A Big Fat Problem

(image from myrecipies.com)

When it comes to cooking, we have a lot of fats to choose from and we all know that olive oil is the healthiest one that's easily available. However, I don't know about your family but mine isn't going to put up with whole grain pita bread dipped in olive oil for very long. What they want are flaky, tender, homemade biscuits and that's what I'm going to give them... at least sometimes.

The problem? What fat should I use to make these as healthy as possible? I learned to make them with shortening. I can make them with margarine or butter, or even lard. I cannot make a good biscuit with olive oil.

For those of you who don't cook, here's how you make biscuits. First you mix some white flour, baking powder, and a little salt together. Then you cut in some fat (you mush it into the flour with a fork or pastry blender forming little flakes of fat and flour). Then you mix in a little cold milk, roll them out and cut them into round shapes and bake them till golden. This isn't health food but I'm not trying to kill my family either. The flakiness is caused by the fat flakes melting in the oven as the biscuits bake, so you can't use oil.

And so, I set out on a mission, an internet odyssey, to find out which fat would be better for my family: butter, margarine, shortening, or lard.

A fat that is saturated has lots of hydrogen atoms bonded to it and tends to be solid at room temperature. These are usually animal fats. We threw out the polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fat when we threw out the oils. They are better for you but they are liquid at room temperature and won't suit our purpose. Trans fats started out as unsaturated fats but had hydrogen atoms added to them to make them more solid at room temperature.

So we have saturated fats: butter and lard, or trans fats: margarine and shortening... So which is worse?

This doctor says Trans fats are worse because they lower your HDL (good stuff) and increase your LDL (bad stuff). He says that saturated fats only increase your LDL.

However, the same guy, when asked which is better, butter or margarine said to pick margarine.

Okay, I don't have any margarine in the house but I do have some shortening. It occured to me to check the ingredients: selected meat fats (lard, tallow, and hydrogenated lard), partially hydrogenated soybean oil with mono-and diglycerides added; BHA, propyl gallate and citric acid added to protect flavor.

Ooops! Lard didn't have enough hydrogen on it already? Here we have a product that is made up of both trans and saturated fats. Shortening is off the list! This is a little heartbreaking because it's so easy to use.

This is the internet. One source is not enough. Let's consult somebody else: butter or margarine?

This newspaper article doesn't really answer the question, but points out that butter has cholesterol in it and more fat than margarine.

The American Heart Association says Margarine: but I get the feeling they don't approve of flaky biscuits.

So I think the answer is that I shouldn't serve biscuits every night of the week and when I do, I should make them with margarine. If I use tub margarine they won't be quite as flaky as biscuits made with shortening but they'll be healthier. If I want top notch biscuits that won't raise Hubby's cholesterol quite so much, I ought to opt for a shortening made from vegetable oils rather than the kind I have on hand. I think...

Links:

The National Association of Margarine Manufacturers wouldn't be biased, would they?

Snopes weighs in.

The American Butter Institute just says, "things are better with butter".

Food groups, oils and butter, and cancer of the oral cavity and pharynx (From the British Journal of Cancer)

Word of The Day

Trans-isomer: this is when you have a couple of carbon atoms that are double-bonded to each other and the hydrocarbons that are bonded to those carbons are arranged on opposite sides. Because of the shape of the bonds, trans-isomers have a straighter or flatter shape than cis-isomers that have those hydrocarbons on the same side. This is a case where the stereochemistry of molecules can make a big difference in the way they behave, even if they have all the same kinds of elements in them.