06 Dec Ingredient Swaps {Holiday Edition}
In this holiday season, you’re going to be baking + cooking a lot, so I wanted to bring to you five healthy holiday ingredient swaps. Quality ingredients matter and you don’t have to completely miss out on quality flavor.
Sugar
1. So the first ingredient that I wanted to talk about is sugar. Most recipes, especially old school recipes, call for white sugar. A good alternative is just using coconut sugar. You can substitute that one-to-one.
1 cup regular sugar = 1 cup coconut sugar .
If you’re trying to go for a sugar free alternative, I would explore monk fruit extract. It’s a powder that has a really powerful flavor so you don’t use a lot. If you’re new to it, I might opt out of that for a little bit. You don’t want to try something new and it comes out awful. If you have time to test it beforehand, do. But if not, you should just stick to coconut sugar.
Flour
2. The other ingredient that you can easily substitute out is regular flour. If again, you are not a season baker, you’ve never done healthy baking or cooking, you can easily just get a gluten free one-to-one flour by Bob Red Mills. It’s a blend of different flours. If you’re a seasoned cook, you can use a combination of almond flour + coconut flour. You can also use tapioca or pecan flour. There are so many different nutrient dense flour alternatives that don’t harm the gut like wheat flour does. Again, would stick with just a gluten free, one-to-one ratio flour that you can use so it’s not something that you have to worry about.
**If you’re using a flour for thickener, you can easily use tapioca starch, arrow root powder, any of those, and you’d make a slurry first. How do you make a slurry you ask?? Make sure that you mixed a little bit of water and with the powder that you’re going to use with flour and then you pour it in and add in slowly. Just to get to the right consistency.
Butter
3 .Butter! I’m a huge fan if it’s grass-fed butter. if you’re able to tolerate dairy.,Kerry Gold and Vital Farms are my favorite. If you have issues with dairy proteins, you can try ghee. Ghee is simply butter cooked down. The milk proteins come to the top (which you skim off ) and a lot more people can tolerate that.
Vegetable Oil
4. Vegetable oil. Again, I’m not a low fat advocate!. I love oil ,especially whether it’s baking or cooking. but I would aim for a coconut oil or avocado oil. Avocado and coconut oils are great for higher heat cooking compared to olive oil, which i keep for raw purposes. If you’re going to make a salad, avoid vegetable, canola, soybean, safflower, sunflower and all the other industrialized processed oils. Coconut and avocado will be your number one that you can easily swap out.
There is a way to use coconut oil without getting the coconut flavor and that is buying refined coconut oil. It’s not the most perfect because ultimately you want unrefined, but that is great if you want to use coconut oil, which I do for baking, but you don’t want the coconut flavor.
Milk
5. Milk, This is a common ingredient in a lot of classic recipes where you can simply sub any nut milk, coconut milk, or oat milk now. I find we still turn to nut milks the most. it’s actually really, really easy to whip up your own cashew milk if you’ve never tried it. With making your own nut milk, you can soak and all that stuff, which is great.
But if you are in a pinch, you can easily just get four cups of water, put it into a blender, get a cup of raw organic cashews (I get from Costco.) and blend it up. There you have cashew milk. You can easily add a little bit of sea salt, a splash of vanilla extract, or even a date if you want a little bit of sweetness. I hope that helped and I challenge you to easily swap out your old classic grandma’s recipe for the holidays this year.
If you incorporate these healthy holiday ingredient swaps, tag us on Instagram or Facebook @nuvitruwellness with a pic. If you have any other ingredient swaps that you have questions about, let us know!
