1 January 2006

Low GI Recipe of the Month

Fresh Plum and Ricotta Strudel
Plums and other blue-red fruit such as cherries, blueberries and cranberries, are rich in a particular type of antioxidants known as anthocyanins. Here’s a low-fat version of the strudel Catherine Saxelby makes using plums instead of apples. From Eating for the Healthy Heart and also reproduced in The Low GI Diet Cookbook.

strudel
Photo: Ian Hofstetter, The Low GI Diet Cookbook

Serves 6
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 45 minutes

30 g (1 oz) monounsaturated or polyunsaturated margarine
½ cup (40 g) fresh wholemeal breadcrumbs (about 3 slices)
1/3 cup (80 g) brown sugar
½ teaspoon cinnamon
425 g (15 oz) can plums, drained well (or 6 fresh plums about 250 g/9 0z)
6 sheets filo pastry
olive oil spray
125 g (4½ oz) reduced fat ricotta cheese

1. Melt the margarine in saucepan over medium heat. Add the breadcrumbs and sugar (reserving 2 teaspoons of sugar) and cook for 15 minutes stirring well to break up any lumps. Remove from heat. Stir in the cinnamon. Allow to cool.
2. Halve the plums, removing stones and slice the flesh thinly.
3. Preheat the oven to 190°C (375°F). Lightly grease a baking tray. Lay two sheets of filo pastry on top of one another spraying the upper most sheet with oil. Sprinkle with one-third of the crumb mixture and top with two more sheets. Spray top layer with oil and add another one-third of the crumb mixture. Top with the remaining two sheets and sprinkle with final third of the crumbs.
4. Spread ricotta along edge of pastry. Arrange plums on top of ricotta. Sprinkle with reserved 2 teaspoons of sugar. Roll up pastry as for a Swiss roll, tucking in the edges. Transfer to a lightly oiled baking tray. Bake for 10 minutes. Reduce heat to moderate (180°C/350°F) and bake a further 20 minutes until crisp and brown. Serve warm with low-fat vanilla ice cream

Per serving
Low GI, kilojoules 865/calories 205, fat 6 g (saturated 2 g), protein 5 g, carbohydrate 30 g, fibre 3 g, sodium 260 mg

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have the Low GI Diet book and the Low GI Cookbook and am trying to follow the suggested eating plan for losing weight, but am unsure how to fit the recipes in the books and on this website into the plan.

At first I thought I should look at the nutritional breakdown and work out what that represented in terms of the approx protein, fat and carbohydrate in a serve (ie 30g carb is one serve carb etc) and use that, but then I realised that in some recipes, like this strudel, some of the carb comes from fruit. Does this count in the carb count or the fruit count?

And then I looked at the lentil salad recipes and noticed that they had significant amounts of carb and protein, both of which come from the lentils, but the diet book says lentils can be either carb OR protein. What do I do?

Anonymous said...

We can understand the difficulty people have with this. The best thing you can do is judge what food group the dish primarily provides and then use the nutritional information in the recipe to work out how to do the substitution in your diet.

For example, with fried rice, the dish is mainly carbohydrate. The nutritional information tells us that 1 serve contains 55 g carb so we would treat 1 serve as 2 carb-rich serves.

For strudel it is a bit tricky to judge what you have most of, fruit or starch but with 30 g carb per serve we'd treat it as 1 fruit serve and 1 carb serve.

With a lentil salad recipe like the Lentil, Beetroot and Feta Salad, 1 serve provides 12 g protein and 12 g carb. Because you can class legumes as either protein or carb, you could count a serve of this as either a serve of protein-rich food or a serve of carb-rich food (almost--perhaps whichever suits you better. If you want to have some bread with the salad, count it as a protein serve and then have a couple of slices of bread with it as a carb serve.

We hope this helps you.

Anonymous said...

Yes, thanks.