Muhammara Dip with Crudité
Roasted red peppers from a jar deserve a spot in your pantry. This convenient food is my fast track to making muhammara—an easy, plant-rich dip with roots in Turkey and Syria. Each jar packs in about 6 sweet bell peppers that have been roasted, seeded, and peeled, all in a mild vinegar solution. Whizz the drained peppers in a food processor with walnuts, breadcrumbs, olive oil, garlic, and spices, and you’ll have a batch of this sweet and savory dip in minutes. Leftover peppers make a great snack piled atop a Triscuit.
Peppers are a top flavonoid-rich food
The pigments in plants that make them colorful are actually nutrients called flavonoids, a key tool for blocking oxidative stress in the brain. It’s not surprising, then, that colorful red, yellow, and green peppers provide flavonoids galore. In this study out of Rush University, a flavonoid-rich diet was strongly linked to reduced Alzheimer’s risk. In fact, the more flavonoid-rich foods participants consumed, the lower their risk of developing Alzheimer’s in the next 5 years.
When Harvard researchers studied the link between cognitive function and flavonoids, they found a similar trend. This powerful 20-year long study of 49,493 women from the Nurses’ Health Study and 27,842 men from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study found that the more certain flavonoid-rich foods were included in the diet, the less likely one was to have subjective cognitive decline—the subtle type of thinking problems noticed decades before dementia is diagnosed. They gave especially high marks to citrus fruits (oranges and grapefruit), berries (blueberries and strawberries), leafy greens, tea, and colorful vegetables like peppers.
What makes a convenience food brain healthy too
You may be wondering: aren’t roasted red peppers in a jar a processed food? It’s true that a brain-healthy diet consists of mostly unprocessed foods (like fresh vegetables, whole grains, and beans), and it should have very few if any ultra processed foods. You can tell that a food is ultra processed if it has added ingredients like sugar, salt, fat, and artificial colors. It also contains substances extracted from other foods, like starches and hydrogenated fats. Examples include soft drinks, frozen meals, cold cuts, packaged cookies, and salty snacks.
There’s room in the diet, however, for minimally processed foods—whole foods that retain their nutrient density. These are foods that have been altered somehow to be packaged, such as a box of lettuce greens (sometimes triple washed!), a can of beans, or a tin of anchovies packed in olive oil. Certain foods become even more nutritious after minimal processing. The roasting process used to make roasted bell peppers in a jar actually amplifies the impact of their brain-boosting nutrients (like the carotenoids, alos a plant pigment) to be better absorbed by your body. Marinara sauce is another example: simmering the tomatoes makes their nutrients (especially lycopene, a type of carotenoid) more bioavailable.
Avoiding ultra processed foods is crucial for heart and brain health. But this doesn’t mean you have to cook everything from scratch. Certain store-bought foods can be real timesavers, helping you create brain-healthy meals fast. I like to think of these foods as brain health superstars—“convenience” foods that are “conveniently healthy.” Other items that get the brain health stamp of approval that come from a jar include olives, good-quality salsa and marinara sauce, capers, and fermented vegetables (look for these in the produce section, not on the shelf).
Read the label
The key to finding the best conveniently healthy store-bought foods? Read the label. Get out your reading glasses, if necessary, and zero in on the nutrition label.
- Check for any words that sound like a chemical. Some preservatives are fine, like the citric acid commonly used to preserve tomatoes and peppers. But you want to avoid ultra processed ingredients in your food, such as hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated fats, modified food starch, cellulose powder, and soy protein isolate, to name a few.
- Read the Added Sugar line item. It should be zero.
- Check the Sodium line item. “Low sodium” means under 140 milligrams of sodium per serving, or under 5% of the DV (daily value) recommended. Some canned vegetables and beans are excessively high in salt. While others, like capers and olives, are meant to be salty. They can often replace the salt called for in a recipe.
Muhammara is packed with brain-healthy ingredients
You could make this muhammara with home-roasted red peppers. This entails grilling, roasting, or placing fresh peppers over a burner with an open flame until the skin is charred. Then, you’ll place the peppers in a plastic bag to steam, slip off the skins, and deseed them. It’s not difficult, and it will surely make an exceptionally good muhammara, but it is an additional step. Either way, this dip is bursting with brain-boosting ingredients. Besides the peppers, there’s walnuts, an excellent source of polyphenols and omega-3 fats. Extra-virgin olive oil provides monounsaturated fats and more polyphenols, especially oleocanthal. With a touch of cumin, an anti-inflammatory spice, and a generous handful of cilantro, this is a dip that is both convenient and good for you, not to mention incredibly delicious.
Leftover muhammara is great to have on hand, too. It makes a brain-healthy swap for mayo on a sandwich. Thinned with more olive oil, it is also a vibrant sauce that spices up roasted vegetables, fish, chicken, and tofu.
Servings |
cups
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- 1 ½ cups raw walnut halves
- 1 ½ cups chopped roasted red peppers about 3
- 1 cup loosely packed cilantro leaves and tender stems, plus extra leaves for serving
- ½ cup fresh whole wheat bread crumbs see Tip
- 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
- 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
- ½ teaspoon ground cumin
- ½ teaspoon kosher salt
- Sturdy lettuce leaves (butter lettuce endive, radicchio), crudité, or toasted pita wedges, for serving
Ingredients
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- Preheat your oven to 300ºF with a rack set in the center position. Place the walnuts on a rimmed baking sheet and bake until lightly toasted, 6 to 8 minutes. Let cool. Set aside ½ cup of the walnuts and place the rest in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a metal blade.
- Pulse walnuts until coarsely chopped, then add the peppers, cilantro, bread crumbs, oil, lemon juice, cumin, and salt. Process until the dip is partly smooth but still with small pieces of walnut visible, about 5 pulses.
- Scrape the dip into a shallow serving bowl. Press the remaining walnuts onto the surface, drizzle with olive oil, and top with cilantro leaves. Serve with lettuce leaves, crudité, or pita for dipping.
Tip: To make fresh breadcrumbs, tear 1 to 2 slices of slightly dry sturdy bread (like whole grain) into 1-inch pieces. (You’ll need about 1 cup of bread pieces to make ½ cup breadcrumbs.) Place in a food processor and process for about 30 seconds for coarse bread crumbs. Transfer to a bowl and set aside. (There’s no need to clean the bowl of the food processor; just proceed with the recipe.)
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