50
How can I make (east) asian food healthy?
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
50 points (100.0% liked)
Cooking
6566 readers
7 users here now
Welcome to LW Cooking, a community for discussing all things related to food and cooking! We want this to be a place for members to feel safe to discuss and share everything they love about the culinary arts. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow!
Taken a nice photo of your creation? We highly encourage sharing with our friends over at !foodporn@lemmy.world.
Posts in this community must be food/cooking related and must have one of the "tags" below in the title.
We would like the use and number of tags to grow organically. For now, feel free to use a tag that isn't listed if you think it makes sense to do so. We are encouraging using tags to help organize and make browsing easier. As time goes on and users get used to tagging, we may be more strict but for now please use your best judgement. We will ask you to add a tag if you forget and we reserve the right to remove posts that aren't tagged after a time.
TAGS:
- [QUESTION] - For questions about cooking.
- [RECIPE} - Share a recipe of your own, or link one.
- [MEME] - Food related meme or funny post.
- [DISCUSSION] - For general culinary discussion.
- [TIP] - Helpful cooking tips.
FORMAT:
[QUESTION] What are your favorite spices to use in soups?
Other Cooking Communities:
!bbq@lemmy.world - Lemmy.world's home for BBQ.
!foodporn@lemmy.world - Showcasing your best culinary creations.
!sousvide@lemmy.world - All things sous vide precision cooking.
!koreanfood@lemmy.world - Celebrating Korean cuisine!
While posting and commenting in this community, you must abide by the Lemmy.World Terms of Service: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
- Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
- Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
- Shitposts and memes are allowed until they prove to be a problem.
Failure to follow these guidelines will result in your post/comment being removed and/or more severe actions. All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users. We ask that the users report any comment or post that violates the rules, and to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Professionally cooked western food also uses a lot of sugar and salt - especially frozen foods. Sugar is really fucking addictive so eating high sugar foods regularly will lower how much sweetness you'll get from it - this sounds especially relevant if you're directly adding sugar in addition to the sauce.
Sugar and salt both have very negative side effects if over consumed but a moderate amount of them is fine. I'd suggest trying to scale back the total sweetness to whatever level you can tolerate without it becoming bland and use more flavored spices to make up the difference. Additionally, not all sugars are created equal and it might benefit you to try switching off of refined sugar to one of the alternative sugars so that your body can more easily process your sweeteners.
Opinions may vary but I think it's incorrect to try to completely eliminate sweeteners from your diet, usually I've seen people suffer from extreme cravings that drive them to occasionally binge eat candy before returning to a "sugar free" lifestyle. It's important to respect yourself and allow for moderation rather than trying to cold turkey yourself. Duck sauce is extremely sweet but having a small quantity of meat smothered in duck sauce among an otherwise balanced meal can be a nice and reasonable treat.
Many western foods made at home can easily made with less salt and rarely require sugar to be added.
I can't reduce the salt or sugar in the premade sauces that are required in east asian dishes. I don't know what duck sauce is but we don't eat that in asia; it's also a condiment and not a required ingredient in our dishes like fermented bean paste
this sample recipe for taiwanese spicy beef soup which is a classic taiwanese dish as you can see requires both rock sugar and salt to be added to the already salt doubanjiang: https://seonkyounglongest.com/taiwanese-beef-noodle-soup/
Duck sauce is a name that was adapted in American Chinese cooking. The original product, which is used in Asia (particularly known with Canto food), is plum sauce. Same thing, though you may get a slightly different product depending on where it was made.
There's a huge difference between using salt and sugars, and adding TOO MUCH of them. Just cutting the suggested amount added in half gets you closer to what you're asking for. As for the premade stuff, just add less, or dilute them a bit maybe.
I think you were the only one who understood my question
Cutting down on the sauces is a good alternative and what I'm doing in the meantime; unfortunately I think these sauces are heavy contributors to the flavour of the dish so the result is the flavour is kinda weak in the dish. Doubanjiang or gochujang for example are staples of the respective Asian cuisines and dishes.
I think some kind of food is just not designed to be healthy. It was made to be tasty without thinking about health. You can either make it more healthy and less tasty or you can eat it less often (as a treat).
yep, that's true. our typical dishes are actually not much meat and have a lot of vegetables like water spinach dishes