Ann Brignola learned to cook from an Italian mother who sprinkled salt freely and poured oil without measuring.
Now Brignola is unlearning those habits in her 70s in free cooking classes through Yale New Haven Health.
“I’ve walked away with a lifetime of knowledge,” she said.
The Teaching Kitchen, a rarity to be offered through a health care institution, is teaching Brignola and others about flavorful, healthful and fast cooking.
It’s a hands-on series of classes where 12 people referred by their doctors prepare healthful meals together, talk about ingredients, learn about healthful substitutions and then eat together.
Their teacher is registered dietician and chef, Max Goldstein, and the dean of sorts is medical doctor Nate Wood, director of Culinary Medicine, Yale School of Medicine. Wood is also a professionally trained chef, an unusual career pairing.
Wood, who also works with obesity patients, said lifestyle, including what people eat is the most important factor in health.
“If you eat a solid diet of minimally processed foods or unprocessed foods you can prevent chronic disease,” or even reverse it some cases, Wood said.
Doctors generally are “poorly trained” in nutrition, getting only about 11 hours of training, but there is a strong movement afoot to change that, Wood said.
“This is a growing field, lifestyle and food as medicine,” he said.
Goldstein said they follow the Mediterranean diet of vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts and seeds although the recipes aren’t Mediterranean.
The recipes are plant forward, meaning an emphasis on fresh fruits and vegetables, but not vegetarian.
Cooking students, referred by their doctors in the Yale New Haven Health system, learn dinner, lunch, breakfast and snack recipes such as a tofu scramble, avocado egg salad, black bean burger with balsamic marinated mushrooms, pesto pasta with roasted tomatoes and broccoli, Quinoa lettuce wraps with spicy peanut sauce, black bean brownies, and tacos.
They learn to make pancakes with whole wheat flour and oats along with a glaze made from frozen fruit to substitute for more sugary maple syrup.
Wood said most people know they should eat more plants, but don’t necessarily know how to cook or access them in an affordable way.
Michael Gore of West Haven, who battles obesity, said he loves the classes and has already lost 55 pounds with lifestyle change in addition to other treatment.
Gore, whose wife attends classes too, said they have learned about easy prep and cost efficiency.
The program works with a lot of canned and other shelf-stable ingredients.
They teach students how to shop and read labels carefully, such as noting that when a label gives calories per serving, it’s important to remember there could be five servings in a package.
“The teaching kitchen helped me,” Gore said. “I used to buy veggie burgers and they never tasted right. Then Max taught me to make tasty ones with black beans from scratch.”
Brignola, of Woodbridge, learned, among many other things, the salt and oil her mother used so freely is absorbed into the food being cooked and should be measured for health reasons.
She said Goldstein has “an immense amount of patience,” and never criticized or embarrassed students over mistakes, such as when she used a metal utensil on the wrong pan.
“He was an excellent teacher. He educated us,” said Brignola who attended with husband, Joseph.
The way the class generally works is that there are six cooking stations and 12 people prepare versions of a meal following a recipe so they can see and taste healthful substitutions along the way.
For instance, one group will do a flour tortilla taco with hamburger meat, onion and store bought taco seasoning high in sodium. The second group uses a corn tortilla with less hamburger meat, veggies, and homemade sauce with less sodium. The third group adds beans and more vegetables to the second incarnation.
Brignola said they made recipes the “regular way” and they were 3,000 calories, and then the healthiest way they became 600 calories and almost vegetarian. They learned healthful substitutions such as brown rice, whole wheat pasta, she said.
The objective, Goldstein said, is to “drive home the point that simple swaps can have a real nutritional impact.”
After they cooked, students ate together and had fun doing it, they all say.
“Some call it group therapy,” Wood said. “There’s something psychologically rich about sitting, talking ,preparing food, eating together.”
Wood said he became interested in the food as medicine element early on, as he grew up in a family aware of the food/health connection.
Wood recalls his grandfather’s oft repeated saying: “The whiter the bread, the quicker you’ll be dead.”
He felt so strongly about pairing food and medicine that Wood made the unusual move of attending Institute of Culinary Education to become a chef between his third and fourth year of medical school. As part of the school requirement he did an internship at The Modern restaurant in New York City, a two-starred Michelin restaurant.
Some scratched their heads over his decision to take a break from med school for chef school.
“I went to medical school to learn how the body works and wanted to combine cooking education,” he said.
Wood said that in addition to health, the classes address time and flavor.
“We use frozen foods, canned foods, shelf-stable pantry items, in our recipes to show people how to make food that is healthy, delicious, and fast,” he said. “We practice flavor-first cooking. Yes, we want it to be healthy. But first and foremost, we want it to taste good. To amp up flavor without using a lot of fat and salt, we use lots of spices, herbs, and acid like citrus juice or vinegar. ”
Wood and his crew also teach medical students in the Teaching Kitchen.
Goldstein said they are not the only teaching kitchen in the country, but they are only among a handful connected with a health institution.
Individuals can be tracked because their attendance in the Teaching Kitchen becomes part of their electronic medical records, Goldstein said.
To combine nutrition and cooking “is pretty much my dream job,” Goldstein he said.
