How to create healthier holiday cookies
Simple, healthy exchanges and tips for the next batch of Christmas cookies.
We love Christmas cookies, not to mention the daily lunch box, and especially like delicious cookies, which are also healthier! Here are five tips on how to make your favorite cookies better throughout the year. Happy baking!
Tip 1: Add fibers to your cookies.
Try replacing part (or all) of general purpose flour with wholemeal, wholemeal and/or oatmeal. If you are used to the taste and texture of wholemeal cookies, some biscuits will have the same pleasure when made from 100% wholemeal. By using wholemeal instead of wholemeal, your biscuits will receive approximately four times the fibre in each batch.
For cookies with a finer texture, or if you're still getting used to the taste and texture of wholemeal, try using finer ground wholemeal or white wholemeal with a milder flavour instead of about half of the flour in general purpose flour - you'll still get the added benefit of extra fibre without a lot of wheat flavour.
Or try to replace 1/4 to 1/2 cups of universal flour with oat flakes or oatmeal ground into "flour".
Tip 2: Reduce the added sugar.
Cookies are delicious, and we are not saying that we should do without adding sugar at all, especially on holidays. But there are ways to reduce it and still have delicious cookies to finish the show. Instead of covering sugar cookies with sugar glaze, sprinkle them with nuts, orange peel, dry flowers or seeds, or sprinkle them with a little dark chocolate. Experiment with your favourite cookie recipe and try to use a little less sweetener and add vanilla, almonds or lemon for a sweet confectionary taste (without sugar). We love natural sweeteners such as honey and maple syrup in our biscuits for their delicious taste, but remember that they relate to the total amount of sugar added.
Tip 3: Add Omega 3 promotion
Grinded flax or linseed flour also adds fibres to bakery products. Flax seeds also contain alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), an omega-3 fatty acid that is associated with the health of the cardiovascular system. Try adding 2-4 tablespoons of ground flax (or linseed flour) to your batch of cookies. The taste of flaxseed is supplemented by oatmeal cookies or cookies with a strong flavor, such as ginger molasses or snickerdoodle.
Tip 4: Keep the sodium at arm's length.
Some bakery products can have surprisingly high sodium content. The target is no more than 1/2 teaspoon of salt per batch of cookies. If you are on a diet with a limited salt content, try to reduce the amount of salt in a pack of biscuits to 1/4 teaspoon.
Tip 5: Remove trans fats and other artificial ingredients.
Keep away from ingredients that contain partially hydrogenated oils (or trans fats) such as margarine and most vegetable fats. Consider limiting other artificial ingredients, such as artificial food colouring.
One of the advantages of homemade baking is a simple list of ingredients. If you bake your own cookies, you can use whole ingredients and avoid most or all of the recycled ingredients found in many packaged cookies.
We are not Scrooges - we know that festive cookies look more festive when they are decorated with powder or coloured glaze - but we want to keep the ingredients as "natural" as possible. A little food colouring from time to time is probably not so bad, but if you want to avoid artificial ingredients, look for all natural food colours, such as red beet dye, available at health food stores or on the internet. Or try some chocolate or finely chopped nuts to spice up your liver.
Tip 6: Make your heart healthier.
Replace part of the butter, margarine or shorteners with heart healthful butters such as rapeseed or olive. For each tablespoon of butter that you replace with heartwarming butter, remove at least 5 grams of saturated fat from your batch of cookies. (A batch of 2 dozen cookies made with 1 cup of butter contains almost 5 grams of saturated fat per cookie.) In EatingWell's test kitchen, we were lucky enough to replace up to 50% of the butter in the recipe. Remember that if you reduce the butter in your recipe, you may lose some of its softening and moisturizing properties. Biscuits that use a little oil instead of butter can be a little crispy and dry out earlier. To obtain the best cookie texture, you should store the extra cookies in an airtight container.
