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:

  1. Mix dry ingredients together in a large bowl.
  2. 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
--------------------------------------------------------
      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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