Healthy Fast Food Recipes for Home Cooked Burgers, Fries and More. Copyright 2021 Terence Carter / Grantourismo. All Rights Reserved.

Healthy Fast Food Is Home Cooked Fast Food – Recipes for Burgers, Fries, Meat Pies and More

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Healthy fast food is home cooked fast food. Whether you’re cooking your own burgers and fries, battered fish and chips, meat pies, sausage rolls or sauces, when you make them at home you know exactly what’s going into them plus they taste infinitely better. Here are our favourite healthy fast food recipes.

Many of us around the world who are in lockdown or are quarantining are looking for healthy fast food. We’re all finding comfort in food, whether it’s cooking or eating, from traditional dishes that inspire nostalgia for far simpler times to fast food that provides quick calories and satisfies cravings. But fast food that’s healthier.

Increasingly, and perhaps because people are eating so much of it, everyone appears to be searching is for healthy fast food options, but, unfortunately, you’re not going to find them at McDonald’s, KFC, Burger King, Dominoes, or Taco Bell. Remember McDonald’s pink slime and Subway’s ‘tuna’ that wasn’t tuna?

If you want healthier fast food you’re going to have to cook it at home, because home cooked fast food is fresher, more nutritional, less fatty, and made with real ingredients, not pink slime or ‘tuna’ with no tuna DNA. Below you’ll find our favourite healthy fast food recipes for everything from fish and chips to burgers and fries and meat pies and sausage rolls. Plus some spicy sauces to go on those.

But before I tell you about our healthy fast food recipes, we have a favour to ask. Grantourismo is reader-funded. If you’ve used and like our recipes, please consider supporting Grantourismo by supporting our original, epic, first-of-its-kind Cambodian culinary history and cookbook on Patreon for as little as US$5 a month. Or, you could buy us a coffee. Although we’ll use our coffee money to buy cooking ingredients for recipe testing instead.

You can also support our work by using links on the site to book accommodation, rent a car, purchase travel insurance, or book a tour on Get Your Guide; shopping our Grantourismo online store (we have fun gifts for foodies designed with Terence’s images); or buying something on Amazon, such as these award-winning cookbooks, cookbooks by Australian chefs, classic cookbooks for serious cooks, cookbooks for culinary travellers, travel books to inspire wanderlust, and gifts for Asian food lovers. Now let me tell you all about our healthy fast food recipes.

Healthy Fast Food Recipes for Home Cooked Fast Food – From Burgers and Fries to Fish and Chips and Meat Pies

Beer Battered Fish and Chips Recipe

This beer battered fish and chips recipe is a healthy fast food recipe. It makes the perfect fish and chips for the classic takeaway that is an iconic dish for the British, Australians and New Zealanders. The use of beer instead of water for the batter mixture for this beer battered fish and chips recipe is not just to add extra flavour to the batter.

The beer serves a couple of purposes. Firstly, alcohol burns faster than water, so the crust of the batter firms faster, protecting the fish from being heavy with oil. Secondly, the foam of the beer, formed mainly from carbon dioxide, keeps the batter light as it cooks.

Best Beer Battered Fish and Chips Recipe for Perfect Fish and Chips

 

Hand Cut Potato Chips Recipe For Crispy Fries For Your Fish And Chips

Our hand cut potato chips recipe is another healthy fast food recipe. It makes perfect crispy fries for your fish and chips or moules frites or whatever else you like to serve with fries. Our mouthwatering potato chips are crunchy on the outside and soft in the middle.

There are a couple of ways to achieve this, but ultimately you need to fry the chips twice. Fortunately, our method doesn’t mean hours in the kitchen and these are better and healthier than any frozen chips you’ll ever eat.

Hand Cut Potato Chips Recipe for Crispy Fries for Your Fish and Chips

Spicy Potato Wedges Recipe

This spicy potato wedges recipe takes the classic Australian café, pub and bar snack of potato wedges with sweet chilli sauce and sour cream and gives it a spicy Asian twist. These skin-on potato wedges can be fried or baked, but we’ve gone for the oven-baked route for a healthy fast food recipe.

Don’t worry, this spicy potato wedges recipe will still make you potato wedges that are crispy on the outside and fluffy within. Served with the classic Aussie combo of sweet chilli sauce and sour cream, these spicy wedges make a filling snack or a fantastic side for burgers.

Spicy Potato Wedges Recipe With Sweet Chilli Sauce and Sour Cream

Corn Fritter Breakfast Burger Recipe

Our corn fritter breakfast burger recipe with fried egg and Thai sweet chilli sauce makes an incredibly delicious vegetarian breakfast burger that’s packed with flavour and crunch. With a Southeast Asian twist on the classic breakfast burger, it’s so good you won’t miss the burger patty and bacon, and the grease that comes with it.

This is another of our favourite healthy fast food recipes. If you made our Thai corn fritters recipe and you have a batch of our homemade Thai sweet chilli sauce in the fridge, then you’re all set to go.

Corn Fritter Breakfast Burger Recipe with Fried Egg and Thai Sweet Chilli Sauce

Chicken Katsu Burger Recipe

This chicken katsu burger recipe places a crunchy tender chicken cutlet, prepared using the classic Japanese katsu method of panko-breaded and deep-fried chicken, between spicy Asian slaw, tangy Japanese-style barbecue sauce, and soft burger buns.

Serve with hand-cut fries and you’re in chicken katsu burger heaven. We love these so much we eat them as often as we do Japanese pork tonkatsu!

Chicken Katsu Burger Recipe for Crunchy Tender Chicken Cutlets with Spicy Slaw

Southern Fried Chicken Recipe

Our Southern fried chicken recipe is an Aussie take on classic fried spicy Nashville style chicken. Australian chef Morgan McGlone learnt to perfect this during his time in the USA’s South, home to some of the world’s best fried chicken. We make a big batch and use it in everything from chicken burgers to chicken fried rice.

The secret is boneless skin-on chicken thighs that are coated in seasoned flour that forms a ‘glue’ on the chicken and then the pieces are deep fried to get the crispiest skin you’ll ever taste. Then there’s the sauce it’s slathered in…

Southern Fried Chicken Recipe for Belles Hot Chicken Spicy Nashville Style Chicken

Pepper Steak Pie Recipe

My pepper steak pie recipe makes a Cambodian beef lok lak meat pie that is inspired by one of Cambodia’s most popular street food-style dishes, served at local eateries around the country. Typically eaten for lunch, but also acceptable for dinner or breakfast, when a fried egg on top of the stir-fried beef is compulsory, lok lak is one of those dishes that is as popular with foreigners as locals.

A dish of Cambodian-Chinese origin, it’s a cousin to Vietnam’s loc lac or ‘shaking beef’, whose history is much-debated – but there’s no debate about how good these pies are and they’re healthy.

Pepper Steak Pie Recipe for a Cambodian Beef Lok Lak Meat Pie

Spicy Pork Mince Pie Recipe

This spicy pork mince pie recipe made is with Cambodian prahok ktis – Cambodia’s deliciously spicy dip of minced pork, coconut cream, pea eggplants, and prahok, the Khmer fermented fish paste.

Anything fermented is good for your gut health and your immunity, making this another of our favourite healthy fast food recipes. Stuff this into an an iconic Australian meat pie casing and you have a curried meat pie that’s unlike any you’ve ever tasted.

Spicy Pork Mince Pie Recipe Made with Cambodian Prahok Ktis

Cambodian Chicken Curry Pie Recipe

Our chicken curry pie recipe takes the much-loved classic Cambodian chicken curry to make a flavourful spicy chicken pie like no other. Unlike the classic curried chicken pie which uses curry powder to flavour the chicken filling, this recipe uses a Cambodian red curry paste. The classic Cambodian chicken curry has potatoes, long beans and Asian eggplants, which we’ve included to create a really hearty chicken pie that is another of our favourite healthy fast food recipes.

Homemade Chicken Curry Pie Recipe Made with Cambodian Chicken Curry

Cambodian Curried Beef Sausage Rolls

These homemade curried beef sausage rolls are filled with rich Cambodian Saraman curry, which is a cousin to the Thai Massaman curry and Malaysia’s Beef Rendang – all complex and slow-cooked curries. The Saraman curry is a time-consuming curry to make, which is why it’s often considered to be a special occasion dish for Cambodians and it’s extra special when made into sausage rolls!

Homemade Curried Beef Sausage Rolls Recipe Made With Cambodian Saraman Curry

Classic Aussie Sausage Roll Recipe

Our sausage rolls are a breeze to make – and making them at home means you know what’s going in them, and while this particular sausage roll recipe makes delicious homemade sausage rolls, you can easily tweak it each time to your taste. In Australia, sausage rolls are warming snacks when you’re at a chilly sports stadium watching footie in winter.

Sausage rolls are morning tea for ‘smoko’ (a break) for a hungry tradie working on a construction site, and they’re a party food staple for Aussie kids when you can serve mini-sausage rolls.

Sausage Roll Recipe – How to Make Delicious Homemade Sausage Rolls

Homemade Thai Sweet Chilli Sauce Recipe

Once you make this easy Thai sweet chilli sauce recipe the first time, you’ll remember why that bottle of sweet chilli sauce you bought a couple of years ago is still in the fridge. To be fair, it’s probably still edible because of all the preservatives and thickeners that are added to commercial sauces. But if it tastes like most Thai sweet chilli sauce brands it’s probably sickly sweet.

This homemade Thai sweet chilli sauce is so perfectly balanced and super easy to make that you might never buy a supermarket sweet chilli sauce again. Most commercial sauces use potassium sorbate to prevent mould occurring but this homemade chilli sauce will keep very well for at least a month or two in your fridge, as long as you always dipping clean utensils into the jar, so as not to contaminate the sauce.

Homemade Thai Sweet Chilli Sauce Recipe for the Best Sweet Chilli Sauce You’ll Taste

Homemade Sriracha Sauce Recipe

This authentic homemade Sriracha sauce recipe makes the real thing – the Thai hot sauce that tastes just like it does in its place of origin, the coastal city of Sri Racha, Thailand. This spicy sauce is far simpler to make than you might imagine and you can tailor it to suit your own taste!

With so few ingredients, it’s the quality of the chillies that make this authentic homemade Sriracha sauce recipe so special. Using Thai chillies from Thailand or a similar variety – but not the chillies in the world-famous American ‘rooster’ hot sauce – is your key to an authentic Thai Sriracha sauce. This is another of our favourite healthy fast food recipes.

This Sriracha Sauce Recipe Makes the Best Homemade Thai Sriracha Sauce You’ll Taste

If you’ve cooked and enjoyed any of our healthy fast food recipes, we would love to know what you think in the comments below.

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A travel and food writer who has experienced over 70 countries and written for The Guardian, Australian Gourmet Traveller, Feast, Delicious, National Geographic Traveller, Conde Nast Traveller, Travel+Leisure Southeast Asia, DestinAsian, TIME, CNN, The Independent, The Telegraph, Sunday Times Travel Magazine, AFAR, Wanderlust, International Traveller, Get Lost, Four Seasons Magazine, Fah Thai, Sawasdee, and more, as well as authored more than 40 guidebooks for Lonely Planet, DK, Footprint, Rough Guides, Fodors, Thomas Cook, and AA Guides.

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