By Judy Davie
**”My family enjoys a lot of Asian dishes. I like to stir fry meat or chicken and vegies and usually add a pre made sauce with rice. As I’m trying to lose weight I don’t eat the rice but are the sauces OK?”
— Diana**
The problem with many of these sauces is that those with a low KJ value typically contain high amounts of salt (sodium) and the other sauces with less salt get their flavour from sugar and usually contain more kilojoules.
For the health of your whole family it’s important to minimize the amount of salt in their diet and for you to achieve your weight loss goal you have to decrease the number of KJ you consume. It’s too easy to ladle these sauces over food — doubling the energy intake with one nudge of the elbow.
Try to create more flavour from the food ingredients themselves so there’s less need to disguise their taste with an overpowering sauce. It’s easy to copy the fresh ingredients from the ingredient list of the sauces you use. In Asian dishes it’s likely you’ll need garlic, ginger, chilli and herbs including basil and coriander. All these fresh ingredients added to the stir fry will add flavour with fewer Kj than those found in sauces with added starch thickeners and sugar.
Lemon, lime and rice vinegar (found in Asian stores) are also great in Asian dishes and reduced sodium soy sauce combined with lemon is delicious. Make a lower KJ version of sweet chilli sauce by mixing vinegar with a little chilli and a teaspoon of sugar or honey. The beauty of making your own is you control the ingredients.
Watch out for pre made curry sauces with coconut cream which are very high in kilojoules. A better alternative is to use curry paste, a low fat yoghurt (stirred in at the end of cooking) and a teaspoon of dessicated coconut to serve.
Always check the labels before you buy a sauce and check that the recommended serving size is realistic. The table below gives you a guide to the most popular sauces.
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
