Easy Keto Zoodle Recipe – Mandarin Beef & Mushroom
Looking for a quick and easy keto zoodle recipe? Here is the first zoodle recipe I ever made! It has now become one of my favorite keto zoodle recipes! I hope you enjoy it! Note: This post contains affiliate links.
Since zuchinni noodle recipes are all the rage along with keto recipes, I thought I’d try my hand at it! Skip to bottom for recipe.
A few days ago I was laying in bed browsing Netflix when I stumbled across a documentary called, “The Magic Pill.” (You can watch the trailer here.)
Now let me tell you, I get sucked into documentaries a lot. Especially food-related ones. So of course I got sucked into this one – and I’m so glad I did.
Watching the documentary gave me some great motivation to get back on the “clean eating” bandwagon after several weeks of eating with a “YOLO” attitude. (That’s “You Only Live Once,” for you over there in that cave.)
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It’s kind of sad to say that I needed a documentary to wake me up again and motivate me to continue working on my own health, but I was just in a funk. So I was grateful to find The Magic Pill, and it was ultimately what led me to bust open the food spiralizer I got for Christmas six months ago and try my hand at this easy keto zoodle recipe.
The Magic Pill + My Low Carb Recipe
I’ll have to give you the gist of the documentary so that you might understand why I even created this easy keto zoodle recipe.
Let me start by saying that while I agreed with a lot of what the documentary had to say, I can’t give you dietary advice, even as a certified personal trainer. When writing this post I found a little bit of backlash in regards to the documentary, but I think that the overall concepts presented are important.
The film focuses on promoting a Keto diet as a way of healing many ailments and promoting weight loss. There are a few case studies that the film follows, and they are admittedly quite compelling.
The subjects of the film convert to a Keto lifestyle and “magically” recover from many ailments or other obstacles. For example, one woman cures her “brain fog” and loses quite a bit of weight, while an Autistic girl begins to talk for the first time, have less seizures, and self-regulate more readily.
If you just look at the case studies presented in the film, and consider the overall presentation, it’s obvious that a ketogenic diet is promoted first and foremost.
What Is Keto, Anyway?
The film can explain it better than I can – but there are some clarifications I want to make about the Keto diet here. That’s because Keto as understood by the general population is much different than what was originally intended – and what’s healthiest.
In short, eating a Ketogenic diet (Keto) is done with the purpose of forcing the body to use fat for fuel as opposed to carbohydrates. If done properly, the body will use ketones instead of glucose (sugars, which often come from carbs) to fuel it.
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That means that the Keto diet restricts carbohydrates that don’t come from plant sources, and sometimes even omits all carbs in extreme cases.
Instead, the dieter is to consume mostly fats and proteins, preferably from animals and nuts, seeds, etc.
HOWEVER.
I believe that there is a disparity between what keto should be and what people think it is – and the film got it right here.
Keto is not about eating butter and pastries to increase your fat intake.
It’s about increasing your fat – but eliminating processed or artificial fats, as well as trans and saturated fats overall.
So some people think that they can eat any bacon, cheese, etc. while on the Keto diet. While they have the right idea, I believe that removing processed foods and inflammatory ingredients would be more important here. Clean eating trumps the fat thing here.
Not All Fats Are Created Equal
If you were to try to increase your fat intake, you might think it natural to eat anything that was high fat – so long as it wasn’t high in carbohydrates. This is where some Keto recipes go wrong. Like I said, I think that Keto is SUPPOSED to be something different than what it has been sensationalized as.
More specifically, Keto was meant to be about eating more of the right fats, not just more fats.
Because as we know by now, fat isn’t bad – but there are bad fats.
Yes, there are different kinds of fats! If you don’t know about them, no worries, I wrote a pretty extensive post about the different kinds of fat.
But to sum it up, we want to stay away from “bad” fats like saturated and trans fats. The less of that stuff that we get, the better.
In order to consume the healthier fats like poly and monounsaturated, we need to eat less processed foods. We also want to search for the right cooking oils, like avocado oil as opposed to the ever-ambiguous “vegetable” oil.
So this recipe calls for avocado oil, which is considered to be a healthy fat, but you can also use olive oil. The most important thing is that you use single-ingredient oils that are known as healthy fats.
Anyway, let’s get on to the recipe, shall we?
Easy Keto Zoodle Recipe – Mandarin Beef & Mushroom
I am calling this easy Keto zoodle recipe, “Keto” because I think that it fits generally. But that depends on the sauce you use, and how loosely you throw around the term “Keto.” All-in-all, I just had fun using my new spiralizer and trying something different! I hope you do too! Add it to your bank of keto zucchini pasta recipes. 🙂
How do you make zucchini noodles not soggy? Press them with paper towels or lay them out to dry for awhile first!
Easy Keto Zoodle Recipe - Beef & Mushroom
Ingredients
- 2 zucchinni medium
- 4 tbsp pure avocado oil
- 2 tbsp minced garlic
- 1 cup chopped mushrooms
- 1/2 lb thin sliced steak
- 1/2 cup Mandarin sauce
Instructions
- Wash zucchini and cut off ends.
- Spiralize zucchini. Set aside.
- Slice steak into thin strips.
- Heat oil in large pan.
- Add garlic to hot oil and sautee until golden-brown.
- Add steak to pan, sautee until brown.
- Add mushrooms to pan and stir.
- Add zoodles to pan and stir until desired doneness. (2-5 minutes)
- Remove from heat and stir in mandarin sauce.
- Enjoy!
Notes
Have any keto zoodle recipes you want to share? Comment below and share your fave zoodle recipes!
