The Olive Oil Hunter, Author at Fresh-Pressed Olive Oil

The Olive Oil Hunter News #136

Posted on September 8, 2023September 13, 2023 by The Olive Oil Hunter

Potato Salad with Sweet and Tart Vinaigrette Recipe, Spotlight on Scallions, How to Boil Small Potatoes, Imperfect Calorie Counting and Exercising to Burn Fat

Summer may be winding down, but there’s still plenty of time to enjoy outdoor get-togethers with family and friends. Whether you’re hosting or want a great dish to bring for a BBQ, this potato salad, garnished with scallions, will delight. If you’re trying to lose weight—and who isn’t?—no food needs to be off limits, including potato salad! But there are certain tweaks you can make to your plan to improve results. Two new research studies provide details on calorie tracking and fat-burning exercises.

Potato Salad with Sweet and Tart Vinaigrette

Potato Salad with Sweet and Tart Vinaigrette
This German-style (no mayo) potato salad gets a flavor boost from one of my favorite vinaigrettes, a melding of two vinegars—one more tart, one more sweet. I also love the mix of sautéed shallots and raw scallions or chives, all mild members of the genus allium. This side dish tastes best served warm or at room temperature. Double or triple the ingredients for a large crowd.
Ingredients

For the vinaigrette:
- 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
- 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar of Modena
- 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
- 1 teaspoon honey
- 1/8 teaspoon coarse salt, plus more to taste
- 1/2 small garlic clove, peeled and minced
- 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
- Freshly ground black pepper to taste
For the salad:
- 2 pounds small red potatoes, unpeeled
- 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
- 4 ounces best-quality bacon, cut into 1-inch sections
- 4 shallots, thinly sliced
- 1/2 cup fresh scallions or chives, sliced on the diagonal
- Coarse sea salt, to taste
- Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Directions

Step 1

Make the vinaigrette: In a medium mixing bowl, whisk together the two vinegars, mustard, honey, salt, and garlic. Gradually whisk in the olive oil until the dressing is emulsified. Season to taste with black pepper and more salt, if desired. Set aside while you cook the potatoes.

Step 2

Boil the potatoes until the tip of a knife easily pierces one or two, about 10-15 minutes (see “Quick Kitchen Nugget” below). Use a slotted spoon to transfer them to a colander to drain and cool slightly while you proceed.

Step 3

Heat a heavy skillet or frying pan. When hot, add the olive oil and sauté the bacon. Use a slotted spoon to transfer the bacon to a dish lined with paper towels. Add the shallots to the hot pan and sauté until they are softened and lightly browned.

Step 4

Cut the potatoes in half and place them in a large serving bowl. Dress with the vinaigrette. Top with the sautéed shallots and the fresh scallions or chives. Toss gently and season to taste with salt and pepper. Just before serving, sprinkle on the bacon bits.
Yields 6 servings

Healthy Ingredient Spotlight

Scallions

Also called green onions in some parts of the country, scallions offer sweet onion flavor and two textures—the stronger white ends and the mild green tops or leaves. Use the entire scallion after trimming off the roots and snipping the tips (if needed). The ends should feel firm, not mushy, and the tops should be crisp and bright green, not wilted or dark.

A staple in many Asian cuisines, chopped scallions are also delicious when sprinkled on scrambled eggs and folded into cream cheese for a bagel topping.

Quick Kitchen Nugget

Boiling Small Potatoes

Small or baby potatoes, whether red, white, or purple, don’t need to be halved or quartered before boiling. In fact, keeping them whole can prevent them from falling apart during the cooking process. Start by placing the whole, unpeeled potatoes in a pot large enough to hold them in a single layer and add enough cold water to cover them by about an inch. Bring the water to a boil, add a teaspoon of sea salt, and let them cook for between 12 and 15 minutes, until the tip of a sharp knife pierces two or three of them. Use a large slotted spoon to transfer them to a colander, then proceed with your recipe. For a quick side dish, smash them with the back of a spoon, drizzle with extra virgin olive oil, and top with grains of Maldon salt.

For Your Best Health

Imperfect Calorie Counting May Be Good Enough

Successful dieters often credit keeping a food journal or tracking calories as an important habit to have. But how well do these behaviors correlate to weight loss? That’s one of the questions answered in the study “How much food tracking during a digital weight‐management program is enough to produce clinically significant weight loss?” recently published in the journal Obesity.

Over the course of a six-month period, researchers from the University of Connecticut (UConn), the University of Florida, and the University of Pennsylvania tracked 153 weight-loss program participants who used a commercial digital weight-loss program to record their food intake (it was the new Personal Points program developed by WeightWatchers, intended to simplify record-keeping by designating a number of foods as zero-point items, meaning they did not have to be entered).

UConn assistant professor in the Department of Allied Health Sciences Ran Xu, PhD, and PhD student Richard Bannor analyzed the data to see whether there were patterns associated with weight-loss success from a data science perspective. Using a method called receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve analysis, they uncovered how many days people need to track their food to reach clinically significant weight loss.

“It turns out, you don’t need to track 100% each day to be successful,” says Dr. Xu. “Specifically in this trial, we find that people only need to track around 30% of the days to lose more than 3% weight and 40% of the days to lose more than 5% weight, or almost 70% of days to lose more than 10% weight.”

“A lot of times people feel like they need to lose 50 pounds to get healthier, but actually we start to see changes in things like blood pressure, lipids, cardiovascular disease risk, and diabetes risk when people lose about 5% to 10% of their weight,” says study co-author and UConn Department of Allied Health Sciences Professor Sherry Pagoto, PhD. “That can be accomplished if participants lose about one to two pounds a week, which is considered a healthy pace of weight loss.

“One thing that is interesting about this data is, oftentimes in the literature, researchers just look at whether there is a correlation between tracking and overall weight loss outcomes. Ran took a data science approach to the data and found there is more to the story,” Dr. Pagoto says. “Now we’re seeing different patterns of tracking. This will help us identify when to provide extra assistance and who will need it the most.”

Future studies will dig deeper into these patterns to understand why they arise and hopefully uncover interventions to improve outcomes. For now, if you use these apps, know that you can still get significant results, even if you miss some entries.

Fitness Flash

Exercising to Burn Fat

The study “Discrepancy between predicted and measured exercise intensity for eliciting the maximal rate of lipid oxidation,” done by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published in the journal Nutrition, Metabolism and Cardiovascular Disease found that fat burning during exercise varies widely between people. We don’t all burn fat at the same target heart rate, and reaching a preset exercise machine setting won’t bring the same results for everyone.

“People with a goal of weight or fat loss may be interested in exercising at the intensity which allows for the maximal rate of fat burning. Most commercial exercise machines offer a ‘fat-burning zone’ option, depending upon age, sex, and heart rate,” says lead author Hannah Kittrell, MS, RD, CDN, director of the Mount Sinai Physiolab, a clinical body composition and exercise physiology laboratory at Mount Sinai Morningside, and a PhD candidate in the Augmented Intelligence in Medicine and Science laboratory. “However, the typically recommended fat-burning zone has not been validated, thus individuals may be exercising at intensities that are not aligned with their personalized weight loss goals.”

Reaching a target heart rate is still great for overall health, but if fat-burning is one of your key fitness goals, the researchers suggest having clinical exercise testing, a diagnostic procedure to measure your physiological response to exercise to get a more personalized exercise prescription. (Talk to your doctor or personal trainer about where to get this evaluation.)

“We hope that this work will inspire more individuals and trainers to utilize clinical exercise testing to prescribe personalized exercise routines tailored to fat loss. It also emphasizes the role that data-driven approaches can have toward precision exercise,” says senior author Girish Nadkarni, MD, MPH, Irene and Dr. Arthur M. Fishberg Professor of Medicine at Icahn Mount Sinai, director of The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine, and system chief, Division of Data-Driven and Digital Medicine, Department of Medicine.

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Potato Salad with Sweet and Tart Vinaigrette

Posted on September 7, 2023September 13, 2023 by The Olive Oil Hunter

This German-style (no mayo) potato salad gets a flavor boost from one of my favorite vinaigrettes, a melding of two vinegars—one more tart, one more sweet. I also love the mix of sautéed shallots and raw scallions or chives, all mild members of the genus allium. This side dish tastes best served warm or at room temperature. Double or triple the ingredients for a large crowd.

Ingredients

For the vinaigrette:

1 tablespoon red wine vinegar

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar of Modena

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1 teaspoon honey

1/8 teaspoon coarse salt, plus more to taste

1/2 small garlic clove, peeled and minced

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

Freshly ground black pepper to taste

For the salad:

2 pounds small red potatoes, unpeeled

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

4 ounces best-quality bacon, cut into 1-inch sections

4 shallots, thinly sliced

1/2 cup fresh scallions or chives, sliced on the diagonal

Coarse sea salt, to taste

Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Directions

Step 1

Make the vinaigrette: In a medium mixing bowl, whisk together the two vinegars, mustard, honey, salt, and garlic. Gradually whisk in the olive oil until the dressing is emulsified. Season to taste with black pepper and more salt, if desired. Set aside while you cook the potatoes.

Step 2

Boil the potatoes until the tip of a knife easily pierces one or two, about 10-15 minutes (see “Quick Kitchen Nugget” below). Use a slotted spoon to transfer them to a colander to drain and cool slightly while you proceed.

Step 3

Heat a heavy skillet or frying pan. When hot, add the olive oil and sauté the bacon. Use a slotted spoon to transfer the bacon to a dish lined with paper towels. Add the shallots to the hot pan and sauté until they are softened and lightly browned.

Step 4

Cut the potatoes in half and place them in a large serving bowl. Dress with the vinaigrette. Top with the sautéed shallots and the fresh scallions or chives. Toss gently and season to taste with salt and pepper. Just before serving, sprinkle on the bacon bits.

Yields 6 servings

The Olive Oil Hunter News #135

Posted on September 1, 2023August 22, 2023 by The Olive Oil Hunter

Salade Niçoise Recipe, For Your Best Health: Lowering the Risk for Dementia with the Mediterranean Diet

The benefits of extra virgin olive oil as part of the acclaimed Mediterranean diet never cease to amaze me. Food lovers including members of the Fresh-Pressed Olive Oil Club appreciate the depth of flavor of EVOO and would love it even without all the health benefits. But it’s the very presence of powerful polyphenols that both give EVOO its taste and convey its benefits, along with its good-for-you unsaturated fats. To be able to share a new study on how the Mediterranean diet can help stave off dementia is very exciting for me. I know you’ll be fascinated by the findings. I’m also sharing a quintessential Mediterranean recipe—salade Niçoise, straight from Nice on the French Riviera, part of that country’s Mediterranean Sea shoreline. Enjoy!

Salade Niçoise

Salade Niçoise
Few dishes symbolize the south of France like salade Niçoise. Although you may not think you like anchovies or capers, they do add to the layers of flavor without being obvious, so try them. You can also build on the basic ingredients to personalize the salad—sliced radishes, red onion, pimentos, and artichoke hearts are just a few of the popular additions. Need a picnic option? Turn this into the classic sandwich of Nice, the pan bagnat, by simply packing all the ingredients into a tranche of a baguette or a crusty whole wheat roll.
Ingredients

For the vinaigrette:
- 1 tablespoons honey
- 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar of Modena
- 1/2 tablespoon Dijon mustard
- 1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
- 1/4 teaspoon finely ground black pepper
- 1 medium garlic clove, minced
- 6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
For the salad:
- 1 tablespoon fine salt
- 1 pound red potatoes
- 1 pound haricots verts or string beans, trimmed
- 4 cups greens, any varieties
- 12 ounces freshly grilled tuna or 2 large cans tuna, drained
- 2 cups cherry tomatoes, halved
- 4 hard-boiled eggs, halved
- 1 cup Niçoise or other small black olives, pitted
- 8 anchovy fillets, drained
- 2 tablespoons capers, drained
- Fleur de sel or grey coarse sea salt, to taste
- Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Directions

Step 1

Make the vinaigrette: in a medium mixing bowl, whisk together the honey, balsamic, mustard, salt, pepper, and garlic. Add the oil and whisk continuously until the dressing is emulsified. Set aside.

Step 2

Bring a large pot of water to a boil and add the fine salt. Add the potatoes and boil for 15 minutes, then add the beans and boil everything for another 3 minutes. Strain the vegetables and wait until cool enough to handle. If the potatoes are small, cut them in half; if large, into quarters.

Step 3

To assemble the salad, choose either one large platter or individual plates. Start with the lettuce, then arrange, in sections, the potatoes, green beans, tuna, tomatoes, eggs, olives, and anchovies, plus any other veggies you choose to add. Sprinkle on the capers and dress everything with the vinaigrette. Finish with the fleur de sel or coarse grey salt and pepper.
Yields 4 servings

Best Health: The Mediterranean Diet: Reversing Metabolic Syndrome After Heart Disease

For Your Best Health

Lowering the Risk for Dementia with the Mediterranean Diet

The Study: “Mediterranean diet adherence is associated with lower dementia risk, independent of genetic predisposition: findings from the UK Biobank prospective cohort study,” BMC Medicine, March 2023.

The Findings: According to researchers from Newcastle University in the UK, people who ate a Mediterranean-like diet had up to a 23% lower risk for dementia than those who did not. This research is one of the biggest studies of its kind, as previous studies have typically been limited to small sample sizes and low numbers of dementia cases.

The Report from Newcastle University: Scientists analyzed data from 60,298 people from the UK Biobank, a large cohort including individuals from across the UK, who had completed a dietary assessment. The authors scored them based on how closely their diet matched the key features of a Mediterranean one. The participants were followed for almost a decade, during which time there were 882 cases of dementia.

The authors considered each individual’s genetic risk for dementia by estimating what is known as their polygenic risk—a measure of all the different genes that are related to the risk of dementia. Oliver Shannon, PhD, Lecturer in Human Nutrition and Ageing, Newcastle University, led the study with Professor Emma Stevenson and joint senior author Professor David Llewellyn. The research also involved experts from the universities of Edinburgh, UEA and Exeter and was part of the Medical Research Council-funded NuBrain consortium.

“Dementia impacts the lives of millions of individuals throughout the world, and there are currently limited options for treating this condition. Finding ways to reduce our risk of developing dementia is, therefore, a major priority for researchers and clinicians. Our study suggests that eating a more Mediterranean-like diet could be one strategy to help individuals lower their risk of dementia,” Dr. Shannon says.

The University of Exeter’s Janice Ranson, PhD, joint lead author on the paper, says, “The findings from this large population-based study underscore the long-term brain health benefits of consuming a Mediterranean diet, which is rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and healthy fats. The protective effect of this diet against dementia was evident regardless of a person’s genetic risk, and so this is likely to be a beneficial lifestyle choice for people looking to make healthy dietary choices and reduce their risk of dementia. Future dementia prevention efforts could go beyond generic healthy diet advice and focus on supporting people to increase consumption of specific foods and nutrients that are essential for brain health.”

The authors caution that their analysis is limited to individuals who self-reported their ethnic background as white, British, or Irish, as genetic data was only available based on European ancestry, and that further research is needed in a range of populations to determine the potential benefit. They conclude that, based on their data, a Mediterranean diet that has a high intake of healthy plant-based foods may be an important intervention to incorporate into future strategies to reduce dementia risk.

The Bottom Line: According to the study abstract, “higher adherence to a MedDiet was associated with lower dementia risk, independent of genetic risk, underlining the importance of diet in dementia prevention interventions.”

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Salade Niçoise

Posted on August 31, 2023August 22, 2023 by The Olive Oil Hunter

Few dishes symbolize the south of France like salade Niçoise. Although you may not think you like anchovies or capers, they do add to the layers of flavor without being obvious, so try them. You can also build on the basic ingredients to personalize the salad—sliced radishes, red onion, pimentos, and artichoke hearts are just a few of the popular additions. Need a picnic option? Turn this into the classic sandwich of Nice, the pan bagnat, by simply packing all the ingredients into a tranche of a baguette or a crusty whole wheat roll.

Ingredients

For the vinaigrette:

1 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar of Modena
1/2 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
1/4 teaspoon finely ground black pepper
1 medium garlic clove, minced
6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

For the salad:

1 tablespoon fine salt
1 pound red potatoes
1 pound haricots verts or string beans, trimmed
4 cups greens, any varieties
12 ounces freshly grilled tuna or 2 large cans tuna, drained
2 cups cherry tomatoes, halved
4 hard-boiled eggs, halved
1 cup Niçoise or other small black olives, pitted
8 anchovy fillets, drained
2 tablespoons capers, drained
Fleur de sel or grey coarse sea salt, to taste
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Directions

Step 1

Make the vinaigrette: in a medium mixing bowl, whisk together the honey, balsamic, mustard, salt, pepper, and garlic. Add the oil and whisk continuously until the dressing is emulsified. Set aside.

Step 2

Bring a large pot of water to a boil and add the fine salt. Add the potatoes and boil for 15 minutes, then add the beans and boil everything for another 3 minutes. Strain the vegetables and wait until cool enough to handle. If the potatoes are small, cut them in half; if large, into quarters.

Step 3

To assemble the salad, choose either one large platter or individual plates. Start with the lettuce, then arrange, in sections, the potatoes, green beans, tuna, tomatoes, eggs, olives, and anchovies, plus any other veggies you choose to add. Sprinkle on the capers and dress everything with the vinaigrette. Finish with the fleur de sel or coarse grey salt and pepper.

Yields 4 servings