By: Duke Diet & Fitness Center Nutrition Team
Cooking meals at home is an important component of a healthy eating plan. But making healthy meals that actually taste good can be time-consuming and overwhelming— especially for cooks who don’t know a whisk from a spatula! But there’s good news for home cooks. Kitchen gadgets can help!
Making healthy meals that actually taste good can be time-consuming and overwhelming! But there’s good news for home cooks. Kitchen gadgets can help!
Learn more about multi-cookers (like the Instant Pot), air fryers, and sous vide. All three tools have some great advantages over traditional stovetop and oven cooking and make healthy meal prep very easy. Here are just a few of their benefits:
Multi-cooker: The multi-tasker that anyone can use.
Many multi-cookers have fancy features that include sautéing, rice-cooking, and yogurt-making, but the best features of multi-cookers are their slow cooker and pressure cooker functions.
Sous Vide: The Michelin restaurant technique that is easy for everyone.
The sous vide technique, which is French for “under vacuum,” works by slowly and gently cooking foods in a vacuum-sealed plastic bag submerged in a water bath. This high-end cooking method was popularized in fine dining establishments such as Michelin Star restaurants, but advancements in technology have now made sous vide cooking more affordable and easy to use at home.
There is a lot of science behind why sous vide makes foods taste delicious, but all home cooks really need to know is that it can consistently produce perfectly cooked foods. The sous vide cooks foods “low and slow” in a precise way that is unique to the sous vide. This cooking method does require a little planning since it takes food several hours to cook, but the sous vide is programmed to do all the cooking, and the results are worth the wait.
Air Fryers: Are they worth the hype?
Air “frying,” or air convection cooking, has exploded in popularity in the past few years. Successful air frying can sometimes require more finesse and trial-and-error compared to the multi-pot or sous vide, but there is a good reason for some of the hype behind this “hot and fast” cooking technique. These little cookers use air convection instead of deep-fried oil convection to cook foods. Most air fryer cooking baskets are small, so you cannot easily cook for a crowd. But this small-batch cooking approach is part of the reason foods get really crispy or perfectly roasted in a fraction of the time of a conventional oven. Some advantages of using air fryers include:
About the Duke Diet & Fitness Center: The Duke Diet and Fitness Center can assist with goals related to weight management. Discover personalized outpatient services for optimal weight loss, nutrition, and behavioral health. To learn more about how the Duke Diet and Fitness Center can help you, visit Duke Diet and Fitness Center or call 800-235-3853.
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