How To Slow-Carb Cook

Hey, everybody, it's Chef Todd Moore again. You might recall, at the beginning of the year, I was feeling kind of lousy. I was feeling run down and tired and cranky and not sleeping well, and wasn't quite sure what to do about it. So I called my friend Ben Greenfield. He's a fitness guru, and one of the first things he advised me to do is examine the way that I'm eating. So I did just that. And I've decided to try and replace a lot of the carbohydrates in my diet. The rices, the pasta, the. The breads, the potatoes with more protein, with things like beans and eggs. Increase the protein in my diet, reduce the carbohydrates. And since I never cook with a recipe, I didn't have to go searching for a recipe for this. I can just make things up. So come on back over to the stove. Look over my shoulder as I create a dish that really adheres to this process of trying to substitute proteins for carbohydrates. We'll show you how to do it today over at the stove.

My ingredient list here is quick and simple. I got a jar of black beans that I've rinsed, some chicken cut into slices, sliced mushrooms, red pepper cut into strips, and egg white, as well as some snow peas that we're gonna steam, and some diced garlic, as well as my flavor profile, some red pepper, sesame oil, dried ginger, and soy sauce. Starting over at the stove, we get our steamer bin going and drop those snow peas in there. Because when I. One of the healthiest ways to cook, certainly without added fats, is steaming. And if I were to put those snow peas in a saute pan, they would burn on the outside before they'd get nice and soft. Testing the saute pan with some water, I know that it's hot. We're going to use some of the sesame oil and not only for its flavor, but mechanically in a stir fry or saute procedure, that needs to take the heat from the bottom of the pan to the inside of the pan, from the inside of the pan to the protein product. And our protein product today is going to be ch. That chicken that I've cut into slices. We'll add that to the sesame oil that's in the pan, again, not only giving that characteristic flavor, but applying the direct source heat in a saute that will coagulate those proteins. And we'll start to see the chicken go from this pink kind of color to a coagulated white. When you see the white start to creep up around the sides of the chicken. You can start to see it here already, how the chicken coagulates, it stiffens and shrinks and. And all of cooking basically has to do with coagulation of proteins. You know this. If you put a hamburger on your barbecue grill and the raw hamburger is A1 size and the cooked one is much smaller. Coagulation of proteins. Now, after I add some chopped garlic to the pan, we'll combine those flavors as well and let the moisture in the chicken start to evaporate and some of the garlic flavor as well.

On this back burner here, I've got some chicken broth that's been simmering. And what we're going to do is go ahead and poach these black beans in this chicken broth to give them some flavor and soften them up a little bit. Now, granted they're canned beans, so they're already edible. Dried beans you would either soak overnight or you would simmer for an hour or so. But for now, we're looking to add flavor and really create a sauce for this dish, which is going to be a chicken stir fry with black beans. So with the black beans on the back burner simmering in chicken broth and my chicken up here being sauteed, and you can see proteins coagulating again, let's add a little more flavor with some dried ginger. Certainly fresh ginger is possible. It goes that bad so quickly. I keep this dried ginger. I want to add a little heat to this as well. So I'm going to add some of these red pepper flakes to give it just a little spicy flavor profile. Combine all those. Let's check on my steamer here. Combine all those flavors with the red pepper, the garlic and the chicken.

And add the red pepper strips. Now I start to build one flavor on top of the other. So I have some of the chicken fond that winds up in the bottom of the pan. Makes everything taste like chicken. Then I've got the garlic. So I've got garlic flavored chicken and chicken flavored garlic. And now the red peppers, which will give me red pepper flavored chicken and red pepper flavored garlic. Give the beans a stir and we start to build one flavor on top of the other. That's the idea with this quickest way of cooking the stir fry or saute. Continue to push things around. Make sure we distribute the heat evenly.

And now I've got some mushrooms. Those sliced mushrooms will go right in the pan on top of everything else.

Now I've got my egg white. Let's beat up the egg white a little bit. And we're going to add this to the black beans in the back to try and thicken the sauce a little bit, but also, once again, to give protein notice. I'm not making this with rice or with pasta. I'm. But that egg white is going to give me a little bit more protein in with those beans. And you can see how the egg white starts to coagulate pretty quickly. That's going to give us a Chinese, Cantonese kind of flavor to this dish. But an egg white will not only help thicken that sauce a little bit, but will also give us the flavor and the protein in the egg.

Let's check on the steamed snow peas here. Take one of them out. Feel it in my finger. Take a bite out of it. Oh, we don't throw it back in, but those are ready I can taste. So we'll go ahead and add them directly to our stir fry and move the steamer basket aside.

Now let's take a look at our black beans with the egg whites. And you can see how that sauce has thickened a little bit and added that flavor of the egg to the black beans and chicken. That should be great as a sauce to put over this. And again, the black beans and the eggs give me a good amount of protein. But I think we're going to thicken this sauce just a little bit and create a cornstarch slurry. So I've got about 2 tablespoons of cornstarch here with a little bit of soy sauce, and I'll take a spoon and dissolve that. This is a slurry. This is the way that Grandma thickens the turkey gravy at Thanksgiving. This is the quickest and easiest way to thicken a liquid. But since I didn't measure any of the liquid in with the beans, and since I didn't measure any of the cornstarch, I'm not going to dump it all. Let's put a little bit, about half of it in. And this cornstarch slurry made with soy sauce will not only give me the flavor of the soy sauce, but again, thicken this liquid a little bit for me. So when I start to stir it around, I wait for the heat to come up. I can start to feel it getting thicker. I look at the back of the spoon to see how it's coating the spoon. And we'll give that just a few minutes to start simmering. Let's take another look at our stir fry with the chicken, the garlic, the mushrooms, the red pepper, and the Snow peas all in one pan. Notice this isn't going to be a lot of cleanup afterward because I'm really just using this one pan to combine all these flavors as well as make my sauce. Let's check on the thickness of the sauce on the back of the spoon. Bring my finger through the coating, and I can see that it runs together pretty quickly. So we're going to need a little bit more of the slurry. Let's go ahead and add the rest of the slurry.

To our sauce with the black beans and watch that thicken up a little better.

So now that my sauce has thickened up, it's time to plate up. This is a very simple, quick and easy stir fry where we just add one flavor on top of the other in the wok. But the thing that's really going to make this flavorful and protein powerful is the beans and the egg white that I've put in here as well. So it's a simple matter of using my slotted spoon, plating up. God, look at all the different colors, the freshness of these ingredients. Again, there's not a recipe for this, ladies and gentlemen. This is a basic stir fry procedure that you can use anything. I used chicken. You can use beef or shrimp or por or tofu. Or leave out the protein altogether if you're a vegetarian and do just simply a vegetable stir fry or add some Indian paneer or tofu like I mentioned. Excellent for Indian diets. This can be served over quinoa if you'd like, or barley. But again, my process is to try and add as much more protein to my diet as I can and eliminate the carbohydrates. Normally, a stir fry like this I would probably serve over rice, but this is a black bean sauce with egg whites thickened with a soy sauce cornstarch slurry. And I'll just add some of that to the top, straining out some of these black beans. And this is going to be a real protein, powerful dish.

Add a little bit of sauce, a little bit of that egg white soy sauce sauce to both of them. And now I've got not only the nutrition of the vegetables and the healthy cooking process of steaming and, and the soy sa, the sesame sauce saute, both healthy cooking processes. But I've also got the power of the black beans. How about some chopped up? What are they? Cashews. Some chopped up cashews for garnish.

And there it is. My stir fry of chicken with a black bean and egg white soy sauce. It's a Cantonese type dish and something very quick and easy that you can do.