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June 5, 2007
Taste, But Verify
Last night at dinner with co-workers while I sipped my pinot noir (I had eaten a Lean Cuisine beforehand... though I did have an unfortunate bite of the sanck mix) my co-worker who is vegetarian ordered one of his favorite treats: Buffalo wings without the wings. Call them chicken wings, hot wings, spicy wings, little pellets of grease, whatever you will, they come with a fabulous sauce tomato-ey pepper sauce, plus ranch or blue cheese dressing, and celery. So being a vegetarian, he orders the sauces with carrots and celery but no meat. Clever, right? Seems healthy?
Hmmm. I had never had wings before, and so had never sampled the red sauce. I was still under cals for the day ever so slightly, so I tried a bit of the sauce with the celery. AMAZING! Delicious! Hot, spicy, vinegary, with tons of tomato-y vinegary hot spicy peppery bite. I love that! To me, it tasted like a thick hot sauce, so I had quite a bit with the celery. I even tried one small chicken bite, since I had never had one before and my co-workers urged me to give it a go. It wasn't worth the calories... I much prefer the sauce on celery, where the sauce can shine.
So anyhow, we're about to finish when the chef comes out and hands us a new container of sauce, saying that the previous one wasn't quite the right recipe. So we tried that with the celery, and it was even better! I'd never had anything like it. No wonder people like these things so much... though I still contend that the fried chicken bone is a distraction from the true flavor in the sauce.
We were done with our celery and needed to go to sleep, so I took the new sauce to my room and put it in my fridge, thinking to eat it on my rescued veggies the next day. Fine.
Got up, worked out in the hotel gym on the treadmill, did some Pilates in my room, ate breakfast, had a busy morning, ate salad at the salad bar with a little grilled chicken for lunch, and by mid-afternoon was feeling like a snack so I broke out the veggies and the hot wing sauce. Yum! More celery, carrots, musrhoom (yea B!), peppers, and broccoli/broccolini in hot sauce. It was rather more creamy today though than yesterday, which made me start to wonder: what the heck is in this stuff?
I mean, I was assuming that it was some variation on the very low calorie Louisana hot sauce. That's what it tasted like. Or at worst, something like my 20 calorie per tablespoon Carolina Treet barbacue sauce.
So after my meeting I started to look on line for Buffalo/hot/spicy wing sauce recipes.
Two things alarmed me. First, they all seem to be made with copious amounts of ketchup. High sugar, high carb.
Second: they all called for a stick of butter!
So I went down to the restaurant and asked the dear host if I could possibly grab the recipe. He returned about ten minutes later with two bottles: a large bottle of Texas Pete and a bottle of hot spicy Thai chili sauce. I was starting to feel relieved, as those are very low cal ingredients, when he said: "We use these two sauces, plus a whole lot of butter!"
Grrrr. So basically, I blew the number of calories I might have spent on a delicious dinner out in Center City, enjoying fine food under the stars at an outdoor cafe with a lovely bottle of French red in the company of one of my good friends, on some hot spicy vegetable dip made of butter?
I love food, as you know (glad you like the recipes, Garry!) I adore cooking, eating, serving, playing with, reading recipes for, food. I love to find a good taste and then adapt it to be CR-friendly... in fact, my main motivation in asking for the recipe was to find a way to make my own lower carb, CR friendly version. So I'm glad I found a yummy new taste, and I already have an idea for how to make the perfect CR buffalo celery sauce, one that you can serve along side the real thing and have people like just as well or better. I'll test kitchen it this weekend and serve it up on blog if acceptable. But I'm annoyed that I unknowingly ate so many calories on something that just wasn't worth it. I would have enjoyed those calories much more in a nice meal out than in a vegetable dip.
This is one of the main reasons why I favor calorie labeling on menus. Most people don't have the time or energy to be food detectives and go looking up the nutrition info on food before they eat it, yet most people would like to eat well and be healthy, and to choose their treats based on what they really enjoy. When people have the information, they can make their own decisions about what's worth eating and what's not. But when we don't have the information, we tend to eat whatever's there, convenient, and tasty. Especially all of us who are on the run with busy jobs, lives, etc... basically, everyone! We're biologically programmed to reach for fat, salt and sweet tastes, but if we knew that the buffalo wing sauce was probably 100 calories per tablespoon or more, we might choose not to eat quite so much of it, and to save our calories for something we might enjoy more. Or if we did choose to eat it, we would do so with the full information. Informed eaters, making choices to maximize our pleasure and happiness in whatever way we find matches our lifestyle, goals and priorities. Having the information would make it easier to make those choices, since we certainly suffer (or enjoy!) the consequences of our choices.
That being said, I should know enough by now to have researched the ingredients before, not after, consuming the item. I don't expect regular folks to do that kind of research, but I have more unusual goals and priorities and that requires extra effort. I didn't go to the effort, and now for a week I have to cut about 100 calories off my day to make up for it. Blergh.
For those of us who practice CR, or at least for me, it's more satisfying to create dishes that are both delicious and low calorie to eat on a regular basis, and then to enjoy the occasional well-chosen higher calorie meal, than it was to eat high calorie foods all the time. I don't give up any food, but I definitely have "sometimes" foods vs. regular foods. I don't feel like I'm missing anything because if I want a particular food, I just eat it... while balancing off the calories and nutrition in other meals and throughout the week. It doesn't feel like a sacrifice because I feel so much better in the here and now than I did pre-CR, I can't imagine going back. Even a few weeks of eating suboptimally makes me feel dramatically worse, and I remember that's how I used to feel all the time. Those weeks of stress-induced CR slippage felt awful.
Anyhow, when you're in the mindset that a high calorie sometimes food should be just that, a *sometimes* food, you want to know what you're eating on a quotidian basis. That's what makes it hard to balance CR with being on the road a lot. But over time, I'm working it out. From now on, I'll take a small bite of something unfamiliar to get the taste, but do further investigation before consuming a whole serving. Taste, but verify!
Still, it will all be worth it if I go home and engineer the perfect CR friendly low cal buffalo wing sauce. Stay tuned.
Posted by april at June 5, 2007 8:16 PM
Comments
Hi April
Part of the problem is that restaurants are in the business of making money and doing so by appealing to the tastes of a society that favors taste over nutrition. It may seem like being in a nanny state if it has to be the government that forces restaurants to disclose ingredients, but I would also be in favor of ingredient disclosure. Maybe food ingredient disclosure will be a result of societal pressure, without the government's intervention. It's difficult to be a food researcher when eating out. The wait staff are not always informed regarding all of the ingredients in a dish. However, most chefs should be sympathetic to someone who would state that they are asking because they have special dietary needs, and should provide the information through the wait staff if asked. Cheers, Arturo
Posted by: Arturo at June 5, 2007 9:04 PM
This is the sort of thing that is really difficult if you're vegan, as well (as I am). I'd have never stopped to think that buffalo sauce might have *butter* in! (& I'm a bit rubbish about asking, as a rule). Although given the number of things that have whey powder etc in I shouldn't be that surprised :-\
Plus, for me at least, the idea of a buttery/creamy hot sauce like that is a lot less appealing than the idea of a tomato-y one (buffalo sauce salsa, sort of thing!).
Posted by: Juliet at June 6, 2007 2:40 AM
I'm so glad you posted this! I, too, had NO idea that the sauce on the wings would be so bad! I knew the chicken itself wasn't the leanest cuts (by far) and included skin, so I assumed it wouldn't be the best thing in the world, but who knew the sauce was lethal?
I also had two wings (well, one wing and one thigh, I think) just two nights ago when my husband had some from the pizza place. Thank goodness I only had two! Not that I'm calorie counting due to the baby, but I still don't want to gain whale-quantity weight with this pregnancy, either!
Amy
Posted by: Amy at June 6, 2007 4:40 AM
The wait staff isn't always honest, either.
I have a friend who is deathly allergic to nuts. On more than one occasion, she has been served a dessert containing nuts even after she specifically asked whether the dessert contained nuts and was told it did not. And several times, after sending the dessert back, the servers have simply brushed the nuts off the top and served the *very same* dessert back to her. Of course, it was only when she explained that even eating something that had been touched by nuts would send her into shock - a serious life-threatening situation - did the servers 'fess up to this. Needless to say, my friend no longer orders desserts when she goes out.
If people are willing to fudge about stuff that could literally kill someone else, I have to say I don't have much faith that they would necessarily be honest about whether there are trans fats in the salad dressing.
Posted by: Robin at June 6, 2007 5:11 AM
That's even if serving staff *knew* about trans-fats in the dressings. I think I'd be more appalled that someone was serving up a sauce made from throwing two commercial products together (themselves full of sugar and preservatives and god knows what) than that they added butter to the finished product to make it glossy. Urgh.
Sometimes ignorance is bliss! :-)
Posted by: Sara at June 6, 2007 7:12 AM
Great post. I agree with you exactly about the "sometimes" foods and that it's way better to look forward to a "sometimes" food than to eat one by accident!
I recall from one of the articles that Pinot Noir is a CR choice of wine-- could you remind me why? Should I steer my taste buds towards it for a summer full of one glass per evening of wine drinking?
Posted by: Hilary at June 6, 2007 9:42 AM
"But I'm annoyed that I unknowingly ate so many calories on something that just wasn't worth it."
It was worth it! Now you like hot sauce. Okay, the kind you tried had too much butter (or, just that it had butter, I guess).
See, this is what I don't get about CR (what I Really don't get, because I'm sure there is more than this, but this stands out):
all the anguishing over trivial amounts of food eaten that you then regret.
Life is not perfect, how can anyone doing CR always be perfect? But this is what you seem to need to be, to do CR. As much as possible.
Except, it causes so much regret in people, who Will stray from time to time (even the CR people). I say: big deal.
It's not the end of the world. Your life won't be shortened or your health compromised just because you had some sauce made with butter.
Although it's too bad about your missed meal. Too bad that CR can't allow for some sauce with some butter and some extra calories for a nice meal, too.
Posted by: Garry at June 8, 2007 1:57 PM
Oh my gosh!!!I just got done eating just the sauce with my salmon at dinner!!!!!I thought it was like hot sauce----Im really not happy about this, buffalo sauce had always been one of my favorite things.Not anymore!
Posted by: mary at August 19, 2007 10:37 PM