Many Christmas dishes, especially those on Christmas Eve, are actually tailored to a fasting, low-calorie diet. On the other hand, much of the traditional Polish food consumed at Christmas is downright high in calories and dripping with fat. Here are clever tips for reducing the calorie content of Christmas dishes without making a total revolution and while respecting culinary traditions.
How to reduce the calorie content of Christmas dishes? General tips
You don’t have to completely change your Christmas menu to make your Christmas food a little healthier and less calorific. It’s not just about saving calories: it will also make the dishes easy to digest, gentler on the stomach and intestines, and suitable for seniors and people struggling with illnesses. Carry out an invisible revolution and reduce the calorie content of Christmas dishes. Here’s a quick guide on how to do it wisely to respect the most important festive culinary customs.
Most simply skimmed, or defatted
Remember that the most calorific component of food is not sugar or carbohydrates, but fat! 1 g of fat has more than twice as many calories as 1 g of carbohydrates (9 kcal versus 4 kcal). So the easiest way to slim down your Christmas dishes is to slightly skim them:
- If possible, ditch frying in favour of roasting or steaming.
- Skip the batter, which strongly absorbs fat.
- Invest in good pans with a non-stick surface, that will allow you to fry with less fat.
- Don’t use mayonnaise, or even healthy olive and oils, too generously in food preparation and seasoning.
- Choose less fatty dairy products for preparing Christmas dishes.
Give up sugar, go for substitutes
When preparing Christmas sweets, replace sugar with a low-calorie substitute that suits you. Your best bet is erythritol, which has no calories and no effect on blood sugar levels, or xylitol, which has fewer calories than sugar but supports dental health. Take into account that these sweeteners, on some, have a laxative effect. Don’t test them for the first time at Christmas, do it beforehand.
You can prepare any sweet Christmas dish according to the traditional recipe, replacing only the sugar with a sweetener of your choice. You don’t need modified recipes. Sweeteners have a similar structure and provide sweetness close to that obtained from white sugar.
You can use the said sweeteners, for example:
- For sweetening cakes: cheesecakes, poppy seed cakes and other traditional Christmas baked goods.
- For sweetening the Christmas compote.
- For sweetening poppy seed batter e.g. for kutia and poppy seed noodles and cakes.
- As sugar substitutes for coffee and tea. Perhaps you will make any of the family members who add sugar to their beverages curious about them and convince them to try alternatives to sugar on a daily basis.
Slimming down Christmas dishes in practice
Let’s take a look at some of the most popular and calorific foods and consider how they can be effectively slimmed down and stripped of some of the calories.
Low-calorie Christmas dumplings
Dumplings reign supreme on the Christmas table in every Polish home. Cabbage and mushroom stuffing is the least calorific, it’s the one to serve at Christmas. Try to prepare the dumplings with a thin dough, roll it out firmly. Be lavish with the cabbage or mushroom stuffing. Serve the dumplings boiled, not fried, to keep them low in calories.
Low-calorie Christmas fish
Carp is the most popular Christmas Eve fish, but it is not one of the healthiest. It is oily, but the fat from carp is not the omega-3 acids known, for example, from salmon, which is recommended for health. If the tradition of eating carp is not firmly established with you, consider using other white fish: cod, pollock, hake, or a completely different type of fish: halibut, salmon or trout.
The most calorific version of fish is to eat it coated in breadcrumbs, eggs and flour, after frying. Consider, for example, preparing oven-baked fish in a light batter of flour or bran alone. Give your fish a festive flavour with herbs, or by making an unusual, aromatic batter, such as mixing flour with crushed dried mushrooms and roasting pieces of fish in such a batter, in the oven or air-fryer.
Low-calorie Christmas desserts
Verify your Christmas dessert menu and try to adjust it so that it does not provide many calories. First of all, replace sugar with the low-calorie sweeteners already described. Avoid creamy desserts, where thick cream is added. Instead, opt for light yeast cakes, or sponge cakes (high volume, lower weight and fewer calories). Don’t add any more butter to your cheesecake batter if you use fatty (>10 g/100 g) bucket cheese for the cheesecake.
Avoid calorific, fatty and heavy shortcrust pastry. Remember that kcal of cakes are also boosted by healthy nuts, nut flours and dried fruit. An extra handful of nuts for kutia or dried fruit and nut cake is a calorie boost of 200 kcal. A spoonful of coconut shreds (only 6 g) is 50 kcal, and a spoonful of almond flakes is 10 g and 60 kcal.
Lean Christmas meat
It is customary to avoid eating meat on Christmas Eve, but the first and second days of the holiday abound in meat delicacies in most Polish homes. Most eat a variety of roasted or stuffed meat, with or without sauce. When developing the menu for the first and second day of Christmas, try to choose lean and good quality meat. For example, you can go for turkey, rabbit, or maybe wild game? If you insist on the classics and prefer pork, opt for loin or ham instead of fat-overgrown neck and bacon.
Classic Christmas dishes vs their low-calorie counterparts – examples of calorie content
See how many calories you can save by using the tips above and making small modifications to your Christmas dishes. Here is the estimated calorie content of servings of selected classic Christmas dishes against the estimated calorie content of their slimmed-down versions.
| A classic Christmas dish | A slimmed-down version of the Christmas dish |
| Whitened mushroom soup with potatoes and cream – approx. 500 kcal in a 500 ml serving | Fasting mushroom soup without roux – approx. 200 kcal in a 500 ml serving |
| Herring in oil – approx. 230 kcal/100 g | Herring in 12% cream or Kashubian herring in tomato sauce – approx. 150 kcal/100 g |
| Fried dumplings with cabbage and mushrooms – approx. 520 kcal in a 200 g serving + oil for frying | Boiled dumplings with cabbage and mushrooms – approx. 340 kcal in a 200 g serving |
| Fried croquette with cabbage and mushrooms – approx. 310 kcal per piece (130 g) | Pancake with cabbage and mushrooms without batter – approx. 230 kcal per piece (130 g) |
| Vegetable salad with mayonnaise – approx. 290 kcal/100 g | Vegetable salad with mayonnaise and yoghurt (1:1 ratio) – approx. 190 kcal/100 g |
| Classic Vienna cheesecake – approx. 300 kcal/120 g serving | A piece of bun – approx. 180 kcal/50 g serving |
| Slice of roast bacon – approx. 200 kcal/slice (35 g) | Slice of roast ham – approx. 95 kcal/slice (35 g) |
| Sweet dried fruit compote – approx. 150 kcal/glass | Dried compote with xylitol – approx. 50 kcal/glass |
| Fried battered carp – approx. 300 kcal/130 g serving | Roast pollock – approx. 130 kcal/130 g serving |
| A piece of Christmas loaf with poppy seeds and icing – approx. 290 kcal/80 g piece | Yeast cake with poppy seeds – approx. 240 kcal/80 g serving |
| Traditional baked cheesecake – approx. 300 kcal/100 g serving | Yoghurt cold cheesecake – from approx. 150 kcal/100 g |