Calorie counting home cooked recipes

What I love about cooking from scratch is the satisfaction of making great tasting meals, but also, they generally seem to be lower in calories, fat and salt when prepared at home. As someone who also works in the weight loss industry, I thought I'd share some of my insight and experiences on how cooking from scratch can really help when trying to live a healthy lifestyle, lose weight, or whatever your goal may be.

When calorie counting, there are obvious benefits when preparing home cooked meals - to start with, you know exactly what you're putting in your food. Not necessarily the case if you're making Bolognese with a jar for example, I'm talking about truly making it from scratch (tomatoes, herbs and spices etc). When making a recipe from scratch, it's always a good idea to see which ingredients are contributing the most calories and fat to the recipe as a whole - this way you can choose alternative ingredients or cooking methods to save calories.  I use a calorie counter called Nutracheck to check the calorie and fat content of my recipes. There is a recipe builder where you put each ingredient of your recipe into the tool and it'll show you the calorie and fat content of each ingredient and how this is contributing to the recipe as a whole. Using my Potato Salad recipe as an example, it easily shows me if I use Extra light Mayo instead of original, I'll save 15.2g fat per serving - pretty good eh!

Another good tip is using water instead of oil. After all, oil is pretty much 100% fat with 1g fat per 1ml (and 1g fat contains 9 calories) - so substituting it wherever possible is always a good idea.  Obviously there are some foods that need oil to help them roast (roast potatoes/veg for example), however, using a stewing-type recipe as an example, adding water instead of oil when frying the onions and garlic to start with really doesn't make any difference to the flavour - and it'll save you a hell of a lot of calories.

Finally, it's always worth considering if an alternative cooking method can be used to help save calories - a prime example being grilling instead of frying. Again, online-based services such as Nutracheck can show you the calorie difference between fried and grilled ingredients as well. If frying is the only option, it's worth investing in a good quality non-stick pan. I say invest because a good one will set you back at least £30, but this will mean it has a high-quality non-stick surface so you will need hardly any oil (if any) to fry your ingredients.

At the end of the day it doesn't take long to begin recognising where more sensible ingredient swaps and cooking methods can be made, so hopefully you'll find some of the techniques mentioned here useful.

Image courtesy of BobPetUK