Low Fat Healthy Cooking Substitutions for Roux?

by Peter
(Saint Louis, MO)

Is there a low fat, healthy cooking substitution for roux? Because I absolutely am enslaved to making sauces, my wife and I are experiencing "fluffiness" for want of a better word and our bodies and existing clothes are progressively more difficult to match. We don't want to buy more clothes!

What would you suggest to a sauce fanatic to use as a basis other than a roux? We are trying to minimize our use of carbs/starches during this adjustment period to get our weight down and yet I just love sauces with beef, pork, chicken and fish.


Peter-
Roux is fat and starch. Fat is fattening. Butter has such great flavor and gives shine and texture to sauces, but also adds a lot of fat and calories.

Take a tip from Asian cuisines, and get familiar with cornstarch slurry. Cornstarch has no fat, and only 50 calories per tablespoon. Dissolving cornstarch in ANY cold, flavored liquid will thicken sauces and add the flavor of the slurry liquid. The drawback is, that it doesn't taste like butter, and cornstarch gives a glassy sheen like most Asian Foods.

So, if you want to try this with a steak, I'd make a slurry with cornstarch and worchesteshire sauce or your favorite steak sauce. Bring some beef broth to a simmer and slowly add the slurry in stages, testing the nappe with the back of a spoon.

In the alternative, you can use adjuncts that are thicker than your broth. For instance, adding fat-free sour cream to some beef broth gives you a Beef Stroganoff type sauce. You can even use plain yogurt, but it's a bit tangy.

Lastly, you can thicken with powdered gelatins, just like making jello. Get plain, unflavored gelatin and whisk into hot sauces. This can make a sauce gummy though. I used this technique when I was Executive Chef at a big hospital.

Keep experimenting until you reach your health and flavor balance.

Chef Todd.