Upgrade your Essentials Challenge 2021! Week 3: Sauces, cooking oils, condiments & dressings

January 17, 2021

It’s Week 3 of the Upgrade Your Essentials Challenge! In Week 1, we talked about your main proteins and in week 2 we covered side dishes, from your greens to your starchy carbs and healthy fats.

This week we’re talking about a less obvious part of your plate - where otherwise great meals can be made not-so-great pretty quickly. That’s your cooking oils, sauces, condiments, and dressings!

(Skip to the end of the post 👇 for a list of what’s on discount this week, or read on if you want to make sure your sauces aren’t sabotaging your otherwise healthy meals!)

For today’s note, we’re going to quickly cover a few topics. If you want to take a deep dive with us, click over to this week’s corresponding blog post and nerd out with us 🤓

Cooking oils: Do you know what oil your food was cooked in? Removing cheap industrial seed oils (aka “vegetable” oils - renamed this by corporate marketing departments to make them sound healthy) from your diet is one of the easiest and highest-return adjustments you can make.

These oils require an 8-step refining process which includes acid washing and perfumizing to remove the foul odor you’re left with at the end. They’re high in omega-6 fats, which when consumed without a good amount of the healthier omega-3 fats leads to chronic inflammation - mass consumption of these oils over the last 60+ years is thought to be behind the rise in serious conditions like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, and more.

Contrast that with extra virgin olive oil - which has a 1 step production process: crushing (or “pressing”) fresh olives. Voila. EVOO and other high-quality oils like coconut or avocado oil are also much higher in the healthy omega-3 fats.
Sauces: Who doesn’t love a good BBQ, hot sauce, or gravy on your meats and veg? The problem is, if you’re drowning your plate in supermarket shelf sauces or gravies, you’re usually also adding lots of preservatives, sugars, emulsifiers, or other strange non-food additives like high fructose corn syrup. 🙅🏻‍♀️

There’s no need! Most of these sauces are easy to make delicious homemade versions (or head over to our Grocery, where we make them in small batches with none of the weird stuff).
Condiments: Same story as for the sauces - except possibly even worse! Large commercial versions of ketchup and mayonnaise in particular are famous for containing lots of high fructose corn syrup (which we should pretty much never be eating) and cheap oils like canola or soybean, plus GMO sugars and MSG. Appetizing.
Salad dressings: Sorry, but that half finished bottle of ranch dressing in your fridge would be a great candidate to find its way to the trash can as part of our Upgrade your Essentials Challenge! (Seriously - send us a pic of you throwing away ANY of your low-quality oils, dressings, or sauces and we’ll send you a voucher for 150 baht to pick up one of our 4 new vinaigrette dressings) 📸

Salad dressings might be the worst offenders of all in corporate food-land. Check out this label from a typical supermarket ranch dressing:

Yup, we’ll have our salad with some of that please! 🤮

To help you swap out your junky oils, sauces, condiments, and/or dressings this week, we thought we’d put some of our real food alternatives on sale this week:

Boundary Bend Extra Virgin Olive Oil at 10% off
All three of our premium iSolai vinegars at 10% off
Our small-batch sauces with no preservatives at 10% off
Our super popular ketchup at 10% off
Avocado oil mayo at 10% off
Organic wholegrain mustard at 10% off
Red Boat Fish Sauce at 10% off
Pasture-raised turkey demi-glace (gravy) at 10% off

Last but not least - we’re launching 4 new vinaigrette salad dressings this week! These are each a great combination of the flavor from the extra virgin olive oil, vinegar, and berries...just a fantastic way to jazz up your regular salad.

To make sure you have no good excuse not to try them, we’re launching them at 10% off their regular price.