Question
Ana Crowther
My biggest interest is being able to cook without oil, salt and sugars (this does not include dates). How can I achieve good flavor in my food creations?
Answer
All right, Anna. So that kind of depends a little bit on what you're cooking, but, um, you know, one of the things that I always say when you're eating, uh, a whole food plant-based diet like this, um, you know, without oil, without salt and those sugars, is to be able to choose the freshest ingredients that you can find, right? So, um, you also wanna try to buy fresh herbs if possible. So buying herbs like fresh cilantro, fresh parsley, uh, basil, different things like that, um, are things you wanna start incorporating into your meals to be able to get the biggest flavor that you possibly can. Um, this also means, uh, getting vegetables that are either in season or that have been, uh, grown closer to you so they're not traveling a long distance. Um, as soon as you pick any fruit or vegetable, um, from its life source, from the vine, from the tree, whatever, uh, from that point on, it starts to decay and it will start to lose its flavor and its texture, uh, and color will start to break down from that point on. So the closer you get it from where it was grown, the better flavor you're going to get. Now, depending at where you are in the world, um, sometimes it's harder to be able to get certain ingredients like in winter time. So it's actually great to either canned items, buy canned items, um, you know, at the same time. But you can also buy fresh herbs or grow fresh herbs in you're, um, inside in a window cell or something like that too. So that's usually what I tell people is to be able to try to, one, use fresh herbs, but also, uh, try to get, uh, different ingredients, um, as close to local as possible as you can to be able to get bigger flavor out of your foods. Uh, now to get any more detail, I'd actually have to know about kind of what you're cooking free feel to write another question. If you want to, I can help kind of troubleshoot to be able to get some bigger flavor out of that as well too.
