Intimidated by the idea of making pasta at home? Gnocchi is a happy compromise because you don’t need a pasta machine or endless rolling to achieve delectable results. A 2:1 potato to flour ratio works best; for accuracy, measure with a kitchen scale. For the smoothest dough, use a potato ricer, a handy and inexpensive tool (see the “Quick Kitchen Nugget” in Olive Oil Hunter News).
Ingredients
2 pounds Yukon gold or red potatoes, peeled
1 large egg, slightly beaten
1 pound all-purpose or 00 pasta flour, plus more for shaping
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
3 teaspoons fine sea salt, divided use
Directions
Step 1
Peel and quarter the potatoes. Steam them on a steaming rack placed over a few inches of water in a large, covered pot until tender, about 25 minutes. The water should stay at a simmer; check halfway through to see if you need to add more.
Step 2
Let the potatoes cool slightly and then press them through a ricer set over a large bowl, working in batches. Add in the egg, flour, olive oil, and 1 teaspoon of salt, and use your hands to mix the ingredients well and knead into a ball. Dust a clean section of your countertop with a handful of flour. Turn out the dough, shape it into a log, and cut it into 6 even sections. One at a time, roll each section into a rope about 1 inch in diameter, lightly flouring your hands as needed. Use a bench scraper to cut each rope into 1-inch pieces.
Step 3
Bring a very large pot of water to a boil. Add the rest of the salt and the gnocchi. Lower the heat to a medium boil and cook until the gnocchi rise to the surface, just a few minutes. Scoop them out with a spider strainer, and top with sauce as desired.
Sheet Pan Souvlaki
Recipe, Spotlight on Mint, How to Choose Skewers, The “Secret Sauce” for Losing Weight and The Long Reach of Exercise
Warm weather reawakens my desire for effortless cooking, but I still want food that’s intensely flavorful. This take on chicken souvlaki is the perfect answer—simple and succulent. It relies on a wonderful mix of spices enhanced by extra virgin olive oil. It’s also an excellent example of how delicious food can be good for you. For many people, higher temperatures also reawaken the desire to get into summer shape. Timely research on how the human touch can be more helpful than apps for weight loss may have you rethinking hiring a nutrition coach. As you prep for summer activities, you’ll be fascinated by new research on just how wide-reaching the benefits of exercise is for every part of your body.
Traditional souvlaki is, of course, meat grilled on skewers. This version of one of my favorite recipes is perfect for those times when you can’t get to the grill but want to taste souvlaki’s deep, rich spices. Besides the traditional way of serving souvlaki on a pita with tzatziki sauce, this chicken is delicious over rice with a side of tomatoes and cucumber and my light, minty yogurt dressing.
Ingredients
For the chicken:
4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, divided use
Juice of 1 large lemon
4 garlic cloves, very finely minced
1 teaspoon coarse sea salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon allspice
2 teaspoons sweet paprika
1/2 teaspoon cayenne
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken thighs
2 large red onions, peeled and cut into eighths
For the yogurt dressing:
1 cup plain Greek yogurt
1 tablespoon lemon juice, more to taste
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, plus more for drizzling
2 garlic cloves, finely minced
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill
2 tablespoons chopped fresh spearmint
Directions
Step 1
In a bowl large enough to hold the chicken, make a marinade by whisking together 2 tablespoons olive oil, the lemon juice, garlic, salt, and all the spices.
Step 2
Using a cutting board reserved for raw meat, cut the thighs into evenly sized strips. Place the strips in the marinade and toss to coat. Allow the chicken to marinate on a counter for 30 minutes, or up to overnight in the fridge.
Step 3
When ready to cook, preheat your oven to 350°F. Use a tablespoon of olive oil to lightly coat a rimmed sheet pan. Spread out the strips. Drizzle the onions with olive oil and arrange them among the chicken pieces. Bake for 30 minutes or until an instant-read thermometer reaches 165°F when testing a few chicken strips.
Step 4
While the chicken is roasting, make the yogurt dressing by whisking together all its ingredients. Taste and add more salt, pepper, and/or lemon juice if desired. (If you want to make the sauce in advance, keep it in the fridge until needed). Just before serving, drizzle the top with more olive oil.
Step 5
To serve, plate strips of chicken with the red onions along with the yogurt dressing and your choice of sides or pitas.
Yields 4 to 6 servings
Healthy Ingredient Spotlight
Choosing Mint
Many recipes that call for mint don’t specify the type to use. Unless you grow your own, you might be surprised to learn that there are well over a dozen varieties, with spearmint and peppermint being the most well-known yet quite different in taste and appearance.
There’s a good reason that candies and drinks, especially around the holidays, feature peppermint. Peppermint is 40% menthol, and it’s the menthol that tingles your palate. Spearmint, on the other hand, has almost no menthol. It gets its sweetish taste from a phytochemical called carvone, and that makes it perfect when you want just a nuance of mint in dishes like yogurt dressing, tabbouleh, or mint sauce for lamb.
Both types of mint make great additions to your herb garden or window box—once you have them at your fingertips, you’ll look for even more ways to enjoy them.
Quick Kitchen Nugget
When You Want to Grill: Choosing Skewers
With summer grilling season upon us, it’s time to take stock of your BBQ tools. Whether you want to grill meat, veggies, or fruit, having a selection of skewers is a must. While bamboo skewers are great for finger foods, but for grilling, the soaking process and their shorter size make them more work than strong metal ones. And, of course, they’re not reusable.
There are many styles of metal skewers to choose from. I recommend looking for some specific features that make them easier to handle and thread. The skewer itself should be at least 12 inches long. You can find skewers that are nearly a foot and a half in length, but before you make any purchase, make sure they will fit inside your grill! I also prefer those with a wide, flat surface that ends in a sharp point, better for piercing raw meat and harder veggies and fruits.
Helpful hack: Coat your skewers with a few drops of extra virgin olive oil before loading them up—the cooked food will release that much more easily.
Also aim for skewers with heat-resistant handles that are easy to grab—do still wear grill mitts for safety—rather than skewers with only a metal ring. As convenient as online shopping is, if possible, test out different brands at a physical store to see which ones fit best in your hand.
Wash and dry your skewers as soon as feasible after cooking. That’s when traces of food will come off more readily (dropping them into your sink for a soak in warm soapy water for a few minutes will help).
For Your Best Health
The “Secret Sauce” for Losing Weight
As great as the need is for low-cost, effective weight loss treatments, current technology—even with all the apps available—is not advanced enough to replace human coaches, according to the SMART study conducted by Northwestern Medicine and published in JAMA.
“Giving people technology alone for the initial phase of obesity treatment produces unacceptably worse weight loss than giving them treatment that combines technology with a human coach,” said corresponding study author Bonnie Spring, PhD, director of the Center for Behavior and Health and professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
In the study, people who initially only received technology without coach support were less likely to achieve meaningful weight loss, considered to be at least 5% of body weight, compared to those who also had a human coach. Investigators intensified treatment quickly (by adding resources after just two weeks) if a person showed less than optimal weight loss, but the weight loss disadvantage for those who began their weight loss effort without coach support persisted for six months, the study showed. Note: It is possible for some people to achieve clinically meaningful weight loss without anti-obesity medications, bariatric surgery, or even behavioral treatment, Dr. Spring said. In the SMART study, 25% of people who began treatment with technology alone were able to achieve a 5% weight loss after six months without any treatment augmentation. But that means 75% were not.
Eventually, more advanced technology may be able to supplant human coaches, Dr. Spring said. “We may not be so far away from having an AI chatbot that can sub for a human, but we are not quite there yet. It’s within reach. The tech is developing really fast.”
Scientists are now trying to parse what human coaches do that makes them so helpful, and how AI can better imitate a human, not just in terms of content but in emotional tone and context awareness, Dr. Spring added.
An unsolved problem is matching treatment type and intensity to individuals’ needs and preferences. “If we could just tell ahead of time who needs which treatment at what intensity, we might start to manage the obesity epidemic,” Dr. Spring added.
Fitness Flash
The Long Reach of Exercise
The health benefits of exercise are well-known, but new research published in the journal Nature shows that the body’s response to exercise is more complex and far-reaching than previously thought. In a lab study on rats, a team of scientists from across the United States found that physical activity caused many cellular and molecular changes in all 19 of the organs they studied in the animals!
Exercise lowers the risk of many diseases, but scientists didn’t fully understand how it changes the body on a molecular level. This is partly because most studies have focused on exercise’s effects on a single organ or on one gender only, among other limited variables. To take a more comprehensive look at the biology of exercise, scientists with the Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium (MoTrPAC) used an array of techniques in the lab to analyze molecular changes in rats as they were put through their paces with weeks of intense exercise.
The team studied a range of tissues from the animals, such as the heart, brain, and lungs. They found that each of the organs they looked at changed with exercise, helping the animals regulate their immune system, respond to stress, and control pathways connected to inflammatory liver disease, heart disease, and tissue injury.
The data provide potential clues to many different human health conditions. For example, the researchers found a possible explanation for why the liver becomes less fatty during exercise, which could help in the development of new treatments for metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (formerly called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease). “Even though the liver is not directly involved in exercise, it still undergoes changes that could improve health. No one speculated that we’d see these acetylation and phosphorylation changes in the liver after exercise training,” said Pierre Jean-Beltran, PhD, a co-first author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, when the study began. “This highlights why we deploy all of these different molecular modalities—exercise is a very complex process, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.”
“Two or three generations of research associates matured on this consortium project and learned what it means to carefully design a study and process samples,” added Hasmik Keshishian, PhD, a senior group leader under Steve Carr, senior director of Broad’s Proteomics Platform, and co-author of the study. “Now we are seeing the results of our work: biologically insightful findings that are yielding from the high-quality data we and others have generated. That’s really fulfilling.”
Additional MoTrPAC studies are underway to study the effects of exercise on young adult and older rats, and the short-term effects of 30-minute bouts of physical activity. The consortium has also begun human studies and is recruiting about 1,500 individuals of diverse ages, sexes, ancestries, and activity levels for a clinical trial to study the effects of both endurance and resistance exercise in children and adults.
The team hopes that their findings could one day be used to tailor exercise to an individual’s health status or to develop treatments that mimic the effects of physical activity for people who are unable to exercise.
Traditional souvlaki is, of course, meat grilled on skewers. This version of one of my favorite recipes is perfect for those times when you can’t get to the grill but want to taste souvlaki’s deep, rich spices. Besides the traditional way of serving souvlaki on a pita with tzatziki sauce, this chicken is delicious over rice with a side of tomatoes and cucumber and my light, minty yogurt dressing.
Ingredients
For the chicken:
4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, divided use
Juice of 1 large lemon
4 garlic cloves, very finely minced
1 teaspoon coarse sea salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon allspice
2 teaspoons sweet paprika
1/2 teaspoon cayenne
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken thighs
2 large red onions, peeled and cut into eighths
For the yogurt dressing:
1 cup plain Greek yogurt
1 tablespoon lemon juice, more to taste
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, plus more for drizzling
2 garlic cloves, finely minced
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill
2 tablespoons chopped fresh spearmint
Directions
Step 1
In a bowl large enough to hold the chicken, make a marinade by whisking together 2 tablespoons olive oil, the lemon juice, garlic, salt, and all the spices.
Step 2
Using a cutting board reserved for raw meat, cut the thighs into evenly sized strips. Place the strips in the marinade and toss to coat. Allow the chicken to marinate on a counter for 30 minutes, or up to overnight in the fridge.
Step 3
When ready to cook, preheat your oven to 350°F. Use a tablespoon of olive oil to lightly coat a rimmed sheet pan. Spread out the strips. Drizzle the onions with olive oil and arrange them among the chicken pieces. Bake for 30 minutes or until an instant-read thermometer reaches 165°F when testing a few chicken strips.
Step 4
While the chicken is roasting, make the yogurt dressing by whisking together all its ingredients. Taste and add more salt, pepper, and/or lemon juice if desired. (If you want to make the sauce in advance, keep it in the fridge until needed). Just before serving, drizzle the top with more olive oil.
Step 5
To serve, plate strips of chicken with the red onions along with the yogurt dressing and your choice of sides or pitas.
Salmon Bowl Recipe (Made Simple), Spotlight on Sesame Seeds, Thawing Frozen Fish, Why Wild Seafood is Best, and Counting Your Biological Age
Americans still don’t eat enough fish, and the challenge of finding quality fresh seafood is one of the reasons. My DIY salmon bowl recipe is a great way to get the goodness of salmon plus as many veggies as you’d like to include. Read on to see why frozen is actually preferred—unless of course you live near a fishing dock! Then find out about advances in measuring biological aging, a metric that makes your chronological age less important.
Poke bowls are still very popular, but it’s not always easy to buy the sushi-grade tuna needed to make your own. This variation includes sautéed chunks of salmon instead of ahi. The technique is also great if you like tuna but prefer it cooked. I’ve suggested many veggies to fill up your bowl, but have fun choosing other ingredients—be guided by what’s most fresh at your market.
Ingredients
For the fish:
1 pound skinless salmon fillet, wild caught if possible
1 tablespoon regular or reduced-sodium soy sauce
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, divided use
For the spicy mayo:
1/4 cup best-quality mayonnaise
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon sriracha, or to taste
For the spicy bowls:
3 cups cooked quinoa or brown or white rice
1 large cucumber, diced
3 scallions, trimmed and sliced into small pieces on the diagonal
1 cup shelled edamame
2 large avocados, cubed or cut into thin slices
2 tablespoons black or white sesame seeds or a mix
Optional: red onion rings, sliced tomatoes, shredded carrots, chopped red cabbage, enoki mushrooms, and other fresh veggies of your choice
Directions
Step 1
Using a sharp knife, cut the salmon into 1-inch chunks. Add to a glass bowl with the soy sauce, sesame oil, rice vinegar, and 1 tablespoon of olive oil. Toss well and set aside for 30 minutes.
Step 2
Make the spicy mayo: In a small bowl, whisk the mayonnaise and the olive oil until well blended, then mix in the sriracha; set aside.
Step 3
Heat a frying pan over medium-high heat. When hot, add the rest of the olive oil and the salmon chunks. Sear on all sides, using tongs to turn the pieces. When cooked through, remove the pan from the heat.
Step 4
Assemble the ingredients in four deep bowls: Center equal amounts of the cooked grains, then top with the vegetables and then the salmon chunks. Use a fork to drizzle on the spicy mayo, then sprinkle with the sesame seeds.
Makes 4 servings
Healthy Ingredient Spotlight
Black and White Sesame Seeds
Sesame seeds are more than a colorful and crunchy garnish—they can be pressed to make the Asian staple sesame oil, both the plain and toasted varieties, and whipped into the Middle Eastern treats tahini and halvah. Importantly, these little seeds pack a big punch when it comes to nutrients, so consider sprinkling them on more than poke bowls and sushi rolls.
Sesame seeds are rich in fat; protein; minerals like iron, calcium, copper, potassium, and manganese; vitamins like A and E and B vitamins; and fiber. Among their phytochemicals are lignans, which have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Because more of these nutrients, including their lignans, are in the hull, always choose unhulled sesame seeds. Black ones almost always come with the hull intact, but you’ll have to look carefully to find unhulled white ones.
Black and white sesame seeds have some taste differences, with the black ones being slightly crunchier and more bitter. I like to mix the two because this creates visual appeal and different taste sensations.
Quick Kitchen Nugget
Thawing Frozen Fish
Fish that’s caught in faraway waters and flash-frozen at sea often retains more of its nutrients and flavor—you’ll often see the words “previously frozen” on thawed fish at markets, a potential good sign. If you’re buying fish still frozen, make sure it’s frozen solid when you purchase it. Let it thaw overnight in the fridge, not on a countertop, to preserve that freshness—defrosting it in a cold fridge also helps inhibit the growth of any harmful bacteria. To do it properly, take it out of its packaging and put it on a plate or tray lined with a few sheets of paper towels or on a rack over the plate with paper towels. Just before cooking, rinse under cold water and pat dry.
For Your Best Health
Seafood: Why “Wild” Wins Hands Down
Research done at the University of Cambridge in the UK offers more insight into why farmed salmon isn’t as nutritious as wild salmon or other wild-caught fish, like mackerel, anchovies, and herring—even though these same varieties are often used in farmed salmon feeds. These oily fish contain essential nutrients including calcium, B12, and omega-3s, but they don’t transfer over in the same amounts when fed to farmed salmon.
By analyzing the flow of nutrients from the edible species of wild fish used as feed, which also included sprat and blue whiting, to the farmed salmon they were fed to, scientists found that farmed salmon production leads to an overall loss of essential dietary nutrients. Quantities of calcium were over five times higher in wild feed fish fillets than in farmed salmon fillets; iodine was four times higher; and iron, omega-3s, vitamin B12, and vitamin A were over 1.5 times higher. Wild feed species and farmed salmon did have comparable quantities of vitamin D. Zinc and selenium were actually higher in the farmed salmon than in the wild feed species due to other salmon feed ingredients—a real mark of progress in the salmon sector, said the researchers.
Another interesting point is that you can get key nutrients, including omega-3 fatty acids, which are known to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke, in smaller portion sizes of wild fish than in farmed Atlantic salmon.
“What we’re seeing is that most species of wild fish used as feed have a similar or greater density and range of micronutrients than farmed salmon fillets,” said lead author David Willer, PhD, of the zoology department at Cambridge. “While still enjoying eating salmon and supporting sustainable growth in the sector, people should consider eating a greater and wider variety of wild fish species like sardines, mackerel, and anchovies, to get more essential nutrients straight to their plate.” He goes on to say that eating more wild feed species directly could benefit our health while also reducing aquaculture demand for finite marine resources.
“Marine fisheries are important local and global food systems, but large catches are being diverted toward farm feeds. Prioritizing nutritious seafood for people can help improve both diets and ocean sustainability,” said senior author James Robinson, PhD, of Lancaster University, also in the UK.
Fitness Flash
Forget the Calendar: What Counts Is Your Biological Age
University of Pittsburgh researchers have uncovered blood-based markers that allow them to predict a person’s biological age—how fast a person’s cells and organs age regardless of their birthdate. The new research, published in Aging Cell, points to pathways and compounds that may underlie biological age, shedding light on why people age differently and suggesting novel targets for interventions that could slow aging and increase health span, the length of time a person is healthy.
“Age is more than just a number,” said senior author Aditi Gurkar, PhD, assistant professor of geriatric medicine at Pitt’s School of Medicine and member of the Aging Institute, a joint venture of Pitt and UPMC. “Imagine two people aged 65: One rides a bike to work and goes skiing on the weekends, and the other can’t climb a flight of stairs. They have the same chronological age, but very different biological ages. Why do these two people age differently? This question drives my research.”
To answer it, Dr. Gurkar and her team compared 196 older adults whom they classified as either healthy or rapid agers by how easily they completed simple walking challenges. Because walking ability is a holistic measure of cardiovascular fitness, physical strength, and neurological health, other studies have shown that it’s the single best predictor of hospitalization, disability, functional decline, and death in older adults. Healthy agers were 75 years or older and could ascend a flight of stairs or walk for 15 minutes without resting, and the rapid agers, who were 65 to 75 years old, had to rest during these challenges.
According to Dr. Gurkar, this study is unique because the rapid agers were chronologically younger than the healthy agers, allowing the researchers to home in on markers of biological, not chronological, aging, unlike other studies that have compared young adults with older people.
To define a molecular fingerprint of biological aging in blood samples from participants, they performed metabolomics, the analysis of metabolites, or molecules that are produced by chemical pathways in the body, with blood samples from the two groups.
“Other studies have looked at genetics to measure biological aging, but genes are very static: the genes you’re born with are the genes you die with,” said Dr. Gurkar. “We chose to look at metabolites because they are dynamic: They change in real time to reflect our current health and how we feel, and we have the power to influence them through our lifestyles, diet, and environment.” Healthy and rapid agers showed clear differences in their metabolomes, indicating that metabolites in the blood could reflect biological age.
Dr. Gurkar and her team next identified 25 metabolites that they termed the Healthy Aging Metabolic (HAM) Index. They found that the HAM Index was better than other commonly used aging metrics, such as the frailty index, gait speed, and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test, at distinguishing healthy and rapid agers. To validate their new index, the researchers analyzed a separate cohort of older adults from a Wisconsin-based study. The HAM Index correctly predicted whether individuals could walk outside for 10 minutes without stopping with accuracy of about 68%.
“We took a very different cohort of people from a different geographical region, and we saw the same metabolites were associated with biological aging,” said Dr. Gurkar. “This gives us confidence that the HAM Index can truly predict who is a healthy ager versus a rapid ager.”
Using an artificial intelligence model that can predict potential drivers of biological traits, the team identified three main metabolites that were most likely to promote healthy aging or drive rapid aging. In future research, they plan to delve into how these metabolites and molecular pathways that produce them contribute to biological aging and explore interventions that could slow this process. Dr. Gurkar is also planning more research to evaluate how the metabolome of younger people shifts over time. Eventually, she hopes to develop a blood test that could estimate biological age in young adults or predict those who might go on to develop diseases of aging.
“While it’s great that we can predict biological aging in older adults, what would be even more exciting is a blood test that, for example, can tell someone who’s 35 that they have a biological age more like a 45-year-old,” Dr. Gurkar said. “That person could then think about changing aspects of their lifestyle early—whether that’s improving their sleep, diet or exercise regimen—to hopefully reverse their biological age. Today, in medicine, we tend to wait for a problem to occur before we treat it. But aging doesn’t work that way—it’s about prevention. I think the future of medicine is going to be about knowing early on how someone is aging and developing personalized interventions to delay disease and extend health span.”
