Category Archives: Blog

A Few Tricks To Replace Fat And Salt.

Adding a little fat and salt is a great way to add flavor to your supper club menus. It just isn’t the healthiest thing for you. In working with some great scientists and chefs at Kraft I have learned a few tricks. For me the key is cutting back and finding healthier alternatives.

A great example of this is a “Beurre blanc” sauce that I make. The traditional French recipe calls for adding butter at multiple stages of preparation. The butter gives the sauce the rich, creamy flavor and mouth-feel. They key is the addition of butter at final stage as a thickener.

What I do is replace butter with olive oil to sauté the shallot and garlic at the first stage. In the final stage instead of using butter I use cornstarch as a thickener. The starch system is not at flavorful as butter and delivers a wonderful mouth feel. The net result is that sauce is lighter and really good.

In the 1990’s my wife was trying to cut back on the fat our children consumed so they were brought up eating Philadelphia “Free” no fat cream cheese. One day our daughter came back from a sleepover at girlfriend’s house and she was irate. Her friend’s mom served her real cream cheese with her bagel and our daughter realized that mom had been giving her the crappy “Free” product for years. She got over it and “Free” disappeared from the market.

One great way to reduce the salt in a dish and still have it pop with flavor is to add a little capsicum. Adding pepper, white pepper, cayenne or even a little Tabasco really helps reduced salt dishes. Capsicum is the component in pepper that delivers the heat. A little spice/heat goes a long way to replace salt’s impact on a dish.

The attached recipe uses my version of a “Beurre blanc” sauce that uses no butter and wasabi powder. The heat (capsicum) in the wasabi allows you to cut back on the salt and still deliver a very flavorful dish.

Check out the recipe

Fat and salt deliver flavor. Moderation is the key to healthiness. There are ways to deliver great flavor to your supper club menu. The tricks outlined above are ways to make your dishes healthier.

If you enjoy this blog and similar other stories/supper club lessons subscribe to get future blogs at www.impromptufridaynights.com/blog and be on the look out for my book Impromptu Friday Nights a Guide to Supper Clubs due out from Morgan James Publishing on January 30, 2018

Tricks To Add Flavor

When preparing for a supper club dinner party there are two key tricks you can use to add flavor to your dishes.

  1. Add a little fat

  2. Add some salt

Adding a little fat is one great way to add flavor. The French are better than good at adding flavor. That is why there is so much butter in French foods. There is a great recipe for what I call Pommes Maccarre that uses the triple crown of a ‘little’ fat: butter, cream and olive oil.

Check out the recipe.

In a previous life I was head of Marketing for Kraft Food Ingredients. Entenmann’s in the 1990’s was a sister company that had developed a fat replacer called MX. I was charged with marketing MX fat replacer to other food companies. Working on the project with me was as senior scientist that was an expert on fats and oils. As part of the development effort we tasted all kinds of foods that used the MX. With each tasting I asked the elderly scientist what he thought. Repeatedly he said: “Needs a little fat”. The scientist knew that it is true, fat delivers flavor.

Back in the 1990’s when Kraft came out with its line of “Free” no fat products the key fat replacer was a derivative of cellulose that was basically wood fiber. The joke at Kraft was “Save a tree don’t eat free”. It is no coincidence that these products were not a success. They gave the consumer what they wanted “fat free products”, but they didn’t taste very good.

The other key way to boost the flavor impact of a dish is to add salt. Having worked with quite a bit of cheese research and development at Kraft I can tell you that most American consumers equate “cheesiness” with “saltiness”. This is true with cheese as well as many other foods. Throw in that salt is cheap and that is why there is so much salt (sodium) in prepared foods.

Food manufacturers are bad, but restaurants are worse. A chef once told me that at Culinary school they were taught that if they didn’t get one or two complaints a night about salt the chefs wasn’t adding enough salt to their dishes. The salt in a dish intensifies the flavor and a broad consensus of consumers will say they taste better.

Adding a little fat and salt will certainly boost the flavor in your dinner party dishes. Adding salt and fat is great when you are entertaining. In tomorrow’s blog I will talk about some ways to cut fat and salt especially for your everyday dinner and still have it taste good.

If you enjoy this blog and similar other stories/supper club lessons subscribe to get future blogs at www.impromptufridaynights.com/blog and be on the look out for my book Impromptu Friday Nights a Guide to Supper Clubs due out from Morgan James Publishing on January 30, 2018

Would You Like A Beer Or A Glass Of Wine?

This is a major supper club question. Socializing over a meal at a supper club dinner party usually involves beer and wine. Historically supper clubs have been more wine centric, but with explosion of craft beers that can change. Picking the right craft beer is a lot easier for millennials.

In my neighborhood in Germantown we have been blessed with a great beer guy.
My buddy Tom Schoelkopf has worked for Anheuser Bush and other beer companies. He has always been a great guy to bring a selection of beer. Beer has really changed over the last 30 years. I grew up in the Lite era. Today the variety of flavor you can get form the myriad of craft beers is great. Tom has been the lead guy to educate us. He also likes my grilled pizza.

Check out the recipes:

Another beer story comes to mind. I used to run a company in the Philippines. Once I was at a cocktail party at the U.S. Embassy in Manila and got in a conversation with an Embassy staffer. He said he rated the countries he had worked in by the quality and quantity of the beer in the country. He said Pakistan was the pits. Past the Muslim aversion to alcohol, beer was really expensive. In the Philippine beer is pretty good and really cheap.

The kicker to that story came ten years later. I was walking through the Department Agriculture offices in Washington DC and recognized that former staffer walking down the hall. I couldn’t help myself. Unannounced I walked up to him and said: You are the guy that rates countries based on the quality and quantity of beer. The guy knew he was “the guy” but didn’t have clue who I was. I probably scared the political daylights out of him.

For me, a beer or two at the start of a dinner party is great. With my meal I prefer wine. The beauty of supper clubs is the group gets to decide and should have lots of fun in the decision making process.

If you enjoy this blog and similar other stories/supper club lessons subscribe to get future blogs at www.impromptufridaynights.com/blog and be on the look out for my book Impromptu Friday Nights a Guide to Supper Clubs due out from Morgan James Publishing on January 30, 2018.