How to make recipes more satiating

My aim is to lay out a process for taking an existing recipe and modifying it to be more satiating.

There are now lots of health-focused cookbooks on the shelves. Several give helpful pointers about nutrition. For example Dr Rupy Aujla’s Healthy High Protein lays out ways to use food as preventative medicine, such as getting a good amount of protein and fibre per meal and including fermented foods and foods that help control inflammation. In a sea of slightly woo ideas about nutrition, I felt the book gave an outline that is simple to follow.

In Lindsay Wilson’s book “Filling Meals”, he talks about reading the satiety research and writing about it on his blog. I would have loved to read this. The most useful pages in his book are those about what makes food filling; in his experience, water, protein, fibre, vitamins and minerals. Ideas included volume eating, bumping up protein, and increasing fibre content. He also mentions ensuring adequate intake of minerals like potassium, magnesium and calcium, as well as vitamins like B vitamins, A, E, and C. I would be interested to read supporting research on satiety and vitamins and minerals, which Wilson doesn’t provide.

My problem with both books is neither offer recipes that are particularly exciting or practical. What I’m not yet seeing on shelves are voices in food focusing on making healthy recipes people will want to eat rather than those they “should” eat.

As a foodie, I have three full shelves of cookbooks. All of these are by authors who have focused on creating the most delicious version of a dish. So surely I can come up with something healthy, but just as tasty to eat.

From the above books’ opening materials, and the conference talk “Satiety: the secret to eating better” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmUqjHbPmEc , I’ve noted down some broad principles.

Making a meal more satiating

You can make a meal more satiating by incorporating 25g or more of protein, and increasing fibre and volume. So more vegetables or fruit. Inventing a more satiating version of a recipe is just a specialised form of recipe testing. With this in mind, here’s my system for building a more satiating recipe.

A process for developing and recipe testing a more satiating version of a recipe

1. Find a few standard recipes for the dish. If you don’t already know how the dish tastes, cook a recipe once without modifications.
2. Look at all the ingredients and consider any alternatives, for example:
   1. Replace sugar with a sweetener
   2. Replace pasta or noodles with higher protein alternatives like red lentil pasta
   3. Replace a cut of meat with a leaner one
   4. Change a technique e.g. bake or air fry if you don’t want to deep fry at home
3. Then consider if you need to shift the ratios to include more protein or vegetables. For example, by making a bolognese with more soffrito than is typical.
4. Write up your recipe as you plan to make it
5. Test the result, and observe if with your modifications you are still happy with the taste.
6. You can note on your written recipe if it needs more or less of anything.
7. If you are happy with the result, you can play with ratios a bit more.
8. Or, you might decide some of your substitutions weren’t worth the loss in flavour. Say if you substituted erythritol for palm sugar in a Thai recipe, you might notice a change in flavour and decide it’s worth including.

An example was the School of Wok’s char siu pork recipe I make for dinner. The first change I made was to remove the sesame oil since pork shoulder is already a fairly fatty cut of meat. Then, I tried using erythritol instead of granulated sugar in the marinade. I was happy it made no difference to the taste.