The idea here was to cook down fresh fruit with some nutritious high fibre grain. In this one I’ve used oat-bran, but am going to be trying out flax-seed and wheatgerm. I’ve used 200g raspberries, 100g blackberries and 25g oat-bran. It’s kind of like a really fruity porridge. This is packed full of goodness and slow release energy. A true breakfast of champions. There is also no added sugar, but if you did want it a bit sweeter, a little squeeze of Agave Syrup or a drizzle of honey would do the trick. Stick it all in a pan with 100ml of water, and gently boil together for 15 mins. Easy, I’m gonna try a few more of these over the week so keep checking back. Blueberries, blackcurrants, goji berries, gooseberries, rhubarb… I’ve got loads of ideas to take this further. What a great way kick start your day and your metabolism.

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My Favourite Pizza

As I said, I love pizza. Take away, restaurant and frozen, all can be great but all make you fat pretty much without exception. No one I can think of even markets a remotely healthy version of pizza [update - weight watchers do one, will have to try]. Anyway, I’ve had a lot of pizza. Take away is best, Dominos and Pizza Hut keep me coming back for more (or at least they used to before FlavourSmash - but God… do I miss it!). I’ve decided to settle on a Pizza Hut pizza as my favourite, the order goes like this: A large Italian Supreme with Jalapeños instead of Green Peppers. This yields a cheese and tomato pizza with the following extra toppings:

• Mushrooms
• Red onion
• Pepperoni
• Spicy Beef
• Jalapeños

You have to try this topping, it is absolutely gorgeous. Siobhan and myself absolutely love it. The combination of flavour is just right and we can’t get enough of this stuff. The overall taste of this pizza is quite sweet, they use a sweet tomato sauce and the onions have a sweetness, there’s also a sweet tanginess to the pickled Jalpenos, which also gives a substantial spice kick that is added to by the beef and pepperoni. The challenge was to make this pizza in the kitchen with a quarter of the calories… here’s how we did it:

How to make Pizza Healthy

Right, if we’re gonna make this healthy we have to tackle to the two main unhealthy areas. The dough and the cheese, there is a lot of fat in the beef and pepperoni too, so we’ll also have to look at that.

The dough

Pizza dough is made using strong white bread flour, yeast, sugar, a pinch of salt and a bit of oil. My idea was to make dough that uses a healthier flour blend. I went for the following…

• 50% Wholemeal bread flour
• 25% Rye flour
• 25% Soy flour

This gives you a wholemeal dough that is made a bit less ‘brown’ by having the healthy Rye and Soy in the blend, but without the extra calories you’d get by adding some white flour. Soy is high in protein and low in carbs but you can’t use more of this because it doesn’t have any gluten which is needed to create the texture of airy pizza dough. We found this blend worked a treat. We also added about 50% extra yeast than you would with normal dough, the brown flours were quite heavy and we want to make sure we were getting as much air into it as possible so upped the yeast. For the sugar I used a tablespoon of Agave Syrup, a wonderful all natural sugar extract that has the lowest glycemic index of any natural sweetener.

Mark was very happy with the dough

Wholemeal Wheat and Rye Flour has tons more fibre than white flour, this aids digestion and makes you feel full quicker, which is good. Overall this flour blend has 30% less carbs in it than normal white flour and with the extra fibre we’re really making a big difference by using this for our base.

The cheese

Again for the cheese we went for a blend, the idea being to bring together the desired properties of several different cheeses to create the perfect balance of taste and healthiness. After having a good think in the supermarket I plumped for 4 types of cheese to work with. Seriously Strong Cheddar (full fat, 35%), Tesco reduced fat Cheddar (5% fat!) and Pizza Mozzarella (15%), I also considered working with a bit of ultra-low-fat cream cheese, but this wouldn’t have been right. The theory was as follows, you want a good strong cheesy taste, you want low fat. The strong cheddar was for a good real cheese flavour, but since it was so strong you don’t need much which is just as well because it contains so much fat. The mozzarella adds a classic stringy pizza texture and the low-fat cheddar nicely dilutes the fatty cheeses making the whole thing healthier.

I used the following blend:

• 40% Pizza Mozzarella
• 40% Low Fat Cheddar
• 20% Seriously Strong Cheddar

Just grate it all down and mix it together in the above proportions. This blend has an average fat content of 15%, but it has a really good strong flavour and a perfect stringy texture when melted. The key is to remember that you don’t need to use much, real Italian pizza isn’t smothered in cheese like they do at PizzaHut, so just a restrained sprinkle will be entirely adequate.

The tomato sauce

I got Mark to prepare the tomato sauce before we got together to work on the rest of the pizza. We want loads of flavour here and not a drop of fat. Mark slowly cooked down 3 packs of vine ripened cherry tomatoes in the oven for 10 hours! Along with the tomatoes into the casserole dish went 5 cloves of garlic, black pepper and a few sprigs of fresh basil. We then whizzed all this together, added a dash of Agave Syrup to create wonderfully weighty sauce, with a subtle and smooth flavour. Remember the sweetness is an important part of reproducing what PizzaHut do, and the Agave Syrup is healthiest way of achieving it.

The quick version

If you’ve not got 10 hours, then here’s a quick way of making a sauce that tastes almost as good.

• 75g Tomato Puree
• A good drizzle Agave Syrup
• 1tspn Schwartz Minced Garlic
• 1tspn Dried Basil
• Good crack of black pepper
• 25ml water

Just warm all this together in a pan for 10-15 minutes and you’re done.

The rest of the toppings

The rest is pretty easy, mushrooms and onions are good for you anyway, so just get good fresh ingredients and cut them in to nicely sized chunks. I use small field mushrooms, they’ve got a much better taste than button mushrooms. For the Jalapeños I use Discovery or Old El Paso, you get them from the Mexican section of the supermarket (next to the taco and fajitas kits).

The Spicy Beef

This required a bit of extra work, but essentially it was really easy to create a low-fat version. I got hold of some extra lean mince, only 5% fat as opposed to the 25% in normal mince. We stuck the whole packet into a dry frying pan on medium heat and quickly knocked together a spice blend to liven it up.

Into my pestle and mortar went 1tblspn black pepper corns, 1tblspn smoked paprika, 1/2tblspn dried oregano and a generous pinch of cayenne pepper. Grind it all down and put it in the pan with the meat.

Just keep cooking it in the pan until all you are left with a pan of dry spicy beef, this should only take about 15-20mins. We then transferred this to a casserole dish and left it in the oven on a medium heat for it dry up a bit more. I have since discovered that this is unnessesary, so put the mix to one side ready to load on your pizza.

Bringing it all together

Pizza needs a hot oven. When they make pizza in your take away or at a restaurant they have special pizza ovens, these are hotter than your domestic oven will ever go, so we can’t compete here. Just turn it up full whack and it’ll be fine.

Once your dough has proved. Knock the air out of it and roll it out into the desired size. Try and make it as thin as you can, the less dough you eat with your pizza the better really, so try and get it nice and thin. Once your base is rolled out transfer it onto a baking tray to begin loading it with flavoursome toppings.

Tomato sauce first, 2-3 tablespoons of sauce should adequately cover a 10 inch pizza. Use the base of a spoon to evenly spread the sauce up to the edges leaving about a cm of crust.

Now lets add the toppings, evenly spread a handful of mushroom and onion, sprinkle over the spicy beef and regularly place the Jalapeños over the top.

Now add the cheese, don’t go over board, it can be tempting to smother it but there really is no need. A modest sprinkle will do fine. Bang it in the top of your red-hot oven. Leave the door shut throughout cooking to keep it as hot as possible. It should only take 7-9mins, keep an eye on it through the window. Cheese should be melted all over and just starting to brown and so will the crust.

Here it is, the FlavourSmash pizza.

Whip it out the oven and let it stand for at least 5 mins. There’s nothing worse than burning your mouth on a red hot pizza because you can’t wait to scoff it. You’ll enjoy it more if you can just wait those few mins.

The verdict

As we sunk our teeth into our creation, Ryan (of chicken fame), Mark and myself all shared a glint in our eyes as we all realised that this pizza was something of a marvel. The flavour combination of the topping had been recreated to almost atomic precision. The base texture was notably more wholesome yet retained the light airy softness that we all loved. The sweetness of the tomato was perfectly sitting alongside the sharp kick of the Jalapeno and beef. The cheese perfectly packed more than enough flavour and it’s melted texture was everything we could’ve hoped for.

We devoured two 10in pizzas between the 3 of us, enjoying every mouthful almost as much as if we’d been eating it’s fat cousin from Pizza Hut. Then we made this realisation, the main residing feeling in each of us after consuming the pizza was one of total guilt free satisfaction. We actually felt good about ourselves after this bout of indulgence, there was no grease stained pizza box in sight and we could tell our bodies were actually being nourished in a balanced and wholesome way, and that felt simply incredible.

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In the meantime I’ve become part of the weightloss blogging community the Healthy You Challenge, a great community of bloggers who are striving to shed the pounds and are more than happy to give each other support and guidance along the way. To get involved in the whole thing I’ve decided to set some goals for the month of April. So far, FlaourSmash has been a mix of crazy cooking ideas, flavour packed dishes and quite random weight loss postings. I’m going to set the ground rules:

• Weight-loss progress postings are every Wednesday (gives time to get back on track after the potentially slippery weekend)
• One Ultimate Smash Challenge per week (i.e Fried Chicken, Chicken Balti)
• One other original FlavourSmash recipe concept per week.

And here are the goals I am going to set for april. I’ll also post these in one of the side bars to constantly remind me:

• Lose at least a further 8lbs
• Start a sporting blog, something interesting and quirky that doesn’t get enough attention. I’m think it’ll be based around the fine art of playing frisbee. Something I have developed an interest for of late. It’s the power of harnessing  the physics of the rotating disc that appeals. In the way FlavourSmash has helped with my healthy cooking/eating, I believe that this will help with my exercise.
• Read a decent novel this and every month. Something I just can’t seem to find time to do for some reason.

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Being a man of decadent indulgence, he wanted to capture the luxurious richness of eggs benedict without the fat laden hollandaise. Silky smooth flavoursome sauce with gently poached eggs was the concept, and enough interesting flavour that you don’t mind not having bread with it.

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This is the man himself, full of eager anticipation to liven-up breakfast with intense flavours to kick-start the day.

We got started with the Bloody Mary’s, generally breakfast isn’t the best time to go crazy with flavour, but a Bloody Mary gives you license to really pack a punch first thing in the morning. Our recipe was a simple twist on the classic.

• Tomato Juice
• Worcester Sauce
• Mild Tobasco (jalapeño juice, I like to call it)
• Ketel One vodka (FlavourSmash’s number one endorsed vodka)
• Spice blend (freshly ground tropical peppercorns, Szechuan pepper corns, celery salt, cayenne pepper)

They were top notch. Pure, healthy (minus the booze) and bursting full of flavour…

Natalie looks on as Eggs Norris is conceived…

So now for the eggs. The concept here was to shallow poach the eggs in a calorie free flavour blend. A frying pan was filled with an inch of water, to this was added a 50ml of Worcester Sauce and good glug of cider vinegar. It was brought to the boil and then left turned right down so the mix was no longer boiling and the water became still. The eggs were very gently placed into the water and left. No stirring, so spooning liquid over, just let them sit there in the hot flavoursome water.

Here they are, just sitting there, taking on flavour and gently cooking… no movement in the pan remember

After about 15 mins, you can scoop the eggs out and sit them on plate. By this time the eggs should be perfectly cooked, just reaching the point where the yolk is starting to solidify but not quite.

While the eggs were sitting in the pan reaching perfection, we’d been busy creating a flavoursome cheese sauce to go with it. Remember we’re trying to get the sensation of eggs benedict, but with more flavour and less calories. A cheese sauce wouldn’t normally be acceptable, but a little for breakfast is okay and compared to hollandaise it’s practically fat free.

The cheese sauce was made like any other cheese sauce, make a rue (butter and flour) and add milk and cheese to thicken. We’ve added wholegrain mustard and some of the spice blend we used for the Bloody Marys to liven it up. It’s also worth mentioning that we used an extra strong and mature cheddar cheese, this way you get maximum flavour for minimum calories. Pour a good portion over the eggs and you’re done.

Here’s Siobhan tucking into this tasty breakfast treat, you should’ve seen her mouth watering while she was waiting for me to take this pic.

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You have to try this.

The story…
Myself and my good friend Ryan used to love enjoying fried chicken together. Every week, we’d go and try a different fried chicken place in Manchester, after years of enjoyment we became veritable experts in fried chicken. We learned to understand every nuance of the mighty bird and knew exactly what we looking for in a good piece and where to get it. The ratio of coating to flesh, the crispness, the ideal consumption temperature… we understood it all, and really appreciated the art of frying chicken. It is undeniably one of the finest ways known to mankind of enjoying the succulent flesh of the chicken, and unfortunately one of the least healthy.

Then I started FlavourSmash, we couldn’t go and get chicken together any more, I got into staying in and cooking wondrous, flavour packed cuts of fish with crisp vegetable stir-fries etc… this wasn’t Ryan’s bag. He felt left out, it was damaging our long-running common interest, I felt bad. Then I hit upon the idea of starting a quest. A quest to create the same flavour experience without the fat or carbs, the ultimate, the fried chicken you can eat every night and not pack on the pounds and I believe we’ve made it.

Phase 1: Understanding Chicken
In order to create the ultimate FlavourSmash version of chicken we had to understand how to make normal full fat chicken. So we set to work. After reading many recipes online we got the idea behind cooking southern fried chicken. Covering the chicken in buttermilk, and coating in a flour mixed with herbs and spices then deep frying in groundnut oil. First of all we blended loads of the spices mentioned in the recipes, paprika, Szechuan pepper, celery salt, nutmeg, cayenne pepper, garlic salt.. the list goes on. We tried a few blends, mixed it with plain wheat flour and every time it tasted too weird. Too much going on. The key was more simple, more restrained, more subtle… Then we hit on it.

After 3 or 4 attempts, we tried using just salt and pepper and it gave the best results BY FAR! It was 90% there, bar a bit of subtlety in the exact blend. It turns out that the secret flavour was just SALT and PEPPER! That bloody Colonel, pretending that KFC contains a secret blend of 11 spices. It’s nonsense, the flavour is subtle, and really relies on the saltiness of the coating to make it so satisfying, the chicken flesh itself takes care of the rest of the experience. Chicken just tastes good coated in a crispy, salty and peppery coating. The key to this is that the fat is not the most essential ingredient in creating the taste experience. What we need is moist cooked chicken, a crispy coating and a weighty salt and pepper seasoning. This is something that can be achieved all within the concept of FlavourSmash.

Phase 2: Taking the Fat and Carbs Out
The next challenge was to remove the fat and carbs from the cooking process. The obvious choice for lowering the fat was to bake the chicken instead of frying it. To ensure the chicken cooks all the way through, I decided that we would boil it first. Boiling the chicken releases a lot of the fat, and also ensures the meat is kept moist since it’s constantly submerged in water. Boil a deep saucepan full of chicken legs for 30 mins and they will be cooked through fully. Leave aside to cool and prepare the spice blend. For this blend I used freshly ground black pepper and sea salt, and to cut the carbs right back I used soy flour instead of normal wheat, for added fibre and folic acid, a couple of tablespoons of wheatgerm was also added. This has less than half the carbs and tons of healthy proteins packed in to it. Mix a blend up of about 90% flour to 10% salt and pepper blend. Get your chicken legs and remove the skin. The skin is gorgeous and you can leave it on, but it harbours the most fat (even when boiled). I’ve found that you don’t miss it that much when removed, so lose it if you want the healthiest possible option.

I rolled the cooked chicken around in a tray of buttermilk (fat free natural yoghurt also works) and then rolled the pieces in the soy-flour-spice mix and baked it in a medium oven for about 15-20 mins.

I pulled the chicken out, let it cool for about 10 mins (remember, KFC chicken isn’t straight out of the fryer, it’s had time to cool so you can consume it in one delicious go), I tucked in. The taste was amazing. Just having a crust on the chicken is where the magic happens, the combination of moist chicken and warm salt and pepper crust creates the experience entirely, and remember this has no added fat. But it wasn’t quite there. The crust had become a bit too powdery. The flavour was there but the texture had become slightly too dry. I needed a way of lightly adding a tiny bit of grease to enhance the texture of the coating. Then I hit on it….

Phase 3: Innovating the magic
The key was in getting a touch of the groundnut oil flavour and its crisping qualities in to the coating. I wasn’t sure how to do this. I definitely didn’t want to deep or shallow fry. It had to be the lightest coating possible. I came up with an ingenious solution. I prepared the chicken pieces as above, but of instead of putting them straight into the oven, I prepared a pint glass of water. Into that glass of water I poured a small portion of groundnut oil on to the top, the oil sits on the top of the water and creates a layer. I then dipped the pre-coated chicken pieces all the way through the pint. This gently coats the meat with the slightest layer of oil. It barely penetrates the top of the crust, but it is just enough to create a delicious crispy coating when baked. This method causes a tiny fraction of the oil penetration that would be caused by deep frying.

I placed the pieces on a special baking tray with small holes in its base to ensure maximum heat and air circulation around the chicken, and the results were ASTOUNDING! Light, crispy, and with the exact flavour satisfaction of KFC! The soy flour is taking the carbs right down and the resulting chicken experience is almost indistinguishable from the colonel’s finest. A true triumph.

Phase 4: Further Enhancements
Once I had invented this breakthrough concept I experimented more the next day. Turns out, if you improve the blend with a spice mix as follows, you get even better results:

• 1/2 teaspoon Celery Salt
• 1/2 teaspoon regular Salt
• 1 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon Cayenne pepper

Mix all that with about 200 grams of soy flour, and you can add low-carb, fat-free colonel magic to anything you fancy (southern fried broccoli and courgettes are awesome) . Try it and let me know what you think!

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Anyway on with the weight loss. This week on the scales I was down to 13st 5lbs! Another amazing result! I’ve been making sure I have no beer and low carbs and eating just so many delicious tasty recipes that I do not feel like I am on a diet at all! I feel so positive about the whole thing.

I did enjoy myself over the Easter weekend, particularly with a massive roast dinner with a wonderful leg of pork. That has given me the idea for the quest to create the ultimate FlavourSmash roast dinner alternative. I used sweet potatoes roast with no fat, and steamed vegetables and a fat and virtually carb free onion gravy. I’ll do a few more experiments over the coming weeks and post the final result.

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I think I could be on to great new diet concept here. The satisfaction derived from eating such healthy food is wonderful. My mind is overwhelmed with the most creative concepts I’ve ever experienced. There are so many ways of eating really healthy food that tastes brilliant, keep you posted.

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Serves 2

Ingredients:
For the Turkey: 2 Turkey Breast Steaks, Lime Juice, Schwartz Lemon Pepper

For the Stir Fry: 2 Leeks, Raddish Sprouts, Curly Kale, Fresh Coriander, Ginger

Stir Fry flavours: Wholegrain Mustard, Worcestershire Sauce, Soy Sauce, Wine Vinegar and Lemon Pepper

For the Sauce: Low Fat Alpro Soya Voghurt, Wholegrain Mustard, Cider Vinegar

For the Peppers: Orange or Red Sweet Peppers, Olive Oil and Lazy Garlic

Method:

Beofre you start, get a dish as above and fill with Lime Juice, I’ve used Jiff Lime Juice for convenience but I bet fresh lime juice would be even better. Cover the steaks in a generous amount of Schwartz Lemon Pepper (I’ll do a post on this under Flavours soon) and place in the lime juice and let them marinade for at least 20 mins. Soon as you’ve done this, cut your peppers in half, remove any seeds and place in roasting tray. Spinkle some of ready chopped lazy garlic over each one, and drizzle a small amount of olive oil over the lot. Stick in the oven for on 190C for 30mins.

Here are the ingredients for the stir fry and sauce. The raddish sprouts are a fantastic superfood, crunchy with a hot raddish punch, they are the perfect ingredient for this sti-fry. Not to mention their gorgeous colour.

For the sauce I’m trying something a bit brave, we’re going to load a lots of flavour into some low fat yogurt. This is risky since yogurt is not heat tolerant. This means that it will separate and go a bit weird if you heat it up too much. Put the yogurt in a pan, and add two tablespoons of the mustard and a dash of cider vinegar for a little tang and really gently heat. Don’t get it too hot, just run a little bit of heat through the mxture. Certainly don’t let it boil. It won’t matter that it is not piping hot since all the other components of the dish will be.

Smash all the stir fry ingredients togther as described before and cook until the leeks have all softened. Keep tasting as it’s cooking and add the flavours, I’ve found the best way to do these stir frys is to taste as you go.

For the steaks, pull them out of the marinade and pan fry on a medium heat for about 4 minutes each side. The lime will have nicely penetrated the flesh and the pepper should still be clinging to the meat a bit. This will form a light crust. With Turkey, if it’s overcooked it can go dry quite quickly, so be careful to pull it out of the pan just before it’s over cooked.

Bring it all together as shown in the pictures, it was a good presentation move to pile up the peppers on top of each other. The vibrant colours in this made it look fantastic, Siobhan was thoroughly impressed and it tasted it out of this world. This was my first experiement with the Lemon Pepper, I think it could prove a great spice mix to have in the cupboard permanently.

Hearty, nutricious and full of exciting flavours. You can eat meals like this every night and lose weight. I can’t believe it.

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Over the last couple of day’s I’ve tried to cook FlavourSmash style for a couple of my friends, but have ended up creating something with far too much going on with the flavours, too spicy hot, too tangy - not everyone can take it as intense as me, so when I’m cooking for friends I have to have a bit more control and restraint over the composition of the dish. I had to pull it back tonight or I’d be starting to lose faith in my concept… I think I’ve pulled it off… big time.

I’ll have to make this again when I’ve got my proper camera with me, but the below pic gives you the idea. You can tell by Siobhan’s face how much she loved it!

For the red veg:
Load up a roasting tin with vine ripened tomatoes (cut in two horizontally), sweet pointed peppers (cut length-ways) and crushed garlic cloves, just chuck it all in, you can even leave the skin on the garlic. A tiny drizzle of extra virgin will get it all going. Stick it in the oven for 30 mins on 190 °C.

For the marinade:
Genovese Pesto 5 tablespoons, Kalamtra Olive Tapenade 1 tablespoon, Green Peppercorns 1  tablespoon. Roughly mix it all up and you’re ready to go. Get your chicken and make little slashes all over both sides with a sharp knife. Use a teaspoon to force the marinade into all the grooves you’ve just created in the chicken. Leave for at least 20 mins.

For the stir-fry:
Half a savoy cabbage shredded, 1 leek julienne-style, 200g fresh basil, 100g dried porcini. 1 clove of garlic. Soak the porcini in warm water for 30 minutes (do this at the same time as putting the roasting veg in). Simply stir-fry all the ingredients in a hot wok for 5-7 mins. I also poured in a dash of cider vinegar and the liquid the mushrooms were soaking in. It added a bit of extra depth to the green veg side of things.

Method:
Pan fry the chicken in a pan with a little olive oil over a medium heat, 8 mins each side will do it. Put any excess marinade in the pan at the end and cook through to create a little sauce.

Pour the sauce over the meat, place the stir-fry on one side of the plate and load up the roasted pepper and tomatoes on the other (squeeze the contents of the roasted garlic all over the plate too for extra tasty garlicky pungency), top off with a sprig of fresh basil and savour the subtle intensity of this sublime dish.

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