Healthy Food !!!

Healthy Food !!!

It is a big topic! just trying to diddle and fiddle around.Nutrition professionals usually do not use the term “healthy foods” because the fact that a food is healthy or not will very much depend on how much we eat of it how often, what our nutritional needs are, what else we eat in the diet, who is eating it, who it is for?  There is no single complete food that provides all the nutrients as we need. Also, every person in the family have different type & level of nutrient they need individually per day basis  so that’s one family meal  will not be suited each member of the family. Foods including a variety of different foods such as vegetables, whole grains, fruits, dairy products, legumes, lean meats, poultry and fish and enough fluids like water and watching portion sizes are key to a healthy diet.

Healthy eating and lifestyle are important to how we feel, look and how much we enjoy life. Eating a healthy diet will reduce the risk of diseases such as blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, obesity, diabetes, cancer. I would say everyone has to educate at least basic level about healthy food and its component. 

My experience  says most of the disease right start from the home kitchen.  It starts with what you feed to your kids and what we continue eating throughout the day to day life.

How can we make food healthy? the answer keeps simple, fresh and wholesome. I want to explain a bit more for the portion and serving size.

The portion is how much food you choose to eat at one time, whether in a restaurant or  from a package or in your own kitchen. A portion is 100 percent under our control what we decided to eat.

• Serving Size is the amount of food listed on a product  so all of the nutritional values you see on the label are for the serving size the manufacturer suggests on the package.
  Once we understand the difference, it’s easier to determine how much to serve. When cooking at home: Offer the proper “serving” to each member of the family.

How do we control?

1. When dining out: Skip the appetizers and split a large salad or main dish with a friend. 
2. When ordering takes away  at home: Eat one slice of pizza instead of two, and order a small instead of a medium to split the family so the pieces are smaller. 
3. Watching movies at home or at the theatre:  Don’t eat while watching TV or a movie or when you’re on the computer. It’s harder to control how much you’re eating if you don’t pay attention to what you’re putting in your mouth, and when. At the movies, share a box of popcorn, and avoid the free-refill tubs and skip the candy. 
4. Avoid Chinese and  Eat much as you like a buffet.  End of the day your stomach is fix and whatever variety or food you can eat full not more than this so why we go these place better we should go decent place and get what you like. 
5. At snack time: Never eat straight from the bag or box. Measure out snacks, including fruits and veggies, into an appropriate portion, sizes before giving them to your kids.

These are general serving sizes 

• 1 slice of bread
• about 200 gm  rice or pasta (cooked)
• 1 small piece of fruit (super-large apples are 2+ servings)
• 1 wedge of melon
• 80 ml fruit juice
• 200 milk or yogurt
• 50 gm of cheese
• 80 gm  meat, poultry or fish 

 Healthy Cooking Idea 

Cook and use fresh produce as much as possible.Fresh, so there not going to be added addictive to preserved food such as sugar, salt, sulfur, benzoate, brine  and so on.

Sourcing healthy produces and using an unhealthy cooking technique doesn't make sense for example if we buy fresh from the fish market to battered deep fried where  we could be baked / grilled that fish with same spice or more ever poached adventurously with your favourite herb and spices. 

Count Total Calories What You Need and Stick within line Splitting at least 5 Meal a day. As average calories, we need for the day is about 2200 to 27000.

I use the website below to count calories, in general, & it's very easy and cover all most of all ingredients in the different form and it's  free.

http://www.nutracheck.co.uk/CaloriesIn/

Customize your food, even though burger goes with a slice of cheese,  you can avoid easily replacing with an extra slice of cucumber or slice of meat with fatty patties. 

Go for vegetarian or wholesome produces rather than processes like a slice of salami/ ham  rather than with a slice of chicken or vegetable. 

Greek yoghurt to light and low-fat yoghurt, ghee to olive oil, refine flour to wholemeal flour, white bread  with wholemeal brown bread, frozen / can / preserved food to fresh food, cream to low-fat milk. 

• Stock up on heart-healthy cookbooks and recipes for cooking ideas. keep it simple 
• Cook the wholesome simple dish with least ingredient balance of  carbohydrate, protein, green.
• Use grades of meat rather than prime  and be sure to trim the fat off the edges before cooking.
• Use cuts of red meat and pork labeled loin and round as they usually have the least fat. With poultry, use the leaner light meat (breasts) instead of the fattier dark meat (legs and thighs) and be sure to remove the skin and trim the fat.
• Make recipes or egg dishes with egg whites, instead of egg yolks.  Substitute two egg whites for each egg yolk.
• For recipes that require dairy products, try low-fat or fat-free versions of milk, yogurt and cheese.
• Use reduced-fat, low-fat, light or no-fat salad dressings (if you need to limit your calories) on salads, for dips or as marinades.
• Use and prepare foods that contain little or no salt.

Basic Snack and Natural Food Idea

Try healthy way of the cooking idea such as instead of frying, shallow frying grilling do with steaming, baking, poaching.

Instead of stir-fried we can do blanch.

Instead of pouring oil we can spray every little help make a difference to live.

Try at least once a week raw food  for day and another day the vegetarian same way we can try vegan, gluten free. It depends on how deep we want to go. I would suggest going with slow and steady.

Try light meal such as steamed edamame bean instead deep fried peanuts, deep fried chips.

Replace refine sugar with honey, salty potato crisps to raw nuts, or roasted no salt nuts. animal fat, lard  with cold press olive oil, cook with less salt,

fizzy drink to simply still water or fresh cold press juice or smoothie.

Always make meal balance of carbohydrate, protein, green vegetable.Eat same in total for the day but small portion short time interval and many meals.

I always try to make one meal under 500 calories with about 120  gm of protein can be meat chicken, fish, lentil, tofu balancing carbohydrate / Starch of  about 100gm, and about 80gm of green vegetable. That mines from 500 calories from each meal will give us more snacking or light dessert opportunities.

All above figure are from my head there is no data, factor or based formula to prove, it all it based on my 18 years of cooking experience and also used to be developed  special meal for 68 global major airlines in worldwide and recently I attended Nutrition classed and I’m qualified Nutritionist and again I’m doing and writing it  for my interest.

 Why there is no large chain of Indian food establishment like Bella Italia or Cafe Rouge.. in the UK ?

The first answer is that they not fast enough. 

All we need is a fast, eye appealing, location and attentive  customer service along with a decent food. Profitable business model. Although Chicken Tikka Masala is now recognised as the national dish in the UK but there are no national chains.

Indian food isn't fast yet and not going to be until the team of expert make it happen before too late.

Best I can see is that can be slow cook fast service so we don’t lose taste and flavour on sauces meat and chicken. The vegetable and seafood can be a la carte or cook  just before serve. Prepare in advance and order to make. Basically reheating and finishing per customer demand such and mild, hot, extra sauce 

Prepare in advance and order to make. Basically reheating and finishing per customer demand such and mild, hot, extra sauce.

Most of the Indian food's business model is the small family-run restaurant and claims secret family recipes that where the problem comes  and also everyone tries to be unique not like if we eat any Italian restaurant more or less tomato salsa  is same but Tikka Masala taste different in every single different establishment.  There is no standardisation like French got 5 base  sauces and make out of derivative sauces with the construct and  deconstruct some of those. 

We did same in The Bombay Bicycle Club, it was 17 branches. Basically, we use to have 2 base sauce and two way to batch cooking. one for vegetarian  meat and another one for non-vegetarian with one dominating spice pairing. All tandoori marination basic was same one spice mix on the  end use to make the difference.we use to  create about 45 difference dishes adding different spice mix, cream, lemon and soo on.

French food is extremely varied as each region has its own distinctive cuisine and style, prepared from local producers and determined by the seasons. For example, the Alps region is known for its warming cheese-focused dishes such as fondue and raclette, Provencal food embraces olive oils, fresh tomatoes and wild herbs, and in Normandy, the food is rich with butter and crème Fraiche, balanced by apples.

Exactly same goes to Indian food. Noth Indian style food based on rich, dairy, butter accompanied with naan roti chapati.Similarly  south Indian food mainly  coconut base flavoured with curry leaves flavoured rice, vegetable based accompanied  lentil or rice based bread and same as other regional cuisine specialised on their specialised ingredients.

I'm just trying to compare above two cuisines in term of product standardisation and figure out myself where they are and where we are now. We have the better history than them but  we just left behind just because of product standardisation.

Precise recipes,  right aromatic spice additions to make different  sauces and industrialise the cooking process to a minute and counting every second  level and still manage to retain the taste and flavour to serve quickly. That’s what Indian restaurant have to do and keep in simple so any chefs can cook it.

To attract any chefs in Indian food establish  we need to create platforms such as  flexible working hours,  good rate of pay, holidays, safe working environment and better future same as Nando or Wagamama or even better to attract more youth and local.

Apprentice, train to jobless people from job centre using government grant on training and sending free courses from the government, encouraging to take online government funded courses are the best option. 

Indian cuisine mean huge, north, south basically  22 regions got 22 type different cuisine and they have specialised spice mix cooking method and specialised chef. That specialise chef mean if we want to cover 2 cuisines we need to put two specialised chefs.

That’s a big problem for Indian restaurants moving forward. They will have to find a way of creating the food without having the too many skilled chefs, skilled chef doing the non-skill job, not using a simple machine to chop the onion  that will impact to final cost to complete Wagamama, Nandoos of a similar type of food establish. 

My experience says if Indian restaurant wants to go for chain has to have production kitchen, precise recipes, fix supplier and quality monitoring procedure from farm to fork,  product specification, menu spec, training plan, construction and deconstruction of recipes. 

Also using modern technique and equipment to beef up cooking process such as brat pan, steamer, smoker, such as tortilla maker to make roti and  chapatti simple example if we use crepe maker to make dosa so anyone can make it with short training  otherwise we need to have south Indian cuisine specialised chef. 

Simple standard equipment makes different and standardisation of the product like the deep fryer. Let's say if we fix the size  and shape of onion bhaji.We can easily fix cooking time and temperature after some batch of product trail but I recently found one restaurant in centre London using the pot of oil for deep fry and curiously asked Head Chef.  One off or regular process, without any hesitation, replied it  is every day.

Most of the cases, when Head chef changes, recipes and taste changes because there is no spec or any written data to follow what poor chef will do? 

Also, recipes are not all the time going to be right, depend on when we set up recipes, what varieties of spices used and  especially chilli and most of the aromatic spices, is it the same origin,

is it from the same season?  .Recipes just say 1 tsp or 2.5 gm of something. It is the natural product so we need to set up tasting panel and cross check, update recipes, cross training, need to be placed in the system basically such as kitchen operation manual start with farm to finish on the fork and furthermore where that wastage will go such as recyclable packaging bin or standard bin. 

In terms of food, keep meat, chicken or fish same at least change the vegetable per season with keeping same sauce. If we want to grow that I strongly suggest not to use ready made paste and spice mix otherwise, it will be same as next door. I see most of small restaurant uses tikka paste, balti paste or nonsense paste so there are no exclusive taste others and that perception spread to the whole cuisine. 

At least, don’t use frozen vegetable and from the  supermarket wherever we buy it is standard product and just different branding most of case and customer easily figure out as they buy from the same place as they are not going to be the different part of the world. 

Keep simple and precise taste and cooking process.

Some  dishes from the menu have to keep in line with current market trends by quick introducing special, healthy menu as much as possible introducing  like summer for the yoghurt ( sound interesting than milk  )  shake, chat, grill, bbq and light dishes  in summer. Soup,  spicy, ragout dishes for winter and quickly catch up any media attention, quick add and remove dishes or ingredient to business menu mould   per media attention, news, articles from a public health body, the government body.  

Recent bad media such as a cheap cut of beef were using instead lamb, dirty kitchen, cockroaches and mouses in the kitchen,  immigration issue  stereotype like is hot and spicy, unhealthy food, colour and sugar laden food  also some percentage affected. 

Also, most of supermarket doing the better standard of  food and producing per best chef from country recipes and guarantee ingredient list ( except horse meat scandal ) this is also killer for the Indian restaurant. 

 Wagamama and Nandoo do business in lunch and dinner or any time of day so we need to make a menu which can be fit for same principal so It will change the whole conception of Indian food and educate the customer on above all. It should be suited to any age and type and time  and location. 

If we follow above all it will  automatically affordable so it will go to need  market, not the luxury. 

I wrote all from experience as Group Executive Head Chef 17 branch the Bombay Bicycle Club  , Development Chef of Do & Co doing research , development , shows and  presentations about 68 global airline and  doing high profile global  events such and formula 1 , Rolex master event , Chelsea flower show and doing multi cuisine , Euro Cup , Championship final  working with one of expert team from world.

If anyone want to add any comment please most welcome to make it  for better future of Indian food,  Chef & business. The Indian mean for me is again Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Bhutan.

I took the above establish name from my personal list of chain  from London.The quality of food, good service  less damage in the pocket are three best combinations to repeat same place week in and week out.