines still have trans-fats in them. The good news in all of this is that “spreads” are trans-fat free and a good choice in a number of recipes.

Nuts and seeds: Yep, these are considered fats. Purchase them raw and get only a handful or so at a time so that they don’t go bad (they will last about 2 months sealed in plastic).

Keep your favorites of these on hand:

Almonds (whole, slivered and sliced)
Pecans
Walnuts
Sesame seeds (white and black)
Poppy seeds
Sunflower seeds
Peanuts
Pinenuts
Pumpkin seeds