Easy Low Fat Cooking Techniques

Stir frying is a nutritious way to cut calories while creating healthy and delicious meals using low fat cooking techniques.

Selecting wholesome, nutritious foods is the first step to creating healthy, low fat meals. But ingredients are just part of the process. The preparation and cooking techniques you use to turn those ingredients into low fat meals are equally important. For instance:

When you switch from pan-frying to roasting, or from sautéing to stir frying, you dodge countless calories and fat grams.
When you use tofu in place of meat, you not only cut fat but you save on cooking time, too, because tofu takes just a few minutes to heat through.
With tofu you'll also be getting a dietary dose of soy isoflavones, which may reduce the risk of some kinds of breast and ovarian cancer and ease hot flashes and may impede the growth of tumors.

So, this month, try the new techniques described in these three pages. You might like the results so much that pressing tofu, stir frying and cooking fish could become new habits.

1. Low fat cooking technique: stir frying

Stir frying is a great low fat cooking technique because it calls for keeping the ingredients moving constantly in the pan, so very little oil is needed to prevent sticking. Oil is mostly used to add flavor.

To start:

Set a wok or wide skillet over high heat until hot.
Add seasonings like garlic and ginger first, followed by meat, then vegetables. (Meat is often cooked first, then removed so the drippings can flavor the vegetables; the meat is returned to the wok at the end.) But stir fries do not require meat: You can whip up satisfying vegetarian low fat meals in minutes.
The trick to the perfect stir fry is preparation: cut and measure all ingredients before the wok is hot; once cooking starts there's little time for anything else.
Constant stirring is critical so that all ingredients come in frequent contact with the hot pan.

Read on to discover how cooking fish via roasting is an excellent technique.