#slow-cooking

Recipe => https://omnivorescookbook.com/chinese-bbq-ribs/

Our Whole Duck is fresh, tender, and ideal for creating gourmet meals at home. Known for its rich flavour and succulent meat, duck is perfect for roasting, braising, or slow-cooking. Impress your guests with a beautifully cooked duck centrepiece for any special occasion or family feast.

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The end result is that we can eat the salmon, a rich source of omega-3 fat, with the bones. No need to remove anything. Just take a chunk, as you can see in the photo, and eat it whole. It is a good idea to marinate the salmon for a few hours prior to baking it. This will create enough moisture to ensure that the salmon does not dry up during the baking process. If you are a carnivore, you can make a significant contribution to sustainability by eating the whole animal, or as much of the animal as possible. This applies to fish, as I discussed here before (citeN=citeN+1;document.write(Number(citeN)), citeN=citeN+1;document.write(Number(citeN)), citeN=citeN+1;document.write(Number(citeN))). Add eating less to this habit, and your health will benefit greatly.

As a side note, the cabbage and onion tend to completely dissolve after 1 h or so of slow cooking. The added vegetables give the dish quite a nutritional punch. For example, the cabbage alone seems to be a great source of vitamin C (which is not completely destroyed by the slow cooking), the anti-inflammatory amino acid glutamine, and the DNA repair-promoting substance known as indole-3-carbinol (citeN=citeN+1;document.write(Number(citeN)) ). The good folks over at the Highbrow Paleo group on Facebook (citeN=citeN+1;document.write(Number(citeN)) ) had a few other great ideas posted in response to my previous post on the low glycemic load of white rice (citeN=citeN+1;document.write(Number(citeN)) ), such as cooking white rice in bone broth (thanks Derrick!).

There is no need for any oil in the pan. On a low fire the small amount of water at the bottom will heat up, circulate, and essentially steam the meatballs. The water will also prevent the meatballs from sticking to the pan. Some moisture will also be released by the meat. Part of the fat from the meat will be released and accumulate at the bottom of the pan. If you add tomato sauce and mix, the fat will become part of the resulting red sauce. This sauce will add moisture back to the dish, as the meatballs sometimes get a bit dry from the cooking. Five meatballs of the type that we used (about 15 percent fat) will have about 57 g of protein and 32 g of fat; the latter mostly saturated and monounsaturated (both healthy). They will also be a good source of vitamins B12 and B6, niacin, zinc, selenium, and phosphorus. Add a fruit or a sweet potato as a side dish to 3-5 meatballs and you have a delicious and nutritious meal that may eve impress some people!

As I said before on this blog, I am yet to be convinced that grilled meat is truly unhealthy in the absence of leaky gut problems. I am referring here to high heat cooking-induced Maillard reactions (browning) and the resulting advanced glycation endproducts (AGEs). Whenever you cook a food in high heat, to the point of browning it, you generate a Maillard reaction. Searing and roasting meat usually leads to that. Elevated levels of serum AGEs presumably accelerate the aging process in humans. This is supported by research with uncontrolled diabetics, who seem to have elevated levels of serum AGEs. In fact, a widely used measure in the treatment of diabetes, the HbA1c (or percentage of glycated hemoglobin), is actually a measure of endogenous AGE formation. (Endogenous = generated by our own bodies.) Still, evidence that a person with an uncompromised gut can cause serum levels of AGEs to go up significantly by eating AGEs is weak, and evidence that any related serum AGE increases lead the average person to develop health problems is pretty much nonexistent. The human body can handle AGEs, as long as their concentration is not too high. We cannot forget that a healthy HbA1c in humans is about 5 percent; meaning that AGEs are created and dealt with by our bodies. A healthy HbA1c in humans is not 0 percent. Thanks again to Justin for sending me the full text version of the Birlouez-Aragon et al. (2010) article, which is partially reviewed here. See this post and the comments under it for some background on this discussion. The article is unequivocally titled: “A diet based on high-heat-treated foods promotes risk factors for diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular diseases.” This article is recent, and has already been cited by news agencies and bloggers as providing “definitive” evidence that high-heat cooking is bad for one’s health. Interestingly, quite a few of those citations are in connection with high-heat cooking of meat, which is not even the focus of the article. In fact, the Birlouez-Aragon et al. (2010) article provides no evidence that high-heat cooking of meat leads to AGEing in humans. If anything, the article points at the use of industrial vegetable oils for cooking as the main problem. And we know already that industrial vegetable oils are not healthy, whether you cook with them or drink them cold by the tablespoon. But there are a number of good things about this article. For example, the authors summarize past research on AGEs. They focus on MRPs, which are “Maillard reaction products”. One of the summary statements supports what I have said on this blog before: "The few human intervention trials […] that reported on health effects of dietary MRPs have all focused on patients with diabetes or renal failure." That is, there is no evidence from human studies that dietary AGEs cause health problems outside the context of preexisting conditions that themselves seem to be associated with endogenous AGE production. To that I would add that gut permeability may also be a problem, as in celiacs ingesting large amounts of AGEs. As you can see from the quote below, the authors decided to focus their investigation on a particular type of AGE, namely CML or carboxymethyllysine. "...we decided to specifically quantify CML, as a well-accepted MRP indicator ..." As I noted in my comments under this post (the oven roasted pork tenderloin post), one particular type of diet seems to lead to high serum CML levels – a vegetarian diet. So let us see what the authors studied: "... we conducted a randomized, crossover, intervention trial to clarify whether a habitual diet containing high-heat-treated foods, such as deep-fried potatoes, cookies, brown crusted bread, or fried meat, could promote risk factors of type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular diseases in healthy people." Well, “deep-fried potatoes” is a red flag, don’t you think? They don’t say what oil was used for deep-frying, but I bet it was not coconut or olive oil. Cheap industrial vegetable oils (corn, safflower etc.) are the ones normally used (and re-used) for deep-frying. This is in part because these oils are cheap, and in part because they have high “smoke points” (the temperature at which the oil begins to generate smoke). Let us see what else the authors say about the dietary conditions they compared: "The STD was prepared by using conventional techniques such as grilling, frying, and roasting and contained industrial food known to be highly cooked, such as extruded corn flakes, coffee, dry cookies, and well-baked bread with brown crust. In contrast, the STMD comprised some raw food and foods that were cooked with steam techniques only. In addition, convenience products were chosen according to the minimal process applied (ie, steamed corn flakes, tea, sponge cakes, and mildly baked bread) ..." The STD diet was the one with high-heat preparation of foods; in the STMD diet the foods were all steam-cooked at relatively low temperatures. Clearly these diets were mostly of plant-based foods, and of the unhealthy kind! The following quote, from the results, pretty much tells us that the high omega-6 content of industrial oils used for deep frying was likely to be a major confounder, if not the main culprit: "... substantial differences in the plasma fatty acid profile with higher plasma concentrations of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids […] and lower concentrations of omega-6 fatty acids […] were analyzed in the STMD group compared with in the STD group." That is, the high-heat cooking group had higher plasma concentrations of omega-6 fats, which is what you would expect from a group consuming a large amount of industrial vegetable oils. One single tablespoon per day is already a large amount; these folks were probably consuming more than that. Perhaps a better title for this study would have been: “A diet based on foods deep-fried in industrial vegetable oils promotes risk factors for diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular diseases.” This study doesn’t even get close to indicting charred meat as a major source of serum AGEs. But it is not an exception among studies that many claim to do so. Reference H Birlouez-Aragon, I., Saavedra, G., Tessier, F.J., Galinier, A., Ait-Ameur, L., Lacoste, F., Niamba, C.-N., Alt, N., Somoza, V., & Lecerf, J.-M. (2010). A diet based on high-heat-treated foods promotes risk factors for diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular diseases. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 91(5), 1220-1226.