I was listening to BBC Radio 4 the other day, possibly "The Food Programme" and apparently the Finns used to have a very high incidence of cardiovascular disease because of high butter and animal fat intake.
A big health improvement project called the North Karelia Project in the 1960s and 70s persuaded them to switch to plant oils with a big reduction in CVD.
History lesson over, but it got me thinking about reducing my butter intake too. Pastry is one of those thing where I've always tended to use butter, but maybe it's time to try and reduce its use. I wouldn't want to use other saturated fats or hydrogenated ones, so that leaves oils and perhaps butter at a reduced level.
I did try this for a sweet shortcrust pastry at the weekend for a very small blackberry and apple pie:
- 110g T500 flour (11% protein - European spec)
- 30g WW atta
- 35g butter
- 35g cold pressed rape seed (canola) oil
- pinch salt
- 1/2 egg yolk
- 15g concentrated apple juice
- 10g cold water
It worked OK, but tore easily and needed patching here and there; I wouldn't have liked to line a deep springform with it. Sorry, didn't take a picture of the pie.
Does anyone have any good "healthy" pastry recipes?
Lance
I've read on reddit that two brands -- violife and miyoko's vegan butters -- are the best butter substitutes for croissants and other delicate pastries. I don't know if these are available where you are.
I haven't used them. But I'm planning on baking some vegan donuts (yes, baking) tomorrow and will probably be seeking out one or the other. I'll probably write something up after the bake.
Rob
Haven't tried it myself, but this site raves about using coconut oil in pastry. In fact, she says she recommends it as a substitute for vegan butter. I think refined coconut oil is ok (that's what I use in bread), but she claims unrefined is better and the pastry does not taste like coconut. Actually, that might be nice, but never mind. Solid oil is cut into flour same as lard or butter and ice water is used. Mix, roll, bake. She says it is very flaky. Site & recipe.
I'm not too sure about using coconut oil - it has a lot of saturated fat in it. This is what the British Heart Foundation says:
https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/nutrition/ask-the-expert/coconut-oil
And the vegan butters also seem to be based on coconut oil.
Lance
Violife vegan butter (ingredients: Canola, Coconut and Sunflower Oils, Water, Salt, Sunflower Lecithin, Faba Bean Protein, Citric Acid, Natural Flavor, Glucose, Beta Carotene) has 6 g sat fat in a 14 gram (1 tbsp) serving
regular butter has 7g sat fat in the same size serving.
So: violife butter offers 14% less sat fat -- which is a reduction, but not as significant as I would have thought.
Rob
In the UK we have spreadable butter and low fat spreadable butter. The low fat version has 57% fat, and total saturated fat 25%. Clean label products with just butter, water, canola oil and salt in them. No doubt some high pressure emulsification or similar to keep it all together.
Not vegan of course and too much water for viennoisserie, but might just work for pastry - I'll give it a try.
Lance
Plant oils, as the name says, are liquid. Butter (and other animal fat) are generally solid. If you need solid fat in your recipe, for example for puff pastry, and want to switch to something plant based, the liquid plant fat must be solidified first. This process works only with a "hardener". Unfortunately after this hardening process makes the hardened plant based fat is metabolised by humans as saturated fat. The benefit of plant oils is their high content in unsaturated fats. This is not true anymore if you harden them. Or if you expose them to high heat.
The biggest nutritional issue are trans fatty acids, which afaik are contained in every "non-liquid" plant based fat. One of the reasons why most countries regulated the amount of trans fatty acids in food. Heating plant oil too much generates also trans fatty acids. It happens also at home when you fry something.
Coconut oil, palm oil, and cocoa butter are plant oils that are normally solids at room temperature.
There may also be small amounts of naturally-occurring trans-fatty acids in plant oils and some additional trans-fatty acids may form during refining; canola (rapeseed) is one example.
When you use the terms "harden" or "hardener", do you mean hydrogenated? Hydrogenating oils does cause some isomerization of cis-fatty acids to trans-fatty acids. Exhaustive (full) hydrogenation of vegetable oil would avoid that as there would not be any unsaturated fatty acids remaining and the saturated fatty acid formed may not be as harmful as other saturated fatty acids.
The Chinese have this lamination technique, in which the "beurrage" (lamination fat) is basically flour and oil paste
So, the détrempe (main dough) is laminated using the flour and oil paste. I can imagine it be used for western handpies. You might want to take a look, Lance
Lin has a post regarding the lamination, for flatbread CB submission
Jay
I remember being interested in Lin's pastry recipe at the time - I'll look it up.
Lance
I had a deeper dive and found a few more oil pastry options that I might try.
One is Italian - Pasta Frolla Fatta Con Olio (Short pastry made with oil) - simple, worth a try.
Another is from Julia Tausch on substack a long article and quite a complex recipe with an oil dough and a water dough which are combined.
And lastly, another substack heavyweight, Nicola Lamb, is working on her version.
Lance
Lance, I had in the back of my mind that coconut oil was healthful, probably due to buying it in a health food store over 45 yrs ago. You're right about the saturated fat.
If you want to move saturated fats (SFA) out of your diet, and don't want to be adding trans fats - for the purpose of increasing cardio-vascular (CVS) health - then you can swap them for poly-unsaturated fats (PUFAs). There are two types of PUFAs - those heavy with omega-6 (LA) and those heavy with omega-3 (ALA). Older research did not consider this distinction and allowed mixtures of both in their studies. More recent research seems to show that swapping SFAs for LA-heavy oils is associated with mild to moderate increases in cardiovascular events and all-cause mortality. Swapping SFAs for ALA-heavy oils tends to show a mild decrease.
The vegetable/seed oils suitable for cooking with with the lowest LA amounts (the most common ones in the USA) are olive oils - both extra-virgin and lighter cooking versions. Canola and mustard oils are in between, but still somewhat higher than the olive oils. None of these have much ALA. Other common oils (peanut, corn, sunflower, safflower, cottonseed) have much higher levels of LA and little ALA.
OTOH, these changes in risk ratios are fairly small (e.g., roughly 10%). Butter has small amounts of PUFAs, moderate amounts of mono-unsaturated fats (apparently good for CVS health) but of course fairly high levels of saturated fats. But again, the changes in CVS risk associated with swapping saturated fats with PUFAs seem to be small.
The upshot - if you are really worried about saturated fats, use olive oils. Avoid the others. But don't expect a large decrease in your CVS risk. This research is really hard to do and do well, and it's hard to get really reliable, definitive answers. So the balance may change in the future. But for now, I think, use olive oil, preferably not refined with chemicals, and don't worry too much about using butter. And don't focus too much on any one food including oils or fats in the diet. The healthiness of the overall diet is going to count for more than individual components.
TomP
The whole seed oil/fruit oil debate is unsettled, at least from what I've read (Harvard Health and Johns Hopkins):
Seeding doubt: The truth about cooking oils
Influence vs. Evidence: The Science Supporting Seed Oils
With respect to ALA, olive and avocado oils have very little, but do have a lot of beneficial monounsaturated fats (MUFA).
Canola oil actually has a fair amount of ALA and the LA/ALA ratio is 2:1, supposedly the optimal ratio.
There are a lot of factors to consider, it's definitely more complicated than just "animal fats tend to be less healthy." Let's take a step back and look at human health on the whole throughout history and apply a little common sense.
Much recent research has been finding serious health issues with most seed oils. While traditional plant oils such as olive oil and coconut oil have always been and continue to be regarded as very healthy, newer practices in genetics and processing have turned up a lot of problems. Generally speaking, I would avoid seed oils from GMO seeds, and only use expeller-pressed seed oils. I would not favor plant oils over animal fats, in fact many researchers now believe animal fats are generally even healthier than plant oils. If you want to be healthier, I would focus on making sure my animal fats are from small farms, that the ruminants were grassfed, and that the animals were healthy, unlike most grocery-store animals which rely on routine antibiotics and vaccines in order to even survive their poor diet and environment. The main place an animal's bodily toxins will be stored is in the fat, so the best thing you can do for yourself is to buy organic, grassfed, and, if possible, buy direct from small local farm you can trust.
I hope this helped. I find it very helpful when sifting through the ever-changing health trends to always try to look at the big picture.
It's true that humans' dietary fat intake mostly was from animal sources and of the saturated variety. However, is it possible that they died from other causes before the negative cardiovascular effects of saturated fats were apparent?
"cardiovascular health on the whole has actually gotten worse in the West, rather than better".
It appears that this will depend on the time period that you select. As a long term trend (and in the UK) I read here:
"The British Heart Foundation's (BHF) annual statistical compendium is a comprehensive source of accessible epidemiological data in relation to cardiovascular disease (CVD) in the UK. Using datasets with multiple years of data from the compendium we have analysed trends in mortality, morbidity, and treatment for CVD within the UK. CVD mortality in the UK has consistently declined over recent decades, from 1045 deaths per 100 000 in 1969, shortly after the BHF was founded, to 255 per 100 000 in 2019."
Having said that, I believe CVD (again in the UK) is now on the increase; main factors are considered to be an increase in the incidence of obesity, perhaps because in the UK at least people are eating more ready meals rather than making there own.
Lance
This may not help with pastry, but if you're looking to reduce butter intake overall, Laurel's Kitchen Better Butter as a spread cuts the saturated fat in half. The recipe yields a spread with the consistency of a soft margarine, without the use of palm oil or hydrogenated oils.
I found that an immersion blender was ideal for mixing. I don't add salt but use 1/2 salted and 1/2 unsalted butter and I use canola oil for it's neutral flavor and fatty acid profile (see above). I tried EVOO and the flavor was too strong. It was great on a plain white flour bread, but didn't go well with other breads with jam.