Having been on the Atkins diet for over a year now I have become fairly creative in the kitchen. It's fairly trivial to make some recipes low-carb, but desserts are tricky. Cream cheese and pumpkin both are fairly low in carbohydrates, but the hardest part of a pie is the crust.
Atkins Nutritionals makes a low-carbohydrate baking mix, available from their website or about a zillion other places including GNC and your local health food store, though they may have to special order it. When combined with just a couple of other ingredients you can make a tasty crust for your desserts which makes them cook better and more closely resemble their high-carb equivalents.
Nut flour/meal is available from a number of places around the internet for less than $10/pound. It's expensive for certain, and if you can get macademia nuts in bulk it's cheapest to make it yourself. Be careful when making it in a food processor, as it is easy to end up with nut butter.
Ingredients:
Preparation:
- Mix dry ingredients together in a large bowl.
- Add wet ingredients and mix until well-blended.
The desired texture is wet enough to stick together but dry enough to not stick to your hands. You will have to let it sit a bit so that the baking mix can soak up some of the water.
Once the crust has reached the desired consistency, grease your pie pan with butter, and then spoon the mixture in, and make it conform to the shape of the pan/plate. Bingo! A low-carb crust. It's actually closer in flavor and richness to a pastry than your average crust but it is basically ideal for cheesecake, which is also fairly low-carb when made with non-sugar sweeteners. It should be fairly easy to substitute any low-carb baking mix but you will definitely have to play with the quantities of all of the major ingredients if you do this.
Nutritional Information:
Nutrition information for the entire crust:
(Divide by the number of slices for your nutritional information per serving)
Mix Flax Nuts Butter Total
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Fat 2g 4.5g 44g 66g 116.5g
Saturated 0g 0g 6g 42g 48g
Cholesterol 0mg 0mg 0mg 180mg 180mg
Sodium 220mg 0mg 60mg 600mg 880mg
Potassium 550mg - - - 550mg
Carbs 6g 4g 6g 0g 16g
Fiber 3g 4g 4g 0g 11g
Sugar <1g 0g 2g 0g <3g
Net 3g 0g 2g 0g 5g
Protein 18g 3g 4g 0g 25g
Vitamin A 0% 0% 0% 48% 48%
Vitamin C 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%
Calcium 5% 2% 0% 0% 7%
Iron 15% 4% 0% 0% 19%
References:
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