This is a classic Italian dish, but with cheese and cream and butter in the traditional version, you can get a whopping seventy grams of fat in a single plateful. For this conversion, well replace those fatty ingredients with substitutes such as evaporated skim milk, fat-free milk, Butter Buds, and a great cheeselike substance made from straining yogurt with a coffee filter.

To easily prepare this useful ingredient, well use a technique that I picked up from watching Graham Kerr, the once-galloping gourmet. Graham loves to use this yogurt cheese in many of his low-fat dishes that require a creamy white sauce, traditionally made with fatty foodstuffs. This fat-free substitute is made by straining the whey from the yogurt with a coffee filter. You simply place a filter into a large strainer or metal steamer basket in a covered saucepan overnight in the refrigerator. As the hours tick by, the whey slowly drips from the yogurt, leaving a thick, creamy substance in the filter. The liquid in the bottom of the pan is chucked out, and you measure the yogurt cheese left in the coffee filter for the recipe.

Using this technique, we can shave something like forty-nine grams of fat off the traditional recipe for fettucine alfredo presented at the countrys largest Italian restaurant chain. This recipe makes two way-huge dinner-size entrees like they serve at the restaurant, though you might rather divide this up as four more modestly portioned servings.

Nutrition Facts
Serving size--4 cups
Total servings--2
Calories per serving--1035 / Original--1236
Fat per serving--18 g / Original--67 g