Upgrading Holiday Treats: Real Ingredients, Real Tradition

The holidays present us with a familiar dilemma.

One approach to navigating the constant pressure, abundance, and outright bombardment of food and drink that can completely derail our health is total abstinence. For those who can truly do that, fantastic. It works. And, for some people it is absolutely the right choice.

But abstinence comes with costs.

For many of us, refusing every holiday treat isn’t just a nutritional decision, it’s a mental and emotional one. Food is deeply tied to memory, childhood, culture, and connection. The holidays, for all their dietary landmines, are also built around gathering. And gathering almost always involves food.

There is a social cost to complete abstinence. A relational cost. And for some, that cost quietly becomes its own form of stress, one that can undermine health just as surely as poor food choices.

The more common scenario looks something like this:
We try to abstain completely. We do well for a while. Then temptation creeps in: social pressure, a glass of wine that lowers our guard, or our grandmother’s cookie looking just a little too good. We break. And when we do, the floodgates open.

What starts as one indulgence turns into weeks of eating without restraint. By the time New Year’s arrives, we’ve created a metabolic hole that takes months to climb out of.

This cycle repeats itself year after year.

I want to offer an alternative.

---

An Ancestral Table Community member, Chad’s Grandmother’s Pierogi recipe saved for generations on a kitchen towel (great gift idea)!

A Third Path: Recipe Overhauls, Not Restriction

Instead of total abstinence—or total surrender—there is another option: reworking familiar, traditional holiday recipes so that they are actually nourishing.

This isn’t about “healthifying” food until it’s joyless. It’s about reclaiming older, wiser approaches to ingredients and processing - approaches that allowed people to celebrate without destroying their health.

The goal isn’t perfection.
The goal is damage control through intention.

Let’s start with the two biggest offenders in holiday baking: fats and sugars.

---

Fats: There Is Never a Reason for Industrial Seed Oils

There is no reason, ever, for industrial nut or seed oils to be in holiday baking.

They are not food. They were developed for lubricating machinery and later repurposed for human consumption. Their widespread use is one of the great nutritional disasters of the modern world.

The good news? They are easy to replace.

When it makes sense, my first choice is always animal-based fats, because they are stable, nourishing, and ancestrally appropriate.

• Butter, brown butter, or ghee can replace almost any industrial fat in baking.

• Crisco, which was originally marketed as a replacement for lard, can be seamlessly swapped right back to lard.

• Coconut oil is another excellent, stable option.

When a fat that remains liquid at room temperature is required, there are still good choices:

• Extra virgin olive oil

• Avocado oil

• Palm fruit oil (not palm kernel oil)

Because olive oil and palm fruit oil have strong, distinct flavors, many sweet applications benefit from a more neutral option like avocado oil.

In all cases, sourcing matters. These oils should be truly extra virgin, carefully produced, and intentionally chosen.

Switch to avocado, extra virgin olive oil and coconut oil

---

Sugar: Swap It Thoughtfully, Not Blindly

There is also no place for refined or fake sugars in holiday baking.

That means:

• White sugar

• Powdered sugar

• Brown sugar

• Molasses

Yes, even molasses and brown sugar are refined sugars.

And artificial or “zero-calorie” sweeteners such as Splenda, Sweet’N Low, erythritol, and xylitol are chemical sweeteners that do not belong in our diets at all.

What does that leave?

Natural, minimally refined sweeteners, such as:

• Muscovado sugar

• Raw honey

• Pure maple syrup

These sweeteners retain minerals, enzymes, and complexity that refined sugars lack, and they behave very differently in recipes.

You know which ones to use!

Sweetness and Substitution

Not all sweeteners are equally sweet:

• Sugar and maple syrup are similar in sweetness.

• Honey is sweeter, so you generally use a bit less when swapping.

But sweetness is only part of the equation.

Texture and Function Matter

Sugar plays mechanical roles in baking beyond sweetness.

When a recipe calls for creaming sugar and butter together, the sugar crystals physically cut into the fat, creating tiny air pockets. These pockets expand during baking, resulting in a lighter, airier final product.

Replacing sugar with honey or maple syrup removes that structural function. The result may be denser, moister, or more custard-like. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is different.

Understanding this allows you to adjust expectations, or techniques, rather than wondering why a recipe didn’t behave the way you expected.

A little creamed butter and sugar tip!

Processing Matters: Turning Ingredients into Food

Swapping fats and sugars is powerful, but it’s not enough on its own.

How ingredients are processed matters just as much as what ingredients you use.

Sourdough: A Processing Technology, Not a Flavor

At Modern Stone Age, we treat sourdough as a food-processing technology, not a trendy flavor addition.

A few key principles:

• When adapting a modern recipe to sourdough, a reliable place to start is using sourdough mother at roughly 20% of the total flour weight.

• Fermentation must occur at room temperature (or slightly warmer).

This is critical.

The fermentation we care about for safety and nutrition is bacterial fermentation, not just yeast activity.

• Yeast slows down in the refrigerator.

• Bacteria shut down.

That means adding sourdough mother to a recipe and baking it right away does nothing meaningful to the flour. Adding sourdough mother and then placing the dough in the refrigerator before baking also does nothing meaningful to the flour.

In both cases, the bacteria never have the opportunity to do their work.

For flour to be transformed into a safer, more nourishing food, fermentation has to happen first, and it has to happen at room temperature (or warmer). Time and temperature are non-negotiable.

---

Peanuts soaking for peanut butter at the MSAK

Nuts and Seeds Must Be Prepared

Nuts and seeds naturally contain anti-nutrients like phytates and enzyme inhibitors.

Before using them in holiday baking, they should be:

• Soaked

• Then dehydrated and/or roasted as needed

This isn’t optional.

It’s traditional wisdom that modern cooking abandoned - and paid the price for.

---

Apple Cranberry Christmas pie - sourdough crust of course!

What This Looks Like in Practice

When you:

• Replace industrial fats with stable, ancestral fats

• Swap refined sugars for real sweeteners

• Ferment flour properly

• Prepare nuts and seeds intentionally

You don’t eliminate holiday treats.

You transform them.

These foods may still be indulgent, but they are no longer metabolic landmines. They become something your body can recognize, tolerate, and even benefit from.

This is how humans celebrated for thousands of years - without chronic disease, without guilt, and without needing to “detox” in January.

---

A Note From Our Kitchen

We’ve been making nourishing versions of holiday treats, like our honey marshmallows, at Modern Stone Age Kitchen for years. Simple ingredients. Thoughtful processing. Nothing fake. Nothing unnecessary.

We’re even working on reincorporating marshmallow root, returning the food closer to its original medicinal origins. For now, our marshmallows are made simply with high-quality grass-fed beef gelatin, honey, water, and vanilla extract - and that simplicity is the point.

And this week, these very ideas - recipe overhauls, ingredient swaps, and traditional processing - were the focus of one of our cooking classes with The Ancestral Table, our online community. It’s been incredibly rewarding to see people reclaim joy around food without sacrificing their health.

Bill adapting a pizzelle recipe on the Ancestral Table

You don’t have to choose between connection and well-being this holiday season.

You can honor tradition.
You can nourish your body.
And you can do it with intention.

That’s not indulgence.
That’s eating like a human.