Soul food recipe sites are continue to adapt and reinvent itself to meet changing consumer needs. The traditional southern cooking has changed to a leaner and more user- friendly style of cooking. When you think of southern food you normally visualize hearty and heavy meals filled with heaping helpings of butter, fat and salt. Oh-so delicious, but unhealthy by today's health standards. That’s why the challenge for many southern recipes and the authors is to create recipes that’s not only good - but good for you.
More and more soul food recipes of today recognize and continues to work feverishly to meet this challenge. That's why you'll find more and more recipes shying away from the traditional fat-laden recipes and adopting lighter ingredient recipes. Surprisingly the taste doesn't get lost in translation. "Although many will not taste exactly like your grandmother used to make, they're getting better," says soul food critic Samantha Pollard.
Many of the changes that's taking place is to substitute the traditional heavy ingredients with lighter ones. For example, animal fats such as ham hocks, fat back and bacon is replaced by low fat smoked turkey, turkey ham or turkey bacon. Cooking techniques have also gone healthier. For example, less deep fat frying and more pan frying, baking and grilling is recommended in many soul food recipes now.
In addition, stir-frying is introduced for the first time to many soul food recipes for a healthier lighter alternative. For example, a big hit on many websites is stir fried cabbage as well as stir fried collard greens. Traditionally these vegetables were boiled in large amounts of water for one to two hours. Doing this caused many of the valuable vitamins and nutrients to be loss in the cooking process. However, by using the quick stir fry method of cooking most the vitamins and nutrients are preserved as well as the taste
Another popular element added to soul food recipe sites is video. Many sites have recognized the importance of including demonstration videos with the written recipes. This gives the visitor a better show-and-tell idea of how to prepare the recipes, especially for beginning cooks or people preparing the recipe for the first time.
These changes continue to win rave reviews from visitors. As the economy slows more people change from eating out to eating in and saving money. The soul food recipes found on these new-school websites continues to help more families who struggle to slash their food cost while providing healthier meals. As a result southern cooking has successfully started to shake the unhealthy label while maintaining the comfort food tradition it's famous for.
See the top 20 soul food recipes and video demonstrations voted by readers. Go to
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