Israel’s pre-festival mass health warning is hardly surprising. Jewish festival food is never going to win prizes for doing you good. Pesach has us hoovering up gallons of refined sugar dressed up as cinnamon balls and coconut pyramids. Shavuot sees us ingesting gallons of full-fat cheese. Chanucah takes the biscuit, with mountains of deep-fried oily dough and potatoes on the menu and most of us giving ourselves carte blanche to tuck in – after all it's a mitzvah to eat doughnuts and latkes.
With Chanucah so late this year, the entire month of December will be a doughnut fest. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist nor even a health minister to work out that if we don’t rein it in, it won’t end well.
You can take a healthier angle with common sense and lateral thinking. Chanucah is actually about the oil, so why not keep it simple? Extra virgin olive oil, which would resonate far more with a Maccabee than jam-filled sufganyot, actually has health benefits. Packed with monounsaturated fatty acids and anti-oxidants, it can help fight heart disease rather than instigate it. Drizzle it over salads, or to season grilled vegetables and fish or use it in pesto. If you must eat something sweet, it works in cakes too.
If your Chanucah is incomplete without doughnuts, moderate your indulgence — there’s no requirement to consume them daily. Rather than frying, bake yours. Your home (and hair) will smell invitingly freshly baked rather than of eau d’cooking oil; and you’d be surprised how doughnut-like they taste even though they’ve not been near a deep fat fryer. Making your own also means you know exactly what’s in them.
Baked doughnuts still taste ‘doughnutty’ as the yeasted dough includes butter, milk and sugar, but are lighter and, unlike the fried sort (which are only worth eating warm from the oil) will last a day or three. There are also plenty of baked doughnut recipes online — you’ll find a couple of Lisa Roukin’s baked doughnut recipes in the JC’s recipe archives and another couple in the Chanucah sweet recipes to be published on 23rd December.
