7 Tips to Make Your Recipes Better for Your Heart

  1. Use natural ingredients. “Semi-homemade” recipes that use packaged foods can add hidden fat, sugar and salt to your recipes. Choose recipes that include as many unprocessed ingredients as possible. Frozen ingredients are generally fine, and in some cases better than their fresh counterparts because the produce is picked at their peak and frozen quickly to lock in the nutrients. If using canned ingredients, look for brands have no added salt, or rinse the ingredients to remove some of the sodium.

  2. Control your portions. Increasing the number of servings that a recipe makes by decreasing the portion size is the easiest way to reduce the amount of calories, fat, sugar and salt that you eat. For baked goods, this could simply mean cutting a cake into smaller pieces or dropping teaspoonfuls of batter on the cookie sheet instead of tablespoons. For a main dish, measure out a smaller portion and fill the rest of your plate with lower-calorie sides so you don’t feel deprived.

  3. Discover a world of flavour! A great way to try different herbs and spices is to cook from different cuisines. It doesn’t have to be exotic – even Italian cooking, with its use of garlic, tangy tomato, lemony and peppery olive oils and aromatic herbs like basil, oregano and rosemary can help expand your palate without the salt!

  4. Instead of cream or whole milk… try 2% evaporated milk or 1% buttermilk. They can make comfort foods, like mac-and-cheese, mashed potatoes and cream soup taste just as rich without all the fat! For non-creamy foods, add moisture with low-sodium chicken broth instead of butter or oil.

  5. Instead of fat… Most people already know to use oils or non-hydrogenated margarine to replace butter and lard in their cooking, but there are more ways to reduce the fat in your favourite baked treats. Any oil, melted butter or whole milk in a recipe can be replaced 1:1 with plain low-fat yogurt, applesauce, pureed pumpkin, pureed prune or mashed banana, though it may affect the taste. The same can replace up to half of the solid butter in a recipe. Whole eggs can be replaced by egg whites – use two egg whites in place of one egg in baked goods to reduce the fat and boost the protein!

  6. Using less sugar can taste just as sweet. With most baked goods, you can cut the sugar by ¼ or ⅓ and hardly tell the difference! Add vanilla, cinnamon or almond extract for an extra flavour kick.

  7. Get creative with whole grains. Go beyond pasta, potatoes and white rice as your starchy staples and try different sides, like brown rice, wild rice, sweet potato, barley, quinoa or even lentils! Make your baked treats a little more wholesome by swapping out white flour in exchange for whole wheat – 1:1 should be fine for most recipes, but for lighter cakes, keeping half of the white flour is fine. Up to ¼ of the flour in a recipe can be exchanged for ingredients like wheat bran, wheat germ, oat bran, ground flaxseed or ground nuts.