Can you put aluminum foil in a convection oven?

Can you put aluminum foil in a convection oven?

 

Metal will not allow microwaves to penetrate; the food behind the metal will not be cooked. The metal could also cause arcing in the oven. Microwave convection ovens can use metal and foil safely during the convection cooking. ... Do not completely cover any food item with aluminum foil.

General Convection Oven Recipe Conversion Guidelines

1. Bake at the same conventional oven temperature but for a shorter period of time.
2. Bake for the same length of time as you would using a conventional oven but reduce the temperature by 25 degrees.
3. Bake for a slightly shorter period of time and a reduced temperature.

Which is better convection or conventional oven?

It cooks more evenly: Regular ovens can have hot spots, depending on where the heating element is, but the fan in a convection oven will circulate the air to help even out the temperature variances. It's better at browning: Air in a regular oven can become a bit humid, as moisture can't escape. Take a look at the different styles available. Click here. 

How long do you cook in a convection oven?

How long do you cook in a convection oven?

When converting recipes from conventional to convection, use the temperature and time from the original recipe as a guideline, checking for doneness after three-quarters of the baking time has elapsed. Or, the original baking temperature may be reduced by 25 degrees F in general.

What can be cooked in a convection oven?

A convection oven circulates hot air with a fan. Unlike conventional radiant (also called thermal) ovens, convection ovens have a fan that continuously circulates air through the oven cavity. When hot air is blowing onto food, as opposed to merely surrounding it, the food tends to cook more quickly.

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One of the most prevalent illnesses today is food poisoning. 

It starts as a slight discomfort a few hours after eating and grows into a life-threatening episode requiring hospitalization.

The most common cause are the salmonella e-coli and listeria bacteria. And, they can be common problems in the chef’s kitchen.

Common breeding grounds for bacteria are kitchen towels, dish rags and brushes, cutting boards, kitchen sinks, door, drawer and refrigerator handles. Little things like timers, whisk handles, pepper mills and salt shakers also become breeding grounds for bacteria. You can also add bottles of oil, spice jars, can openers and the controls on your stove or ovens.

Food itself can be storage places for bacteria with the culprits chicken and other poultry, eggs, raw meats, dairy products, and even fresh fruits and veggies.

In addition to washing your hands regularly while cooking here is a list of things you should do in your kitchen to reduce the likely-hood of food poisoning:

1. Wash poultry in ice cold water when you bring it home from the supermarket and refrigerate immediately. Cook it as soon as possible.

2. Wash your hands and everything else that comes in contact with raw poultry.

3. Wash, never reuse knives, cutting boards, towels or anything else that touches raw poultry without washing them. This means don’t use the cutting board or knives to chop vegetables or anything elsethat will not be cooked immediately.

4. Wash your hands after going to the bathroom. Your family is not immune to your personal e-coli!

5. Wash all vegetables immediately after you bring them home from the market. This includes all fruit including watermelons, strawberries, peaches, mangos, grapes, and almost every other fruit including bananas.

6. Use a lot of paper towels that can be thrown away. Dish rags and towels are one of the biggest breeding grounds for bacteria.

7. Keep your kitchen counters clean. Use a diluted bleach or disinfectant before and after meal preparation.

8. Refrigerate foods as much as you can and read the labels on condiments, sauces, jams and jellies to see if they need refrigeration after opening. DO NOT LEAVE MAYONNAISE ON THE COUNTER ON A SUMMER DAY! That goes for anything made with the mayonnaise as well.

9. Gently wash eggs in ice cold water before putting them in the fridge. There is nothing sterile about an egg that came from the chicken coop.

10. Buy your meat, especially hamburger, from a reputable butcher shop.

11. Make sure you have a meat thermometer and make sure all meat is cooked to the proper temperature to kill the dangerous bacteria in meats, poultry and fish.

12. Wash your hands!! I can’t repeat this enough!

13. Plan your grocery shopping so you go home immediately after you purchase perishable foods.

14. If fish smells like fish, don’t buy it! If anything smells “off” or not what

you are accustomed to, don’t buy it.

15. If a can or jar whooshes when you open it, throw it away or better yet, take it back to the store.

16. Drain things over the sink, not in it. This place is teeming with bacteria. Sterilize it often, but still keep edible food out of it.

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The Main Purpose of Cooking is Health

Fall brings the perfect time for hearty soups and stews. 

If you have our Tuscan Skillet Meal Seasoning in your pantry, you've got a sure-fire way to bring a fresh spin to a soup and salad supper! Learn how to make this amazing soup right at home. Making meals does not have to hard, let us show you more. https://goo.gl/MDat22

 

Who can resist the mouth-watering pictures in a cookbook? 

Who doesn’t have childhood memories of the fragrances that wafted from the kitchen on holidays, and even on regular, ordinary days? Spices, bread baking, cookies fresh out of the oven – all these trigger a deep longing in most of us. As eating holds a guaranteed spot in everybody’s daily schedule, so do those who prepare it. They have become the uncrowned gods and goddesses of our lives.

Real cooking consists of more than opening a can with a dull picture of green beans on the front, or popping a TV dinner from a wax-covered box into the oven or microwave. The true goal of cooking is to nourish these marvelous bodies that we live in, to allow them to grow and express vitality and strength, to keep them healthy and able to overcome environmental germs and bacteria. Summarized in one word, the main purpose of cooking is heath!

When does a fruit or vegetable (or any baked item) furnish us with the most nutrition? The experts feel that food grown in one’s own environment will usually contain the most nutrition. Freshly harvested food provides the maximum nutritional value. After a fruit or vegetable has been sitting for several days, or transported around the world, the value of the vitamins and minerals diminishes.

The best means of ‘cooking’ fruits and vegetables for their health value is to eat them raw in salads or as snacks. As soon as heat is applied, a good quantity of the nutrition is destroyed. A good cook can prepare a beautiful plate with the natural colors of freshly picked fruits and vegetables.

Genetically engineered food has infiltrated the growing of almost all crops. This procedure didn’t exist until the last decade, and it remains highly controversial as the long range effect on humans has never been tested.

Briefly described, this procedure consists of infecting a healthy seed or grain with various bacteria or insects to lengthen its shelf life, to make it look ‘pretty’ for the consumer long after the nutritional value has dissolved. This not only has a negative effect on one’s health, but leaves the cook with a less than delicious product to serve.

Cooking with natural foods that are organically grown (that means with no harmful pesticides or chemical fertilizers) gives today’s health conscious cooks the best chance to delight in the time spent shopping and in the kitchen. Whipping up a carrot cake that will enchant both family and friends (best make two cakes while you’re at it), or preparing a quick but nutritious breakfast so the body will gleefully handle the challenges of the day without needing to be drugged by coffee or caffeine, make heading for the kitchen the favorite part of the day!

Truly the cook is the god of the household!


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Do You Like Coffee or Tea? Why

Do You Like Coffee or Tea? Why

Making coffee is one of the easiest things in the world, and yet people are forever finding more and more complicated ways to do it. We live in an advanced coffee culture, where coffee is the most popular drink on the planet, and people get used to things like cappuccinos and lattes and start wondering how to do them at home. A trap some people fall into is buying the instant versions of coffee shop drinks, which inevitably taste inferior, instead of just making the drinks themselves at home.

Is coffee creamer important to you? 


The most important thing to realize about coffee-making is that, no matter what you might think, there is no variety of coffee-shop coffee that is really very difficult to make, despite the fancy names. An Americano is just a normal coffee: coffee, hot water and milk on the side. A cappuccino is coffee, milk, and frothed milk, usually with chocolate sprinkles on top. A latte is milky coffee in a glass, and a mocha is the same thing with chocolate. A Macchiato is coffee with frothed milk on top. Each fancy word basically means coffee, milk and froth in some combination (plus, occasionally, chocolate), with everything else being pretty much a matter of presentation.




Did you know that Collegen Peptides is also helpful and easy to add to your coffee? Check out the different ones and how it can help with anti-aging, skin issues, bone support and soo much more. 

The coffee in each drink is made by an espresso machine, and a basic espresso machine is really all you need to start making coffee at home: once you can put beans in the top and get espresso out the bottom, there aren’t really any other features you need. This simple fact means that there’s not much difference between the cheapest and the most expensive coffee machines if you know what you’re doing. To make your coffee stronger, you just put in more espresso; to make the different drinks, you use different quantities of the different ingredients.


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The Low Down On Diet Comparison | What to Know

The Low Down On Diet Comparison | What to Know

Low carbs and high protein is the way to lose weight, or so you’ll hear from one diet guru, and he has the testimonials to back it up. Low fat, lots of carbs and fresh fruits and veggies, says another – and he’s got the back up from satisfied users, too. A third swears that you need to count the amount of sugar; another tells you the enemy is white flour – if you want to lose real weight and keep it off, who do you listen to?


Take a look at the brief summaries below for a quick overview of the pros and cons of each of the popular types of diet plans.


Low Carb-Hi Protein Diets 

Diets like the Atkins, the South Beach and the Zone Diet all recommend restricted carbohydrates and allow liberal amounts of protein, including protein derived from animal sources. Generally, they limit the overall amount of carbohydrates, or teach you to differentiate between “good” and “bad” carbohydrates. Bad carbohydrates, which are forbidden, include white flour, white bread, and white sugar.



Pros: The diets all encourage learning healthy eating as part of losing weight. Deriving most of your daily calories from high fiber sources of carbs like leafy green vegetables and grains is generally considered the best diet for nutrition by the established medical community. The popularity of the diets makes it easy to find low-carb foods.



Cons: The allowance of eating all the protein and fats you like flies in the face of conventional medical wisdom. A diet high in saturated fats could lead to heart disease, diabetes, gout and other chronic health conditions. Following the diets’ cautions and advice to keep portions reasonable should mitigate that concern, though.



Weight Loss “Programs” 

Jenny Craig, NutriSystem, Weight Watchers, SlimFast and a number of other weight loss programs rely heavily on pre-packaged ‘diet’ foods. They incorporate professional coaching, social structure and reinforcement.



Pros: The professional coaching and nutritional benefits are a big plus, as are the reinforcement and support aspect of the diets. Meals and supplements are prepackaged in the right proportions, and if you stick to the diets and exercise as directed you will lose weight.



Cons: The weekly fees and cost of meals can be expensive. In addition, if you rely completely on the packaged foods, you miss out on the re-education of your eating habits, which is important to maintaining any weight lost.



The Real Mayo Clinic Diet 

This is not the diet that has circulated for the past thirty or more years and purported to have originated at the Mayo Clinic! The true Mayo Clinic’s nutrition and diet center recommends a healthy eating weight loss plan based on limiting fats, proteins and carbohydrates, counting calories and deriving most of the daily nutrition from vegetables, grains and fruit.



Pros: There’s no ‘diet’. Instead, you’re encouraged to take control of your eating. Portion control and sensible balance of nutrients are the cornerstones of a weight loss plan that takes weight off gradually, and helps you keep it off permanently.

Cons: It may be difficult to stay on the diet. Counting calories and portions can be difficult if you’re eating out or on the run.

There are many diets that promise to take weight off quickly and painlessly, without exercise or changing your eating habits. The three major variations of diets above all will result in 1-2 pounds of loss per week, which most doctors believe is the optimum way to lose weight for long lasting results.


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What Helps Burn Fat for Weight Loss | Fat or Calories

What Helps Burn Fat for Weight Loss | Fat or Calories

To lose weight and get in shape you must have a good diet and exercise regularly to burn fat. The first thing you must understand about exercise is that just because you are burning calories does not mean you are burning fat.

Your main focus when you exercise should be losing body fat, and you can’t lose body fat just from burning calories. When we exercise, our bodies will start burning calories, but the calories that are burned are the calories from carbohydrates in our system. In order to burn calories from your stored fat, your body requires the presence of oxygen. There is a certain amount of oxygen that your body needs in order to start burning fat and the only way for you to measure the amount needed for your own body is to keep up with your target heart rate during exercise.

Please understand that if you continue to only burn calories from carbohydrates, you will lose mostly “water weight” which leads to a decrease in your metabolism. Also, think of the calories that are burned from carbohydrates as your energy calories. If you lose too much energy calories then your muscles will not receive enough energy to increase your metabolism which indirectly burn fat. Therefore you must increase your calorie intake when you are on an exercise program to replace your burned energy calories.

Burning Fat Calories during exercise

During aerobic exercise, your body goes through several stages before it reaches the point where you are burning fat. You will hear people say that you are only burning sugar (carbohydrates) not fat during the first 10 minutes of exercise. This is true to a certain extent. I say this because you will continue to burn sugar past the 10 minute mark if you are not working out hard enough for your body to want more oxygen; or you are working out too hard and you can’t supply your body with enough oxygen for fat burning. When you exercise you must move at a steady pace (not too fast, not too slow) so your body will utilize your stored fat (not carbohydrates or sugar) as its energy source. Also remember that just because you reached the fat burning stage does not mean you will stay there. Staying at the fat burning stage once again depends on if you are moving at a pace that is right for your body. Make sure that you are within your target heart rate range.

Burning Fat Calories at rest

The only way for you to continue to burn fat calories hours after you have finished working out is through the anaerobic exercise of weight training. Weight training is the key to burning fat at rest. Weight training is an anaerobic activity that will cause you to burn more calories than aerobic exercise. The calories that you are burning during weight training exercises are mostly calories from carbohydrates (meaning you must eat even more calories per day for energy); but the calories you burn at rest are mostly calories from fat. The reason you are burning fat at rest is because weight training increases your metabolism which uses your stored fat as energy.

To make your body the ultimate fat burning machine you must do aerobic (cardio) and anaerobic (weight training) exercises.


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