Guest Post by Rebecca of GrillSavvy.com
Recently, a study done by the Food channel has revealed some very interesting facts about how we should cook to avoid the excess amount of animal fat in food, especially when cooking meat. The question was: “Which is the best way to cook meat with the least amount of fat?”. Three most popular techniques were tested: cooking on barbecue gas grill, traditional deep frying and roasting.
The experiment was conducted by cooking approximately three pieces of 100g of pork /each. The first steak was put onto a normal gas grill grate and cooked for 7 minutes under 700 degrees Fahrenheit. The second one was completely coated with corn flour and dipped into boiling sunflower oil for about 5 minutes. And the third piece was poked with rotisserie skewer and roasted for an hour.
The Surprising Results
Then the scientists from Food and Drug Administration took all 3 cooked steaks to the lab for testing and weighing how much fat has remained for each technique. The result was astonishingly surprising to most general audience. When the survey was done to collect people’s opinion on whether grilling, deep frying or roasting would keep most fat in the food, most people thought it was deep frying. But according to the calculation from this laboratory test, roasting was the unhealthiest way to cook meat.
For deep frying with corn starch coatings, there was about 2.3% of fat remained in the piece of pork, while for gas grilling, only 1.9% left, and for roasting, the shocking 2.7% was observed. Of course these are not 100% accurate statistics, because the cooking was not repeated and separated into many groups of foods, such as chicken nuggets, green vegetables or other organic foods. Nonetheless, grilling has shown the most potential for healthy way to effectively remove excess fat from meat.
Which Grilling Method is the Healthiest?
While grilling has been seen to produce healthier steaks with less fat, the question then was whether there would be any difference between gas or charcoal grilling for health benefits and overall nutrition intake. Most beginners would prefer gas fuels for its simplicity, ease of use and to avoid the mess usually associated with starting a charcoal fire. However, more seasoned bbq lovers, these days, would opt in for slow charcoal smoking for the unique taste and flavor that cannot be replicated using frying, roasting or any other traditional cooking methods.
Unfortunately, charcoal has been found to pose some potential dangers, such as high blood pressure leading to heart disease in the long term, which most people aren’t aware of. So if you are conscious about what you cook and want to keep it as healthy as you can, gas grilling has been proven to produce the least amount of saturated fat in meat, when compared to deep frying or roasting.