The Award-winning Deep-fried Butter (article), (award) was not a surprise (I lived in Dallas). But it's not much worse than the "Conscious Chef" recipe I evaluated in my previous post. To wit:
- Let's assume a stick of butter is cut-up, breaded, and deep-fried for the Texas State Fair award-winning appetizer.
- The self-proclaimed "Conscious Chef" (noted in my previous post) fries a breaded meat sub in oil, fries udon noodles in oil (and drizzles oil over them), and then uses 1/2 cup of Earth Balance to make a mushroom sauce.
- Here's the revelation: that 1/2 cup of Earth Balance, in fat grams, is the same as 1 stick of butter.
CONCLUSION: the "Conscious Chef" has created a gourmet vegan entree (minus as much, but still high saturated fat), that is pretty much (or more) as totally fatty and unhealthy as the Texas State Fair's Award-Winning "deep-fried butter." He's using, amongst the other fat additions, the equivalent of well over a STICK of butter, in terms of fat grams, for his "beautiful and filling" vegan entree.
Wow. Both recipes are creative ways to insult your cardiovascular system and promote gawd knows what other physical ailments.
It's ironic that we laugh at the "deep fried butter," and praise the intrepid vegan chef's work, when in fact, both attempts are pretty much similar in being nutritionally blasphemous to our bodies when ingested. At least the vegan chef is honest enough to admit that to him, "fat is flavor." Yet, both "chefs" know full well it's a taste addiction. "Frying the butter" versus "frying in butter" is of minimal differential. Both cater to taste addication.
How "conscious," and more important, healthy, is this? Why is it that a vegan chef's recipe is, in terms of fat, pretty much as bad as a State Fair's Award-winning "Deep-fried Butter" and still promoted on a popular vegan blog? Are we so desperate as to be excited about some vegan recipe or a Chef getting Oprah-attention that we ignore evaluating the recipe or body of work from nutritional criteria just 'cause we're so happy to see something vegan? Too simplistic and narrow-minded. We must do better than this.
Ultimately, imho, "Moderation kills" (Esselstyn, Campbell, and McDougall). Going vegan isn't the answer, but going very low-fat vegan, and re-calibrating your fat receptors, is. Let's stop praising recipes just because they are vegan, and instead, extoll them because they are both vegan AND healthy.
Let's be truly "discriminating."
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