The Best Light Recipe - Hardcover

A light recipe you make only once isn’t very helpful. Tofu lasagna and brownies made with prune puree might sound interesting, but one taste and you’ll likely go back to your favorite high-fat recipe. Eating sensibly is a more reasonable plan. But night after night of plain broiled chicken breasts and steamed brown rice is not very appealing either. No wonder most cooks stick with the recipes they know—that work and taste great—fat and calories be damned. At America’s Test Kitchen, we think food should taste good. Otherwise, what’s the point? Before starting this book, our goal was simple: Develop lighter recipes that we’d actually want to serve in our homes. We readily admit that we are not experts on diet or health, but our test kitchen knows how to make good food. After testing thousands of recipes, here’s what we learned. A lot of "light" recipes are shockingly bad. Gimmicks (like cookies so small they’re gone in a single bite), odd ingredients (many nonfat dairy products are so awful they will ruin otherwise decent recipes), and flawed techniques (chicken sautéed in cooking spray scorches easily) are the rule, not the exception. In general, we found that successful light cooking often requires new cooking methods in order to produce workable recipes that anyone would want to make more than once. Do you like the flavor and crunch of fried foods, such as eggplant Parmesan and fried chicken, but not all the fat and calories? We came up with a novel method for putting a crisp coating on foods: First, toast the bread crumbs in a bit of oil in a hot skillet before using them to coat the food; second, bake the breaded food on a wire rack set over a baking sheet so that it becomes crisp all over. Using this technique, we removed half the fat from these recipes without compromising their crispy, crunchy appeal. How do restaurant chefs make sauces taste so good? Butter and cream are the easy answers. But we found that when napping a seared chicken cutlet in a sauce you can make something almost as good by replacing the butter with light cream cheese and the cream with milk. Sounds suspicious, but our tasters had a hard time telling the difference between the original and our lightened version. Desserts presented the biggest challenge for our test kitchen. We weren’t willing to settle for some facsimile of cheesecake or to forgo the richness of a traditional brownie or chocolate Bundt cake. For us to deem a recipe successful, it had to come close to the real deal. In fact, after developing many of these recipes, we organized a tasting in which we pitted our recipes against full-fat versions and other low-fat versions. The result? Some of our most experienced tasters thought our light versions were full fat. In our chocolate desserts, we found ways to cut the fat by replacing some of the chocolate with cocoa powder (which has very little fat) and then blooming the cocoa in hot water to release its full flavor. To make our creamy, silky New York cheesecake (pictured on the front cover), we used a combination of yogurt cheese, low-fat cottage cheese, and light cream cheese and fooled everyone on our tasting panel. But we did have some failures. Our attempts to remove substantial amounts of fat from pie crust failed. Sometimes there is just no substitute for butter. Rather than offering a disappointing light recipe for pie crust, we’ve simply left this recipe out of the book. In such cases, our philosophy is, make the real thing or do without. In The Best Light Recipe, you’ll be able to chart our progress, recipe by recipe, as we describe everything we tried and explain what worked and what didn’t. Core technique boxes such as "Sweat Vegetables and Slash Fat" and "Give It Some Juice, and Reduce" will give you ideas for cooking healthier for a lifetime, while no-nonsense ingredient boxes give you the lowdown on that confusing array of low-fat, no-fat, and "lite" products, from "reduced-fat" mayonnaise to "light" peanut butter to "fat-free" cheddar cheese. Best of all, this book gives you 300 foolproof light recipes that won’t let you down. Whether you want to eat light from time to time, or every day, you needn’t skimp on flavor ever again.

Founded in 1980, Cook’s Illustrated magazine is renowned for its near-obsessive dedication to finding the best methods of American home cooking. The editors of Cook’s Illustrated are also the authors of a best-selling series of cookbooks (The Best Recipe series) and a series of companion books to the America’s Test Kitchen public television show (which reaches 2.9 million viewers per episode). Filmed in America’s Test Kitchen (a 2,500-square-foot test kitchen in Brookline, Massachusetts), the show features editors, test cooks, equipment testers, science experts, and food tasters from the magazine’s staff.

300 full-flavored Light Recipes from America’s most trusted test kitchen

Fed up with low-fat failures? So are we.

In The Best Light Recipe, we set out to re-examine the low-fat landscape by reviewing hundreds of published recipes for low-fat fare. Our findings? Miniscule portions, inferior ingredient substitutions, and fussy techniques are what make so many low-fat recipes unappealing. In response, we’ve placed special emphasis on developing easy-to-prepare, low-fat dishes you’ll want to make again and again. We use real food (no fake fats or artificial sweeteners), and our techniques are clear and -practical. The result is healthy American fare you can -actually look forward to making—and eating. And, if we couldn’t lighten a recipe and still make it taste really good (low-fat pie crust fell into this category), then you won’t find it here. The Best Light Recipe features a mix of naturally light recipes as well as recipe makeovers of all your favorite dishes—chicken pot pie, lasagna, brownies—and, yes, even cheesecake. In short, The Best Light Recipe is your essential guide to lighter, great-tasting recipes that deliver every time.

Light Guacamole That’s Creamy, Not Watery Replacing 2 (out of 3) avocados with cooked, pureed lima beans didn’t sound like such an appetizing idea until we dug in—tortilla chips in hand. What did tasters say? "Tastes like real guacamole!"

No More Skimpy Squares of Lasagna Recipes for low-fat lasagna omit the meat and skimp on the cheese or offer portions so small they don’t satisfy. Swapping in ground turkey for the ground beef and pork allowed us to make a rich, thick meat sauce while reduced-fat cheeses and real Parmesan meant we didn’t have to skimp. As for portion-size, you won’t need to reach for seconds.

Crispy Chicken Parmesan That’s Not Fried How did we do it? We traded in the frying pan for a baking sheet and toasted the bread crumbs ahead of time with just a little oil for flavor and color. Baking the chicken on a rack allows air to circulate all around, causing the crust to become extra-crispy all over.

Light Brownies Made with Chocolate and Real Butter Most low-fat brownies rely on cocoa -powder, which is lower in fat than -chocolate, but doesn’t deliver enough rich chocolate flavor. We found that a combination of semisweet chocolate and cocoa powder makes really good brownies. And, an unusual addition—warm water—intensifies the flavor of the cocoa and keeps the brownies moist.

Light Cheesecake That Tastes Like the Real Deal Most low-fat cheesecakes have a grainy -texture. After 28 failed attempts, we finally discovered the secret to success—light cream cheese, low-fat cottage cheese, and -homemade yogurt cheese—all pureed in a food -processor for a lean cheesecake with an ultra-smooth, lush texture.