Ferrara Café in Manhattan’s Little Italy is a century-old bakery steeped in tradition, but executive pastry chef Dennis Canciello has recently been tinkering with the recipes of two of the café’s signature pastries: cheesecake and cannoli. Like other cooks in the city’s restaurants, bakeries, and fast-food outlets, Canciello faces an impending deadline for conforming to an unusual mandate from the New York City Board of Health. Beginning July 1, 2007, most foods prepared in the city’s 22,000 restaurants will no longer be permitted to contain more than half a gram per serving of artificial trans fats — a type of fat, found chiefly in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils used for frying and baking, in shortenings, and in margarines, that has more unhealthy effects on blood lipids than any other kind. Bakers, as well as purveyors of deep-fried cake or dough products such as doughnuts, for whom finding a suitable alternative is particularly challenging, have until July 1, 2008, to stop using such ingredients. Faced with predictions that banishing artificial trans fats from restaurant foods would reduce the rate of heart attacks and save the lives of several hundred New Yorkers annually, the powerful board of health voted unanimously last December to eliminate what health commissioner Thomas Frieden calls a “hazardous substance” from the city’s cuisine. “The sweet spot of public health,” Frieden told me, “is when you do something that makes the default setting a healthy choice.”
The ingredient that Canciello has decided to substitute — palm oil — is a highly saturated fat and by no means healthful, but he says he needs a fat that is semisolid at room temperature to fry the crisp pastry tubes for his ricotta-filled cannoli and bake the firm base of his cheesecake. “You can’t fry in an unsaturated fat,” said Canciello, who began working in the café three decades ago, when he was 14. “The food industry is a constant cycle,” he said. Twenty years ago, “I baked with saturated fat, so I’m just going to go back.”
Cooks and managers at other Manhattan eateries offered varied responses to the new rules. At the Tick Tock Diner near Madison Square Garden (motto: “Eat Heavy”), manager Tommy Lazarakis said his cooks would comply but added, “I don’t know what the oil will be — whatever the board of health wants.” At Papaya Dog on West 4th Street, the two cooks on duty gave me blank looks when asked whether they would be switching to a new oil for frying french fries. At the upscale Magnolia Bakery on Bleecker Street, popular for cupcakes, a manager said, “Thank God, it doesn’t affect us, because we only use butter.” The health department will offer education and technical assistance to cooks to encourage them to switch to polyunsaturated or monounsaturated oils, and restaurant inspectors will be trained to enforce the rules by examining ingredient lists on oil and shortening labels. Frieden says he isn’t worried that a large-scale increase in the use of saturated fats will negate the beneficial effects of reducing trans fat intake. “Of course we want people to change to healthier oils, and it’s easy, for most food items, to convert” to alternatives like canola oil, olive oil, or soy oil, he said. “But trans fat is clearly worse than saturated. Even if you switch to suet, you do better.”