Culinary yoU: Spaghetti Sauce

Showing posts with label Spaghetti Sauce. Show all posts

Saturday, August 19, 2017

LCHF / Keto Lasagna

If you have been following a Low Carbohydrate High Fat (LCHF) / Ketogenic (Keto) way of eating (WOE), then you have probably seen or made many recipes that substitute zucchini noodles (zoodles) in place of pasta. One recipe in particular that I think that zucchini works well in is lasagna, but I must admit it took me a couple of times until I figured out exactly how to prepare it the way that I liked it. At first there was something about the texture that I just could not get right, and the flat style zoodles were difficult to cut with a fork when eating. After two tries I figured it out that the simple trick was to peel the zucchini before slicing it on the mandolin slicer.

Leaving the peel on the zucchini would make the zoodles difficult to cut with a fork, and you would pull out the whole slice of zucchini when taking a bite. While this is not a major catastrophe, it really bothered me for some reason. Anyway, to solve this problem, I started to peel my zucchini with a standard potato peeler before slicing them with the thin blade attachment on my mandolin slicer.

Now there are several caveats to doing it this way that you must keep in mind. First, because of it's high water content, once the zucchini is peeled, it is slightly difficult to control when using the slicer. So you must be very careful not to cut yourself when using the mandolin. Second, a lot of the benefits of the vegetable (vitamins and minerals) are often found in the peeling. However, because I am such a texture eater, I choose to peel my zucchini, which makes the meal a lot more pleasurable for me. The bottom line is that you can leave the peel on if you like, but for me, once the zucchini is peeled and sliced thin, it is a better representation of a traditional lasagna noodle. Anyway, let's get on to making a delicious LCHF / Keto lasagna that I am sure that both you and your family will enjoy.

The Recipe

24 ounces pasta / marinara sauce (see below)

1 pound hamburger (73/27), cooked and drained

1 large zucchini, peeled

1 cup ricotta cheese

1 cup mozzarella cheese, shredded

1 large egg

1 tablespoon Italian seasoning

¼ teaspoon each salt and black pepper

Cook ground beef in a a medium sized saucepan until no longer pink, drain and set aside. If you like you may rinse with warm water to remove some of the grease, but this will decrease the fat content.

Peel, and using the thin blade of your mandolin slicer, slice the zucchini lengthwise.

Chef's Note: Care must be taken when slicing peeled zucchini as it is very slippery and can be hard to control and you can easily cut yourself if you are not careful. You can leave the peel on the zucchini, but I think it acts more like pasta if you feel the vegetable before slicing. This is however my personal preference.

Next, combine the ricotta, egg, Italian seasoning, salt and pepper in a small bowl and mix with a spoon until will combined. Now you are ready to layer the ingredients to make the lasagna.

Using a 9 ½ x 7 ¼-inch (11 cup) pan layer the ingredients starting with a small amount of sauce, then about one-third of the ground hamburger meat, a layer of zucchini, then the ricotta mixture, then one-third cup of the mozzarella cheese. Continue layering until you use all of the ingredients. Usually for this recipe it is two layers of each, finishing with the remaining sauce, ground hamburger and cheese as the top layer. Sprinkle a little Italian seasoning on top if you wish and then it is ready for the oven or the freezer. There is no right or wrong way to layer your lasagna so you can do it in whatever order you prefer.

Bake in a 350 degree oven for 90 minutes or until the sauce is bubbling and the cheese is melted. Allow to cool for about 10 minutes after removing from the oven before serving.

Chef's Note: One thing you may notice is that lasagna made with zucchini is slightly more watery than a traditional lasagna. Because zucchini contains a lot of water, a fair amount will leech out into the sauce as it cooks. This is not a problem for us, and it keeps the lasagna from drying out when reheating leftovers.

The following nutritional information for this recipe is as follows. When compared to a traditional lasagna that you would buy at your local supermarket you can see how the elimination of pasta really reduces the amount of carbohydrates in the meal. The Keto lasagna has 75% less carbohydrates than the Stouffers, and Great Value traditional frozen lasagnas with meat sauce.

Keto Lasagna (about 59 ounces, 6 servings)

Total Recipe – Calories 2480, fat 186.3 grams, protein 139.9 grams, carbohydrates 48.7 grams

Per Serving – Calories 413, fat 31 grams, protein 23.3 grams, carbohydrates 8.1 grams

Stouffers Lasagna Family Size (57 ounces, 7 servings)

Total Recipe – Calories 2240, fat 84 grams, protein 140 grams, carbohydrates 224 grams

Per serving – Calories 320, fat 12 grams, protein 20 grams, carbohydrates 32 grams

Great Value Lasagna Party Size (90 ounces, 12 servings)

Total Recipe – Calories 3000, fat 108 grams, protein 156 grams, carbohydrates 360 grams

Per serving – Calories 250, fat 9 grams, protein 13 grams, carbohydrates 30 grams

The Sauce

There is one thing you cannot avoid when making a lasagna and that is the fact that tomatoes have carbohydrates, generally in the form of natural sugars. You can choose to make your own marinara sauce for your lasagna, or simply use plain tomato sauce. For this recipe, I grabbed a jar of 'Classico' pasta sauce from my pantry because I was in a hurry, but most of the time I make my own. Putting aside the fact that pre-made pasta sauces have some preservatives etc that many people may not like, from a purely nutritional standpoint, the Classico has added fat (10 grams), and the protein and carbohydrate counts are about the same as regular tomato sauce.

Classico (24oz Jar)

Calories – 300, fat 10 grams, protein 10 grams, carbohydrates 30 grams

Tomato Sauce (8 ounces)

Calories 70, fat 0 grams, protein 3 grams, carbohydrates 10.5 grams

Tomato Sauce (24 ounces)

Calories 210, fat 0 grams, protein 9 grams, carbohydrates 31.5 grams

Having said all of that, making your own marina sauce is usually cheaper (especially if you buy tomato sauce on sale, and in bulk) and you can eliminate or reduce the number of preservatives in your families meal buy making your own. If you want to make your own pasta/marinara sauce, then check out my article 'Mastering Marinara: One Sauce To Rule Them All' on our blog.

Meatless Keto Lasagna

If you want you could go all vegetable with this recipe by omitting the ground beef, using two cups of ricotta, two eggs, and small container (10 ounces) of frozen spinach (thawed). I may write another article on making my spinach lasagna with fresh ingredients, but this is a quick way to make this recipe meatless, just in case you need too. Thaw and rinse the frozen spinach and squeeze with your hands to remove as much moisture as possible. Then add the spinach to the ricotta mixture and follow the directions as listed previously in this article.

Spinach Keto Lasagna (about 50 ounces, 6 servings)

Total Recipe – Calories 1740, fat 115.6 grams, protein 96 grams, carbohydrates 58 grams

Per Serving – Calories 290, fat 19.2 grams, protein 16 grams, carbohydrates 9.6 grams

This meatless lasagna actually contains less good fat, protein, and more carbohydrates than the regular keto lasagna made with ground beef, however the carbohydrate count is still less than 10 grams per serving. It should be noted that the extra carbohydrates come from the additional cup of ricotta cheese (8 grams of carbohydrates per cup), that is used to replace the ground beef as a protein source.

Fresh Or Frozen

This recipe can be made fresh as in this article, or you can make it in a foil pan and freeze it for another day. If you wish to freeze the uncooked lasagna, make it in a foil pan and place in the freezer overnight. Then, after 4 hours, or the next day place a thin sheet of plastic wrap over the surface of the lasagna and cover with foil.

To cook the frozen lasagna, pre-heat your oven to 400 degrees, remove the plastic wrap and replace the foil. Then place the frozen lasagna on baking sheet and bake for approximately 2 hours or until the sauce is bubbling and the cheese is melted. Be careful when removing the foil to check the lasagna as you can easily get burned by steam when removing the foil covering.

Conclusion

There you have it, a quick, easy, and tasty lasagna made with zoodles (zucchini noodles) cut on a mandolin slicer. This is an easy dish to make and either freeze for later and or bake and serve right away. The leftovers freeze and reheat well which is especially nice when you are on a budget. We freeze, then vacuum seal leftovers for me to take to work and they always taste fantastic.

So if you and you family are lasagna fans and have missing one of your favorite dishes since you have started the LCHF / Keto WOE, then I am sure you will enjoy this recipe. As always we ask that if you find the information in this article informative and enjoyable that you share it with your friends family. Don't forget to send us a friend request on our Facebook page 'CulinaryyouLCHF' by clicking on the link, or add us to your circle on Google+ Culinary You.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

Spaghetti Sauce For Canning: My Garden Variety Recipe

Usually when I make any kind of tomato based sauce my wife helps me core, blanch and peel the tomatoes to remove the skins. However, when we make this sauce we simply core the tomatoes and remove any blemishes and cut them in halves or quarters with the skins on. Then, I throw them in my 15 year old Oster shaft driven blender and puree the heck out of them. Now I have to say that this blender is a beast, it will crush ice with ease and will puree just about any vegetable out there with a little liquid. When we make this sauce it purees the tomatoes so well you cannot even tell that they are any skins in the sauce when it is cooked.

This sauce is our short on time, have to many vegetables from the garden sauce, hence the name 'Garden Variety'. It is packed full of vegetables because I puree them all and if I did not tell you, you would never even know there were in there. And that's great, because I am a big texture eater and just cannot eat cooked squash which my wife loves, so I have to hide my veggies from myself while increasing the nutrient value of the sauce. I know kinda sounds moronic and childish, that a 53 year old man has to hide his vegetables in order to eat them, but it is what it is.

The recipe

There is nothing really fancy about this recipe, it is pretty much a basic spaghetti sauce recipe with a few of my own personal tweaks. This is our base recipe, if we have zucchini squash we add it, last year we used banana peppers instead of bell peppers because we had a bigger crop of them as opposed to our bell peppers. If you have them and you like mushrooms, add 1lb fresh mushrooms sliced, or 1 cup of chopped celery (when used, I have to puree it because my grandson does not like it, and he never knows it's there). Anyway, I digress here is the recipe we use a lot, it has served us well and it will do the same for you. It shares some ingredients from both the 'Spaghetti Sauce' recipe found in the USDA Complete Guide To Home Canning (section 3, page 14), and the 'Italian Tomato Sauce' found in The Ball Blue Book (in the 2011 version it is on page 74).

20 – 25lbs assorted tomatoes

6 yellow squash (8 to 10” in length), peeled and cubed

3 green bell peppers, seeded and diced

2 large onions, diced

¼ cup granulated sugar (optional)

4 tablespoons garlic, minced

2 tablespoons salt

1 tablespoon marjoram

4 teaspoons basil

4 teaspoons oregano

4 teaspoons parsley

2 teaspoons black pepper

2 teaspoons red pepper flakes

2 bay leaves

Core and dice all of your tomatoes and puree them in your blender and add them to your stockpot. Any liquid that you have leftover from when you were dicing the tomatoes goes into the stock pot as well. Take the time to make sure you have a big enough stockpot before you get started, having to wash extra dishes is a pain in the backside. I use a 15 quart granite ware stockpot that I purchased at Wal-Mart which you can still purchase for less than $20, so if you do not have one, get one.

Chef's Note: You want to avoid using an aluminum stockpots because high acid foods such as tomatoes can cause a metallic taste to be leeched from the aluminum into the food you are preparing.

Peel and dice the yellow squash and in small batches, add it to the blender with a little of the pureed tomatoes (the liquid makes it easier to puree the squash) and process until all the squash is pureed. Then core, seed and dice the bell peppers and set them aside, dice the onions as well. Then process the onions and bell peppers in your blender until they are pureed as well.

Chef's Note: If you want, you can leave the onions and bell peppers as small dice, but you should definitely liquefy the squash. The USDA has concerns that some yellow squash may possibly contain harmful bacteria and does not recommend that it be canned in either the sliced or in cubed form. In this recipe, we are going to be removing the skin, pureeing the squash and cooking it in a tomato based sauce for about 2 hours. I bring the sauce a rolling boil then cook it for 10 to 15 minutes before reducing the heat to kill any bacteria that might be present (not likely since we grow our own, but hey safety first). Note that the Center For Disease Control CDC states that boiling a liquid for 1 to 3 minutes (depending on altitude) will kill all pathogens.

Add the remaining ingredients to your stockpot (except the sugar) and bring to a rolling boil and cook at this level for 10 minutes, make sure you stir the sauce frequently during this time to keep it from scorching, especially if you have a thin bottomed stockpot. After 10 minutes, reduce the heat to low, cover your stockpot and cook for 60 minutes. After you have cooked the sauce for 60 minutes begin adding the sugar to get the desired sweetness you and your family like. Usually, I just dump it all in, but individual preferences vary so go slow, you cannot remove the sugar if you the sauce too sweet for your tastes.

Thickening Your Sauce (The Crossroads)

At this point you have two options to thicken your spaghetti sauce. The first option takes the longest and is preferred by some canners and is recommended by the USDA as well. That option is to cook the sauce until it is reduced by about half and thick enough to be served directly over pasta. Cooking times may vary depending on the moisture content of the tomatoes and associated vegetables used in the sauce. The second option is to use canned tomato paste. I know, I know, I hear the gnashing of teeth and the howls of canners venting their rage against the idea of using a commercial product to thicken there prized home made spaghetti sauce. So call me a blasphemer, but after 60 minutes of cooking the sauce I add 2 (6-ounce) cans of tomato paste to my stockpot and get ready to process it into quart jars in my weighted gauge pressure canner.

If you decide to use tomato paste, the easiest way to incorporate it into your sauce it to place half of can of tomato paste in a medium sized bowl, then ladle some of the hot spaghetti sauce into the bowl and mix with a wire whisk. Then add the contents of the bowl to your stockpot. Repeat as many times as necessary until you have added all the tomato paste. This keeps the tomato paste from sinking to the bottom of the stockpot an not getting thoroughly integrated into the spaghetti sauce. I have presented you two options to thicken your pasta sauce, the path you choose is up to you, they both work equally well, and unless you tell someone they will never be the wiser.

Chef's Note: Even after I add the tomato paste, my sauce is a little thin, I like to can it that way and then when I make spaghetti I simmer it uncovered to reduce any additional moisture. I would rather have my sauce a little thiner so that I can process it safely than get it to thick.

Processing The Sauce (10lbs PSI)

While tomatoes may be a considered a high acid food, the addition of other ingredients in the sauce has the potential to reduce the pH making it dangerously close to the low-acid food line. Therefore, in order to maintain safe canning practises, this sauce needs to processed in either a weighted gauge or dial gauge pressure canner. Once the sauce has reached the desired consistency, reduce the heat to simmer or 'keep warm' dial on your burner if you have one to keep it hot.

Ladle the hot sauce into hot jars leaving about 1-inch of headspace (do not forgot to remove the bay leaves). Remove any air bubbles and adjust headspace as necessary. Apply the two-piece lids and bands and place in your pressure canner and process pints for 20 minutes and quarts for 25 minutes at 10lbs of pressure (PSI).

Chef's Note: If you add meat to this sauce, then you must process it just as you would any meat product. Pints for 75 minutes, and quarts for 90 minutes at 10lbs of pressure (PSI).

Conclusion

This spaghetti sauce recipe is extremely flexible and easy to make, and just about everyone I know enjoys a good meal with spaghetti and garlic bread. The thing that we like most about this recipe is that it allows us to use whatever vegetables we have on hand from the garden to enhance not only the flavor, but the nutrient content of the sauce. In addition, adding additional veggies increases the yield of the sauce making it go further. If you find that you do not have the individual dried spices in your pantry, simply substitute 4 tablespoons of 'Italian Seasoning', if you like your sauce a little spicy, add 1 tablespoon of red pepper flakes, one of my favorite additions is 2 teaspoons of fennel seeds which I pulverize in my mortar and pestle.

Most additions you can make without any concerns that it will affect the processing time of the sauce in your pressure canner. The one exception to this rule is if you add any type of ground meat to your spaghetti sauce then you will have to process the sauce for an extended amount of time as recommended by the USDA. Therefore, the addition of meat to your sauce require that pints must be pressure canned for 75 minutes, and quarts for 90 minutes at 10lbs of pressure (PSI).

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Ricotta And Mozzarella Stuffed Shells

Ok, so I am a huge lasagna fan, but my wife really wanted something different. While we were shopping at our local Walmart tooling down the pasta isle, she stopped and asked if I could make some stuffed manicotti. As she pulled the box off the shelf she must have seen the look on my face as she asked me “what's the matter?” Nothing I replied, I like stuffed manicotti, but it is kind of a pain in the butt as almost half your shells seem to tear or rip apart when attempting to stuff them.

Looking for a compromise, I saw a bag of jumbo shells sitting next to the manicotti, and asked what about stuffed shells? Same filling I said, just different type of pasta and quite a bit easier to stuff than manicotti. So a deal was struck, and off we went to gather the one item we needed other than the shells that we did not have at home in the fridge or in the pantry, ricotta cheese.

The Recipe

This is the same filling that I use to stuff manicotti. In fact, the cheese filling is very similar to what you would use when making a lasagna. Did I mention I like lasagna? Anyway, this is a large recipe as I stuffed all of the shells and made three small foil pans each with eight stuffed shells each that went into the freezer for future meals. So with this recipe, we fed four people from the original baking dish, and made enough for the wife and I to have three additional meals (about 40 stuffed shells total). If you do not want to make all of the shells at one time, simply cut the recipe in half. At 3 to 4 stuffed shells per person, this recipe yields about 10 – 12 portions or servings. You could easily go vegetarian with this filling by omitting the ground beef reducing the overall cost of the recipe by a small amount. Freshly julienned spinach added to the cheese mixture is also a nice addition, but I did not have any on hand at this time.

1 box jumbo shells

2 (29oz cans) spaghetti sauce

32oz ricotta cheese

8oz ground beef, cooked and rinsed

3 cups shredded mozzarella cheese

½ cup shredded parmesan cheese

1 tablespoon Italian seasoning

¼ teaspoon black pepper

¼ teaspoon salt

Brown ground beef in a skillet and then rinse with warm water in a strainer or colander to remove any leftover grease, then set aside to drain. Rinsing and draining cooked ground beef significantly reduces the fat content of the meat. See my article 'Can Cheap Ground Beef Be Healthy? You Bet!' on our blog for further nutritional information.

Cook your pasta per the directions on the box, then rinse the pasta in cool water to stop the cooking process. Fill your saucepan with cool water and allow the pasta to sit in the water while you prepare the filling.

Combine the ricotta, mozzarella, parmesan, Italian seasoning, salt, pepper, and drained ground beef in a large bowel and mix completely. In order to stuff the shells you will need a large pastry bag, or a I gallon zip lock bag which you can load the mixture in cut off one corner to use as a pastry bag to stuff the shells.

Chef's Note: The ricotta filling is actually firm enough that you could pinch off a small amount and shape it into small balls or oblong shapes and stuff the pasta shells with, but it is far easier to use a pastry or zip lock bag to fill them.

Once you have your shells stuffed with the cheese mixture, take a small amount of the spaghetti sauce and make a thin layer in the bottom your baking dish, arrange the shells in the baking dish and then pour some of the sauce over the shells. I like to toss some additional mozzarella cheese on top of the shells, sprinkle on some Italian seasoning, place a lid on the dish and bake the shells in the oven for 350 degrees for about an hour or until the sauce and cheese are bubbling.

The Cost

Stuffed shells is one of those few meals that you cannot really find a price comparison for at your local Italian restaurant. In fact, I do not think I have ever seen stuffed shells at the any of the Italian restaurant chains. Probably the closet you would come to this dish is lasagna. Although I have never been, the menu for the local Olive Garden in Tyler, TX lists the dinner entree 'Lasagna Classico' for $13.79 per order. So cheaper than you can eat one meal of lasagna at Olive garden you can make and serve 8 to 10 people stuffed shells at home.

Great Value Jumbo shells 12oz box $1.88 at Walmart

Hunt's meat flavored spaghetti sauce 29oz can $0.98 ($1.96) at Walmart

Great Value Ricotta cheese 32oz container $3.48 at Walmart

Ground beef 8oz, cooked and rinsed $1.49 ($2.98lb on sale) at Walmart

American Heritage Mozzarella Cheese 32oz ($6.84) 3 cups mozzarella cheese $2.00

Kraft Parmesan cheese 6oz ($4.24) ½ cup $1.50

Spice and Seasonings (Italian seasoning, black pepper, salt) $0.03

Total cost for 40 stuffed shells $12.34 ($0.31 per shell) or $1.24 per serving for 10 servings (4 shells per person), $0.93 per serving for 12 servings (3 shells per serving). My local Walmart carries two stuffed shell products and one stuffed manicotti.

Bertolli 'Rustico Bakes' 25oz package of stuffed shells ( 7 to 8 per package) is $5.97 ($0.74 per shell)

Celetano' brand 12.5oz package of stuffed shells (4 shells per package) is $3.47 ($0.87 per shell)

Home made Stuffed shells (40 total) is $12.34 ($0.31 per shell)

Stouffer's 29.5oz package of cheese stuffed manicotti (5 per package) is $7.95 ($1.59 per manicotti which is equivalent to about 2 stuffed shells).

Anyway you look at it you can make better quality stuffed shells for 59 – 65% cheaper than you can buy them premade at the supermarket. Not to mention the fact that you can feed 8 to 10 people homemade stuffed shells for the price of ONE lasagna dinner at the Olive Garden.

Now to be fair, you could buy a 90oz Great Value Lasagna that serves 12 people for $10.97 which is cheaper than making your own stuffed shells. My mother-in-law keeps several of these in her freezer for when the family gets together. For the price they aren't bad, but they will never be as good as home made. In fact, you will never get the quality and amount of filling that you find in these shells in a frozen stuffed shell, manicotti or frozen lasagna product.

Conclusion

Stuffed shells and manitcotti are great, I like them both and this recipe allows us to make extra meals that we can freeze and simply throw them in the oven and bake frozen at a moments notice. We use old stale bread and make buttered garlic toast that we then wrap them in plastic and place in the freezer for when we make spaghetti or any Italian American meal in which garlic bread is a nice addition. And yes, when we served this, we used some of our prepared garlic bread and threw in a fresh garden salad to round out the meal.

You could easily go vegetarian with this filling by omitting the ground beef. Freshly julienned spinach added to the cheese mixture is also a nice addition, but I did not have any on hand at this time. If you want to make your own marinara or spaghetti sauce to use in thi recipe then check out my article 'One Sauce To Rule Them All' on our blog. As always, if you have enjoyed this article, please share it with your friends and don't forget to send us a friend request on Facebook and Google+ so that you will not miss out on any of our new articles.