Recipe: Keto Burmese Tea Leaf Salad

Low-carb Adaptation of Burmese Tea Leaf Salad

All my recipes so far have been desserts or snacks, so I thought I’d share my favorite dinner recipe, Burmese Tea Leaf salad. It’s got a fantastic umami flavor from the tea leaves, fish sauce, and nuts, with a great combination of crunchy textures from the nuts, lettuce, and garlic.

I adapted this recipe from Burma Superstar, a great Burmese restaurant where I live. I’ve always loved their Tea Leaf salad, but it has dried lentils and tomatoes, which makes too high in carbs for anything other than a once-in-a-while cheat meal.

The restaurant has a cookbook with the recipe, but when I tried to reproduce it, it didn’t taste nearly as good as what I get at the restaurant. Fortunately, I discovered that when you order the salad to go, the put the ingredients separately in a box for you to mix together yourself. I got a box and weighed out the individual ingredients.

From there, over several tries, I made the following modifications:

Removed the tomatoes and lentils to reduce carbs.
Increased the amount of nuts from 100 to 130 g to increase calories.
Changed the nut mix to ones I like better (I actually vary this based on my mood)
Replaced the sliced jalapeño with red pepper flakes for convenience.
Replaced garlic chips with fried minced garlic to reduce cost.
Use pre-seasoned fermented tea leaves for convenience.
Added flaky sea salt as a garnish to give an additional crunchy texture.

This recipe is extremely customizable. You can modify the seasonings or nut mix to whatever you like. I use whatever nuts I’m in the mood for and often swap out the red pepper and fish sauce for other spices. You can also tune the calories up or down by using more or less nuts.

A note on macros: A lot of tea leaf containers claim very high carb content (e.g. 16g per tbsp.). From testing my blood sugar, this is not correct. I only need an extra 0.5u of insulin when I eat this compared with my normal dinner (300g meat, 150g low-carb vegetable), which suggests the net carbs from the 85g of tea leaves can’t be more than ~5 g).

Hope you enjoy it!

– QD

Low-carb Adaptiation of Burma Superstar’s Tea Leaf Salad

A low-carb Burmese Tea Leaf Salad, adapted from the Burma Superstar recipe.

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Prep Time 5

Total Time 5

Servings salad

Ingredients

Nut Mix (original)

100 g peanuts, roasted & salted
100 g sunflower seeds, roasted & salted
100 g sesame seeds, roasted & salted
100 g pumkin seeds, roasted & salted
40 g fried garlic

Nut Mix (my favorite variation)

200 g mixed sprouted seeds
100 g macadamia nuts, chopped
100 g peanuts, roasted & salted
40 g fried garlic

Salad

130 g nut mix
0.5 tsp red pepper flake
100 g hearts of romaine lettuce, chopped thin
85 g fermented tea leaves (I use a brand from my local supermarket, but the linked brand is good too)
0.25 tsp shrimp powder (optional)
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp fish sauce (Red Boat is the only brand I've found that doesn't have added sugar; tastes good too)
flaky sea salt to taste

Instructions

Mix together nuts and garlic. This can be done in a large batch and stored for use for multiple salads or other dishes.
Combine all ingredients except for salt in a medium bowl and let sit for 5-10 min. This mellows the flavor of the garlic chips.
Add salt right and serve (if you add salt too early, it will dissolve and you won’t get the crunchy texture).

Notes

Macros are heavily dependent on the type of nuts and tea leaves you use.

Tried this recipe?Let us know how it was in the comments

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Experiment #4 – Tracking blood sugar during a 24 hour fast

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**Figure 1.** Measured blood glucose concentration vs. time. Reference bands and lines show my personal target range and high/low thresholds.

**Table 1.** Summary statistics of blood glucose concentration during the fast.

I tried again this week to measure the effect of different food ingredients on my blood sugar. I started with plain glucose, but quickly ran into a problem. The first two times I ate 3g of glucose, which normally would raise my blood sugar ~15 mg/dL, my blood sugar actually dropped. I did these experiments at 2pm, 8.5 h after eat breakfast, so I shouldn’t have had any effects from either the food or medication.

Based on these results, I’m not going to be able to get clean measurements of the effect of food unless I better understand my baseline blood glucose, so I decided to monitor my blood sugar during a day of fasting.

As with my two-day tracking experiment a couple weeks ago, this was quite informative. Here’s a most important things I learned, my new questions, and ideas for next experiments:

Key Learnings:

Full data and summary statistics in Figure 1 and Table 1

Checking blood sugar during a fast is a useful control experiment and helps determine if the phenomena I’m observing are due to specific interventions vs. natural or time of day-based variation.
Even with my morning insulin, I’m seeing an ~10 mg/dL increase that persists for ~5 h. I should try increasing the dose by ~0.25u.
There’s a measurable drop in my BG when I’m driving to/from work. I saw this in 3/4 of the drives during my previous glucose tracking experiment, but I didn’t pick up on it because my commutes occur right before mealtimes. Need to investigate further to see if this is real & consistent.
I saw an ~15 mg/dL drop starting at 1p that persisted until 5:30p.
- This is the time period when I was trying to do the food effect tests and may be why I was seeing the weird drop in BG.
- This occurred 9 hours after my last dose of insulin (0.5u each of Novolog and Tresiba), so must be the result of something my body is doing. Is this drop from fasting (e.g. running out of glycogen) or something that occurs normally?
- My BG stabilized at 65-75 mg/dL, which indicates that that range is something that can occur naturally and not due to medication. Given this, should I correct lows in this range or let them be?
- I always get tired around 2-3p, lasting until about 5-6p. I’ve always chalked this up to the end of the work day and then getting re-energized by dinner/being home, but maybe there’s more going on. Need to test interventions to eliminate this afternoon fatigue.

Questions:

How consistent are the effects I observed? Which are due to fasting vs. effects that occur during a normal day?
Is the driving effect real? If so, are there ways to mitigate it? Even if it’s only a short-term effect, it could be causing fatigue or other reduced mental capacity while driving.
How can I mitigate the 10 mg/dL increase in the morning?
Is the afternoon drop connected with feeling tired and less mentally capable? If so, how can I mitigate the effect?

Next Experiments:

I’m always interested in ideas for new experiments, so please leave a comment if there’s something you’d like me to try.

Repeat this fasting experiment a couple more times to see if the observations are reproducible.
- Also try fasting for shorter durations (single meals) to check if effects are from the duration of the fast vs. ones that would occur normally.
Measure fatigue and/or mental acuity see how it correlates with time of day and BG.
Test an increase in morning insulin to reduce the effect of the dawn phenomenon.

Details

Purpose

To better understand trends in my blood glucose over the course of a day fasting and determine if there are trends or events that I should investigate further.

Design/Methods

General. Blood glucose was measured approximately every 15 min. using a FreeStyle Freedom Lite glucose meter and FreeStyle lancets & test strips. No special precautions were taken to clean the lancing site before measurement. To take a sample, the lancing devices was used to pierce the skin at an ~45 deg. angle from the finger. Blood was then squeezed out by running the thumb and pointer finger of the opposite hand from the first knuckle to the lancing site of the finger. Blood was then wicked into a test strip that had been inserted into the meter and the glucose reading was recorded.

For medication, I took my normal morning and evening medication, but did not dose for meals.

Data

Link

Results & Discussion

See key learnings & questions above.

Conclusion & Next Experiments

See summary above.

– QD

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Low-carb Ice Cream Recipe Collection

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Just collecting all my low-carb ice-cream recipes in one place so I can link to it. Will update as I add more.

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Recipe Development: Low-Carb Adaptation of Nestle Toll House Cookies

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Low-carb replica of Nestle Tollhouse Cookies – Still a work in progress

I’ve been trying to work out a low-carb chocolate chip-cookie dough ice cream to go along with my other ice cream recipes, but I haven’t liked any of the low-carb cookie dough recipes I’ve found on-line. All of them either didn’t really taste like a traditional chocolate chip cookie dough or were too soft even when frozen.

Since the oat-fiber muffins turned out so good, I decided to see if I could use an oat-fiber/whey protein base to make a cookie dough. The results turned out surprisingly good for a first attempt. Still needs some work, but I thought I’d share now to get some advice before I keep developing.

As a starting point, I based my recipe on the classic Nestle Toll House cookie, with the following modifications:

Flour → 80g oat-fiber + 44g whey protein + 16g gluten (same ratio as my oat-fiber muffins)
White sugar → allulose (1:1 by weight)
Brown sugar → allulose (1:1 by weight) + molasses (10% of sugar by weight, adapted from here)
Chocolate chips → 1 cup shredded coconut (I didn’t have any sugar-free chocolate chips, wouldn’t have done this otherwise.
Added 50% more egg to get to the right dough consistency.
Added a sprinkle of flaky sea salt to the top of the cookie before baking.

This was a pretty good start:

Good:
- They tasted very similar to chocolate chip cookie dough (minus the chocolate)
- They froze to a good texture.
- While not as good as chocolate chips, the shredded coconut gave a nice flavor and texture to the dough.
Bad:
- When baked, the cookies puffed up and had more of a bread/muffin texture than a cookie texture.
- The amount of coconut was more than I’d like.

First attempt at oat-fiber cookies. Taste was good, but they puffed up and had more of a bread than cookie texture.

To fix the texture problem, I made the following changes:

Removed gluten (it prevented the muffins from deflating, so removing it should reducing “puffing”)
Went from 2 eggs to 1 egg + 1 yolk (less egg white should give a less stable structure)
Halved the amount of coconut.

This was a big improvement. The taste of the dough stayed the same, but the cookies spread and gave a texture very similar to a chewy chocolate chip cookie.

Second attempt, with gluten and half of egg white removed. Taste, texture, and appearance of a chewy chocolate chip cookie (without the chocolate for now).

This will work great for cookie dough ice cream. For cookies, though, I prefer a crisper cookie. Based on recommendations for regular chocolate chip cookies, there’s a few options on how to do this:

Reduce the molasses content (would help the carbs count, but probably make it taste worse. Could try substituting some “brown sugar” erythritol instead?)
Lower the temperature to let the cookies spread more before setting
Reduce the amount of egg white (hard to do as I’m already at 1 egg, but I could add yolks and whites separately).

At this point, I’m going to post the recipe to r/ketorecipes on Reddit and see if I can get more suggestions (worked for the oat-fiber muffins) before making another batch.

Recipe as it stands now below.

Hope you enjoy it,

– QD