"baked goods" news and stories

At Trader Joe's the other day, I picked up a container of Dark Chocolate Covered Dried Cherries on my way to the checkout. Unlike chocolate-covered raisins, each piece was huge and there was clearly a high chocolate-to-cherry ratio. Chocolate and cherries are a great combination as it is, but Trader Joe's tends to carry some high-quality brands (under their store name), so I didn't hesitate to put them in my cart. My immediate thought was that they would be good in a cookie, so I baked up a batch to share with some friends. I used one of my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipes, which turns out cookies that are just sweet and buttery enough to be dangerously addictive, with a slightly chewy center and crispy edges. The cherries added some extra chew to the basic recipe and the chocolate brought it all together.

Starbucks is the latest chain to try to jump on the no-trans fats bandwagon, trying to demonstrate to customers how much they care about health and nutrition. Starting this week, approximately half of the stores in the US, including those in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon, will have zero trans fats on their menus.

The company says that they have been planning the switch for two years now and that their nationally distributed pastries, primarily seasonal items like the Gingerbread loaf cake, are already trans-fat free. The rest of their pastries are baked by regional bakeries, which Starbucks contracts to provide pastries for their stores. These pastries vary from region to region, as do the recipes for them, so not every supplier has yet made a switch, but Starbucks seems to anticipate that it will not be long before they do.

So, if you're not located in one of the aforementioned areas of the country, does that mean you need to worry about trans fats at Starbucks? Not where drinks are concerned. According to the nutritional information on their website, very few of their drink products contain trans fats and those that do have only a very minimal amount. The pastries, on the other hand, vary widely by region, but judging from a random sampling of regional nutritional data (offered by zip code on the Starbucks website) your best bet will be a muffin or loaf cake if you want to minimize your trans-fat intake without cutting out pastries all together, at least until your area is declared trans-fat free, too.

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Today, the board of health in New York is going to vote on whether or not the city will ban trans fats from restaurants. If the ban passes, eateries will have until July 2008 to eliminate all but 0.5g of trans fats per serving from their food. Restaurateurs are anxious, many worried that the quality of their food - by which they mean the taste - will suffer if the ban is accepted. While we wait to hear the ruling, what are some common sources of trans fats in our food? Forbes has named their five worst offenders in terms of the amount of trans fats they contain. They picked prepared and prepackaged foods; stick margarine; and chips and crackers fried in partially hydrogenated oils. Many breakfast foods, from donuts to pancakes, contain trans fats because they are either fried in type of partially hydrogenated oil or are claiming to be lower in cholesterol, since maybe breakfasters worry about the potential health risks of adding butter to their eggs. The most surprising item on the list is the fact that they name kosher baked goods as being at a high risk. The reason is that they are more likely to use partially hydrogenated shortening in place of dairy ingredients, like butter.

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Though the very height of the "low carb craze" has passed, millions of people still follow a low or reduced carb diet. A new study reveals that, though they are sticking to it voluntarily, at least 3 out or 5 low-carbers feel limited in what they are allowed to eat and regularly crave forbidden foods, which makes sticking to the diet that much harder. The number one thing that low carb dieters miss are baked goods (50%), followed by pasta (22%) and fruit (9%). More than 25% of respondents said that the prepackaged versions of baked goods and some mixes, though diet-friendly, were not worth eating under any circumstances.

The survey was commissioned by the baking-mix company Krusteaz, and coincides with the release of a new line of low-carb baking mixes, called CarbSimple. For the sake of all those poor, dissatisfied low-carbers, let's hope that the line turns out to be a good one.

But aside from promoting a new product, the results here indicate that the diet is not for everyone. If you constantly (or even frequently) feel that you are missing out, if baked goods of any kind - from blueberry muffins to sandwich bread - are at the top of your "must-have" list, the low-carb diet is going to be a tough one to follow and you might be better off choosing a different eating regimen. Picking one strategy that you can follow long-term - low carb or otherwise - will generally produce the best results because it is one that you can willingly and happily follow.

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While reducing the fat in baking gets easier with time, especially after you practice with a few recipes and accept the possibility of failing every once in a while, you have to wonder how far you can push the limits. While there are fat free cakes, like angel food, the texture in those is decidedly different from that of a traditional cake, which you expect to be moist and tender, not airy. After much testing, cookbook author Sarah Philips, came up with a whole book of all-natural, low fat recipes (The Healthy Oven Baking Book). This cake is a variation on one of the recipes from that book - and it has almost no fat.