— Mark Rappaport

People have different journeys with olive oil and with dairy products. Um, you know, a lot of people that will kind of rollercoaster and go up and down on both of those things to wean yourself off. Um, I always tell people to take small steps, don't swan dive. Um, and what I mean by that is like if you, I mean if you have like a medical history of something or you need to stop something right away, definitely do that. But, um, what I always recommend, you know, with things like oil is kind of help yourself by taking the smaller steps to have a better success rate over time. So what I tell people for olive oil or just olive oil, just oils in general is when you're cooking with it, just put a small amount into the pan and then wipe it down with a paper towel. Then you're making your non-stick surface and you're not getting all the calories that you would if you were just glug lugging the oil into your pan. Um, a lot of people don't realize that any kind of oil doesn't matter if it's olive oil or uh, coconut oil, they'll have 120 calories per tablespoon. So you can easily add 500 calories to your dish before even putting food into your pan. So most people, what they're using the oil for is to be able to create a non-stick surface. So if you put the oil in your pan, brush the whole thing down with a paper towel, you'll get that non-stick surface. The same thing with spray oils. A lot of people put the spray oils in there, which typically have other things besides just oil in them, but they'll put that in and they'll just put this huge surface on it. When I worked in school food a lot, you'd see the people in the back just spraying down these huge sheet pans just forever with this and it was like, that's not really the flavor you want is this kind of spray oil on there. So again, a very moderate amount of that to be able to lower the amount of olive oil that you're using in that. Now, after you try that process, try the next step and that is to be able to cook without using the oil altogether with great methods on how to, um, saute without oil, how to cook just in general without oil, um, through the Forks Over Knives course, the Pro Cook or the Pro Plank, uh, courses as well. There's even a free lesson on Rouxbe to be able to show you how to do that as the Forks over Knives intro. So definitely check that out and experiment with it, just using the water to be able to cook with. Then you can step up to other ingredients as well if you'd like to. You can do other things like vegetable broth or you know, beer, wine, other kinds of things that you can be able to use all kinds of different liquids to be able to cook with. And basically what you're doing is when you're, um, adding a product to a pan that's dry, it's heating, um, you wanna look for this mercury ball kind of test to see that the mercury ball of waters, um, floating around. Once it gets to that point, you put your, uh, product into it and then just naturally some of the natural sugars will actually come off of the product. And brown, the bottle of the pan. The old chef adage is you never leave brown of the bottle of the pan because that's where all the flavor is. So to be able to get that brown off the pan and get the product unstuck a little bit, you're going tolas or rinse the bottom of the pan with just a little bit of water about two tablespoons. Um, once you do that, the natural sugars will come back to coat back onto the product as well. Um, and uh, it won't stick to your pan. So that's probably that evolution that I would look for is to start with just very, very minuscule amounts of oil and then wean yourself off gonna the non oil together for cheeses. Um, that's something you have to be able to, uh, kind of look for, uh, alternatives for to be able to start. Um, you know, I'm a big fan of using alternatives, um, for people that are just weaning themselves off of something, you know, so if you were a very big meat eater, I think it's totally okay to go onto the Impossible Burger, even if it's not as healthy to be able to go onto something like a Satan to be able to go onto like a veggie burger or like a not, um, a analog of meat, but more of something like a bean and rice kind of a burger instead. So kind of following those paths to be able to do that with cheese is what I would recommend getting off of cheese. At the same time, if you're the type of person that just likes to sit down to crackers and cheese, look for the alternative cheese. There are many varieties that you can buy at different stores. There are, um, purveyors that sell just high quality, um, you know, cheese as well too that are all completely plant-based. Um, and there are also recipes that you can do at home for the Proco course or for the pro uh, pro plant course. Um, I know particularly we offer a couple different versions of cheese. We do like a shove version, which is a cashew cheese. Then we also do like an agar one. Um, it's a sliceable cheese that Chef Char actually that, uh, we were talking about earlier with her Eagles, um, you know, that, uh, she developed. And it's a fantastic recipe for that kind of cracker cheese experience as well too. And that's something we can make at home, make it easy and it helps to make that transition happen, um, for you.