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10 Healthy Ideas for a Lean Barbeque Season

Millions of South African families enjoy barbeques. This favourite national pastime defies race, class, ethnicity, social status and age and is enjoyed by people from all walks of life. This, coupled with South Africa’s world famous climate contributes to people wanting to spend time outdoors instead of in stuffy indoors. You can make a BBQ as inexpensive or lavish as you wish. By carefully selecting the foods that you include with the barbeque, and adding inexpensive and healthy fillers such as green salads and fried veggies, people can enjoy an affordable and healthy time around the fire.

With an emphasis on health and healthy living these days, many people are looking into how they can still enjoy their favourite ways of eating and preparing their food, but with a higher emphasis on doing so healthily. You can keep your dinners lean and healthy by taking proactive steps. Here are 10 healthy ideas for a lean BBQ season:

• Flavoursome grilling sauces and marinades: Remember that when marinating and saucing your meats, you can do so without adding too much fat or calories. Chilli sauce, tomato paste, molasses, soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce are all very flavoursome without adding a lot of calories. Best of all? These sauces contain 0 grams of fat!

• Marinade your meat using reseal-able plastic bag: A great way to ensure that your marinade is fully absorbed by your meat, fish, chicken or veggies is to place it into a reseal-able bag. Place the meat inside the bag, pour your marinade over the meat and seal the bag. Place the bag in the fridge and allow it to marinade until you’re ready to start the grilling.

• Enjoy a bit of sweetness: You can add a bit of sweetness to your BBQ, but less is perhaps still better. Add a small amount of a sweet ingredient like honey, brown sugar, fruit juice or molasses to your marinade. It will add flavour while also helping to balance and offset other bold spices. If you add too much sweetness, your meat, veg or fish can burn while being grilled over high heat.

• Incorporate delicious veggies: This is perhaps one of the most popular healthy ideas for a lean BBQ season. A great thing about adding veg to the BBQ is that you don’t have to be so preoccupied about overcooking it as you might be with other types of meat. Marinating your veg before grilling them will also help it to caramelise better. Great BBQ veg choices include corn on the cob, eggplant, whole mushrooms and asparagus and zucchini.

• Remove chicken’s skin: Half of the saturated fat in a chicken thigh and breast is contained in its skin, which is why it is such a healthy option to enjoy the chicken skinless.

• Lean meats: Make use of the leanest cuts of pork and beef you can get your hands on, and trim any fat before you start cooking. You will lose a lot of saturated fats this way and avoid feeding it to your family.

• Serving sizes: You can encourage guests to eat smaller portions by grilling the meat in smaller portions. This will also encourage them to eat slower and to socialise more!

• Tenderise the meat: You can marinade lean meat with lower-fat marinades featuring acid ingredients which will break down the tough fibres.

• Healthy grilling: Heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are substances that are formed on the surface of meat that has been cooked to well-done at high temperatures. These have been proven to be unhealthy in humans. Ways to prevent this from forming is to flip the meats more often while on the grill, using low fat marinades and choosing leaner cut meats.

• No processed meat: While it might be tempting, just say no to processed meats and opt for freshly cut and prepared meat.

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Each and every aspiring outdoorsman and woman fancies himself or herself as something of a gourmet chef. Very rarely ill you find a South Africawith access to a Cadac skottle and a gas cylinder willingly handing over the tongs to another aspiring culinary artist. Each and every one of these people has their favourite braai recipes which they ache to try out on a different group of family and friends when those long summer evenings settle onto the Highveld or hen the ocean breeze starts to sigh over the sands and the sun sneaks below the horizon. Give these braai masters half a chances and their interpretation of any one of the many classic braai recipes will find its way onto the gas BBQ.

Braai recipes today bear only a faint resemblance to those enjoyed only a few decades ago. Gone are the days he the most inventive braai recipes were those that called for Ostrich instead of the obligatory lamb chop and wors. Today braai recipes take in a wide variety of different foodstuff, including seafood, vegetable sosaties and even foods like pizza. In fact many of the braai recipes that can be found on the pages of the best selling recipe books would not even have been considered proper faire only a few years’ ago.

The braai recipes of today take into account the changing lifestyles of many South African’s ho are actively searching for recipes that feature leaner cuts of meat and more healthy options. Most of these outdoor enthusiasts know that there’s nothing wrong with a good steak, but might prefer that it b accompanies by a salad, or even some freshly cooked vegetables. Fortunately n cooking methods and the id availability of different fittings and accessories for today’s gas braai means that many chefs are choosing to cook delicious meals that will satisfy even the most health conscious or traditional guest.

Paella is the dish that most seafood lovers enjoy the most but can find the most difficult to cook. This is because most kitchen stoves are just not designed to accommodate the size of pan required to cook paella to perfection. The good news is that you can now purchase a paella pan that can easily be attached to a gas cylinder to allow you to create the perfect paella Spanish style whether you are cooking in or out of doors. Along with your purchase of the paella pan, you will receive camping recipes on the other ways in which you can use your paella pan.

To find out more about the types of camping recipes that can allow you to cook a wide range of dishes to perfection, simply contact us.