Keto Recipes for BBQ Lovers

By Dave Joachim

Well, it sounds like the world has finally caught up with us. We've been celebrating high-fat recipes our whole lives! At AmazingRibs.com, we love cooking with and eating all forms of fat from pork fat to butter to cheese because they're delicious! And now there's some research showing that a high-fat, low-carb diet (the keto diet) might actually be good for your health. Go figure. Whether it's true or not, we have all the keto friendly recipes you can shake a stick at. It's a barbecue website after all. We don't publish a lot of recipes for pasta. And not all our sauces are full of sugar.

If you're new to the keto diet, it is a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet. Essentially, you concentrate on eating more animal and vegetable fats like butter and nuts, while eating fewer high-carb foods like bread, pasta, grains, sugar, and starchy fruits and vegetables. Severely restricting carbohydrates like this forces your body to burn fat instead of carbohydrates for energy, a metabolic state known as ketosis. The "ketogenic diet" was first developed in the 1920s to treat epilepsy in children, and the term itself was coined by one of its principal researchers, Dr. Russell Morse Wilder, at the Mayo Clinic. Dr. Wilder found that the ketogenic diet is effective at treating pediatric epilepsy. Even to this day, about half of children on a keto diet experience 50% fewer epileptic seizures. But doctors treating epilepsy now prescribe anticonvulsive drugs more often than a ketogenic diet.

However, the keto diet has become popular again because of two things: 1) the low-carb dietary craze of the past couple decades, and 2) a surprising side effect of this diet: weight loss. Yes, eating fewer carbohydrates and more fat just might help you lose weight. No, it's not guaranteed. And the jury is still out about whether the keto diet is an effective long term weight loss strategy. But it surely is one of the more tasty diets out there. If you're a flavor hound who's cutting carbs and looking for high fat, keto friendly recipes, we've got 'em in spades. Below are some of our favorites. None of these recipes includes grains. One or two spice rubs and marinades call for a tiny amount of sugar, and you can simply leave the sugar out of the recipe. It is not crucial. As for cooking fats, replace whatever is called for in the recipe with your favorite keto friendly fat, whether it's rendered beef tallow, lard, olive oil or coconut oil.