[Sca-cooks] Dieting

[margali]

=) it helps to all be on the same page.

I used to work in the food service industry, as did others here=) and 
sometimes we an make assumptions about exactly what other people know 
that are not correct=)

I learned about nutritional breakdown, and roughly how they determined 
things - but not everyboy stops to think about what goes into your 
foods=) and i have always found it to help when redacting 
recipes....also the science of what happens when you process foodstuffs.

If you know that you need a food to have a particular texture [like the 
recipe mentions forcing it through a seive] then you know one of several 
things, whether you may have to cook it, or process it in a specific 
way, or that there may be steps they didnt mention because they assume 
everybody knows how to cook that particular dish [cuskys, anybody?] and 
if you understand the physical properties of a substance, like proteins 
reaction to being heated [cheesemaking, makes the whey separate from the 
curds more completely, or egg whites solidifying to trap floaty bits to 
clarify soups] or to being frozen [tofu, the water beads to the surface, 
changing the texture when it is thawed] so you can make a guess as to 
how something needs to be processed to  get the recipe to work.

Same thing with determining what you need to eat to stay on diet - 
though now instead of the humors [bile, phlegm, sanguine and [?] cant 
remember the 4th offand=)] we have proteins, carbs lipids and 
vitamins/minerals that we try to balance.

margali

Betsy Marshall wrote:
> Okay _ I think what I was doing was making a parallel assumption to the
> statement that a pound of fat (lipids) at 9 cal/gm is 3600 (plus or
> minus) calories. Thought that the carb assessment included the water-
> apparently not..
>  All is much clearer now..
> Thanks everybody for your help.