The winter holidays are one of the best times of the year to share good food with your friends and loved ones. All those potluck parties are a great place to try out new recipes or make something a little bit decadent that you wouldn’t normal cook (it’s cold out there and we need those extra calories just to stay warm, right?). But there’s one ingredient that can turn up this time of year that you should be wary of since you want to feed your friends healthy food not poison them.
Partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, the source of trans fats (which have gotten a lot of deservedly bad press lately), is still out there and likely to show up on party platters and dessert trays in the form of crackers and cake mixes and who knows what else.
But what are trans fats and why are they so bad for us, you ask? The answer involves a bit of chemistry, bear with me (and remember I’m a food writer not a chemist).
Fats are made up of building blocks of fatty acids (kind of like proteins are made of building blocks of amino acids). There are saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated fatty acids, it depends on whether the carbon atoms in the chain are “saturated” with a corresponding hydrogen atom. Saturated fats are linked up with all the hydrogen they desire and make a nice long straight chain of atoms. Because the molecules are straight, they stack up very nicely and remain solid at room temperature (butter and lard are the best examples of saturated fat). Unsaturated fats are missing some hydrogen atoms so the carbon atoms on only one side of the fatty acid chain create double bonds with each other. This makes a kink in the chain so they can’t get too close to each other, resulting in liquid oil at room temperature. The difference between mono and poly unsaturated fats is in the number of double bonds of carbon (mono has just one, poly has more than one). Not only does that double carbon bond skew the chain but it makes it weak. It can easily be broken by oxidizing agents which cause the oil to go rancid. Unsaturated fats go bad much quicker than saturated fats.
At the turn of the century, the hydrogenation process was invented. This allowed extra hydrogen to be inserted into an unsaturated fat, straightening the chain, making it solid at room temperature, and prolonging its shelf life. But the hydrogenated fat isn’t a true saturated fat. It’s just partially hydrogenated. It still has double bonds of carbon but now those double bonds are on opposite sides of the chain (trans means “on the opposite side” in Latin and thus the word trans fat). A fully hydrogenated fat can be made by this method but is not as useful as a cooking fat since it’s hard and waxy and must be mixed with other oils to obtain the nice consistency that partial hydrogenation produces all by itself.
Our bodies don’t quite know what to do with these strange molecules which appear saturated from one end and unsaturated from the other. The natural fatty acids (many of which are essential to our body’s functions) found in the original oil are now morphed into only partially recognized molecules. Our cells take these fatty acids in but once they are in the cells, they don’t do the job they are intended to do. They do bad thing like raise our bad cholesterol while lowering our good cholesterol. They lessen the ability of arteries to dilate. They block good cancer fighting enzymes while increasing enzymes that may promote cancer. They decrease insulin binding, contributing to the development of diabetes. And they interfere with our body’s use of natural essential fatty acids which can cause a bunch more problems.
If it’s so bad for us, why is this stuff still out there? The simple answer is it’s cheap. It has the consistency, mouth-feel, and stability of butter but at a fraction of the cost. For the last sixty years, the cooking oil industry (which appears to be as powerful as that other oil industry) has promoted their products as a healthy alternative to animal fats even though there were scientists as far back as the 1950’s warning us that hydrogenated fats were bad for us. This cheap fat has been incorporated into many processed foods and is the go-to oil for the fast food industry. By the time the evidence became overwhelming that this stuff was a cause in the rise of heart disease in this country, industrial food producers were addicted to it and have been slow to remove it from the market. And the powerful cooking oil industry is trying to slow down the removal even more. They have lobbied the government to make sure the recommended daily allowance of trans fats is not zero (which it should be if you want to avoid the deleterious health effects). They’ve certainly made sure there’s no outright ban (although some states and cities are doing just that). They’ve also made a giant loophole in the new labeling law. By allowing products with less than .5 grams of trans fats per serving to be labeled as zero, foods can still contain a sizable amount of partially hydrogenated oil (you know how those serving sizes are never the amount you really eat). For example, Girl Scout cookies are labels as zero trans fat but each cookie has slightly less than .5 grams of trans fats. If you eat more than one (and who doesn’t) those cookies are no longer trans fat free.
If you want to avoid eating any trans fats, you have to read the ingredients. If there is hydrogenated vegetable oil, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil or vegetable shortening listed, I’d avoid it. Make sure your favorite restaurants are cooking with trans fat free oil as well.
Partially hydrogenated vegetable oil can turn up almost anywhere but it’s often found in baked goods which happen to be just what everyone’s eating right now. Check the ingredients on that box of crackers before you put them on your party cheese plate. Make sure your pie crust doesn’t have any trans fats lurking in its ingredient list before you fill it with fresh fruit (yes, Crisco still contains some and the ingredients for Betty Crocker frosting are even scarier). Read the fine print on the bread and cakes you buy from the store, you might be surprised what you find listed. Make sure you’re not feeding poison to your friends and guests this holiday season. They will all appreciate it.
Making you own crackers might seem like a lot of work but these sweet “biscuits” are divine and pair perfectly with soft cheeses like Brie and they are 100% trans fat free.
Ivy’s Honey Biscuits
Makes about 24 biscuits
1 ¾ c all purpose flour
1 c walnut pieces
3 T sugar
½ t baking soda
½ t salt
¼ c butter, cut into ½ in. cubes
½ c honey
1 large egg
½ t pure vanilla extract
2 T turbinado sugar (optional)
Preheat oven to 350F. In a food processor, pulse together flour, walnuts, sugar, baking soda, and salt until nuts are finely ground. Add butter pieces and turn processor on for 10 seconds or until the mixture is the texture of coarse meal.
Whisk together honey, egg, and vanilla. Add to flour mixture and pulse until dough just comes together (dough will be soft).
Transfer dough to a sheet of parchment paper trimmed to fit inside a baking sheet. Flatten dough out into a rectangle. Place another sheet of parchment on top and roll the dough out to ¼ to ½ inch thick (thicker biscuits will be chewy, thinner will be crisp). Carefully transfer to baking sheet and remove top sheet of parchment.
Hold a paring knife on an angle and score v-shaped lines in the dough to make a grid. Sprinkle dough with turbinado sugar (optional)
Bake for 20-25 min. until set and dry to the touch. Cool in the pan on a rack for five min. Reduce oven temperature to 300F.
Invert biscuits onto work surface and remove parchment paper. Break biscuits at score lines. They may not break cleanly but that’s how you can tell they’re homemade. Arrange biscuits on baking sheet, sugar side up. Depending on the thickness, you may need more than one sheet. Bake 15-20 min. until golden brown. Biscuits should be crisp but will get crisper as they cool. Transfer to rack and cool. Store in an airtight container up to 1 week.
Besides, I'm Jewish, so I should be honoring my religion while partaking in another, shouldn't I? Thus was born the idea of a Jew Sock. Amazingly enough, I had the perfect yarn for it (okay, it's not so amazing if you've seen my stash) and after charting too many versions of the Star of David, I started knitting. Having just learned how to make a sock on my new-to-me knitting machine, I cranked out the sock part then spent an equal amount of time hand knitting the top. My mom would plotz if she could see it.
