April 28, 2008
Sorghum Bread
This is my wife's recipe for gluten-free sorghum bread, based on Bette
Hagman's recipe for "Basic Sorghum Bread" and incorporating Jen's
bread machine programming instructions from the Delphi Celiac forum.
It produces a bread with a nice crust and a fine, firm crumb that even
I like. (I'm not a celiac, but I play one at home to avoid
contaminating the kitchen).
We use a Zojirushi BBCC-X20 bread machine, which makes a two pound
loaf, so all measurements are for that size. The machine itself
should be set to a custom program as follows:
Preheat: 10m
Knead: 20m
Rise 1: off
Rise 2: off
Rise 3: 1h5m
Bake: 1h10m
Keep Warm: off
Since there's a ten minute preheat, we use whole grain flours straight
from the freezer, where they're kept to avoid bugs and weevils and
other nasties that can crop up in older flour. Also, the eggs can
come straight from the fridge without warming up.
Most flours come from Trader Joe's or Bob's Red Mill. Whole Foods' GF
mixes tend to have potato starch in them, which Alene is allergic to.
On to the recipe. Dry ingredients:
Sorghum Flour 2 cups
Sweet Rice Flour 1 cup
Cornstarch 1 cup
3tsp Xanthan Gum
2/3 cup almond meal
1-1/2 tsp kosher salt
2 tsp egg white powder
1/4 cup golden brown sugar
2 tsp powdered gelatin
Mix together well. We dump it all into a plastic bag and mix it
around, but whisking in a bowl or sifting it all together should work
too.
If you're comparing this to Bette's recipe, there are some
differences. we use the sweet rice flour instead of tapioca flour
because it makes the bread less gummy. We use almond meal instead of
dry milk powder because Catherine is lactose intolerant. Why almond
meal? If you'ce ever done medieval cooking, you'll remember almond
milk. What can I say, it works. We use egg white powder instead of
egg replacer because egg replacer contains potato starch. We find
using brown sugar gives a better taste. The gelatin is optional,
depending on whether we can find it or not; but don't leave out BOTH
the gelatin AND egg white powder. And we use kosher salt because
that's what we have in the kitchen. Michael Ruhlman counts it
the most important tool in his kitchen.
With the dry ingredients taken care of, on to the wet. In a bowl mix:
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
3 extra large eggs (or four large)
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
2 cups water
You can use melted butter instead of olive oil, or a lighter vegetable
oil. We use whole eggs; Bette had a cholesterol problem and cut down
the yolks. The vinegar is for "dough enhancer". It works just as well and we always have it around.
Now comes assembly and cooking. By all means follow your bread
machine's instructions here; this works for our Zojirushi.
Assemble the machine, pour the wet ingredients in, and add the dry
ingredients on top. You want to cover the wet stuff up with the flour
so the yeast can stay dry during the preheat; this is very important.
Make a well in the dry flour mixture and add one envelope of regular
dry yeast. Now press start.
Only two things left: when it starts kneading after about 10 minutes,
use a plastic spatula to scrape the sides of the baking container to
ensure complete mixing. Then wait a couple hours and turn out your
tasty loaf!
Posted by Berry at 04:59 PM | Comments (0)
April 08, 2008
Iron Chef Berry RIdes Again
So last night I get a SMS from my wife that she's working a bit late and I should make dinner. After a bit of a thought and remembering that we had some vacuum-packed boneless-skinless chicken breasts in the fridge, and remembering that she had said a certain recipe looked good, I settled on chile-chicken skewers. Googling to see if I could find the recipe and check what I needed to fetch on the way home, I came across Laurie Johnson's blog entry on just this recipe.
It's pretty simple, and wonderfully tasty. I cut the chicken (three breasts worth; must have been a mutant chicken) into chunks and marinated it with a bit of brown sugar, pimentón (spanish smoked paprika; substituted for chile powder) kosher salt, a bit of freshly gorund black pepper, and olive oil. Stir up well and set aside while the rest is prepared.
I set the rice cooker going, and made the cilantro-lime pesto. Three cloves of garlic, a handful of walnuts (because we don't have peanuts and I couldn't find my first choice, pinenuts) and half a pasilla pepper (since the store was out of anaheims). Buzz that in a "food processor fitted with the steel blade, or in a blender", add a bunch of cilantro and half a bunch of flat or Italian parsley, and drizzle in olive oil until the consistency is right. At this point I tasted it and corrected seasoning; it needed about half a teaspoon of salt to mute the bitter parsley taste and tranform it into bright herbal notes.
Scrape into a bowl, rinse the food processor work bowl and dump in the dishwasher.
At this point, pretty much everything was set. I peeled an onion, cut it into wedges and skewered it for grilling. About 15 minutes before the rice was done, I fired up the gas grill, and while it was heating I skewered the chicken chunks, now a nice reddish color from the pimentón, and when the grill was hot grilled them and the onions for about ten minutes, turning about every 2-3 minutes.
For plating, I chose two small fish-shaped plates (because they were clean and matched!), filled a small rice bowl with rice and inverted it onto the tail end of the fish. I put a heaping tablespoon of the cilantro pesto on the head end, spread it out a bit and put four chunks of chicken on, flanked by two wedges of the grilled onion. A parsley leaf on the rice mound completed it, and I called Alene for dinner.
It was very tasty, the herbal pesto complemented the smoky pimentón well, and the chicken was tender.
This would make a nice quick summer dinner, since the only appliances I used were the food processor, rice cooker and outdoor gas grill. No oven or stove action to heat up the house.
I recommend a nice pinot grigio with this. A light salad would work too.
I recommend NOT watching a TiVo'd episode of Dirty Jobs where Mike learns to sex chicks, since it's not nearly as much fun as it sounds. It's pretty gross, actually.
(Next time I do something like this I'll take a picture before serving. Of the plate, not the chicks.)
Posted by Berry at 02:30 PM | Comments (2)
February 01, 2008
Chicken Kebabs
(Update: I've closed comments on this entry because some jerk keeps
spamming it with stupid spam links. Just this entry. Go figure.)
So the other night I made chicken kebabs for dinner, and EVERYONE loved them. It was the same old stuff, but a new marinade, which turned out to be a hit. Here's how I did it:
Take a larage boneless double chicken breast (i.e. the breasts from one chicken), remove the skin, and cut into more-or-less bite size cubes. Put into a bowl with about 1/2 a cup of tamari (we use all-soy organic tamari because regular soy sauce has wheat, and we have celiacs in the household), a tablespoon of honey, a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar and (this is the key) a half-teaspoon of whole cumin seeds. Stir and let marinate while you prepare the rest of the meal.
I made a salad of a carrot sliced fine and half a head of red cabbage shredded, with half a bottle of commercial garlic ranch dressing.
I also cubed up a red bell pepper and an onion, and made a pot of rice.
When the rice was almost done, I turned on the broiler and threaded the chicken, onion and bell pepper onto skewers and put them under the broiler, then turned on a TiVo'd episode of NCIS from the first season. At the commercials, I turned the skewers. After about 15 minutes it was done, so we served it forth.
The cumin came through very clearly, but subtly and delicious. My son even ate the leftovers cold and asked for more.
And Gibbs caught the terrorists in time.
Posted by Berry at 09:48 AM | Comments (0)
January 16, 2008
Oh. My. God.
So, I like food and cooking, and I like TV shows about food and cooking, and since I like Ryori no Tetsujin (Iron Chef) I thought I liked Japanese shows about cooking.
But this show, about a guy named "Hard Gay" who, dressed rather like South Park's Mr. Slave, teaches kids to eat things they might find yucky, is... well ... let's just say it will NEVER appear on Food Network.
Oy.
Posted by Berry at 03:18 PM | Comments (0)
January 08, 2008
Iron Chef Berry rides again
The other day Alene and I made a terrific chicken dish. It goes like this.
Take some stale bread -- we used gluten-free toast left over from the previous day's crab feast -- and make it into breadcrumbs in the food processor. Also chop some mushrooms and parsley. Mix it all together in the food processor and add some hard Italian cheese. We used Pecorino Romano, but Parmesan, Asiago or Cacciacavallo would work well too. We added a bit of garlic too, but you can omit this if you don't like garlic.
Now take two whole boneless chicken breasts -- the kind with both breast halves still attached. You can get bone in, bone them out and save the bones for stock if you like. Put them skin side down on a citting board, season with salt and pepper and put the bread crumb-mushroom mixture along the center of one. Lay the other on top and pin together around the edge with toothpicks, or tie with buther's twine. You chould get a fat sausage-shaped thing.
Brown this in a hot pan with a little olive oil until nice and crispy, then finish in an oven at, oh, 375 for about 20 minutes, until the chicken is just cooked through. If your pan can take it, just pop the whole thing into the oven.
When done, remove the chicken roll, ballotine or involtino or whatever you want to call it, to a platter to rest while you make the sauce.
Deglaze the pan with a little white wine, reduce, add a little butter and heat through.
Now slice the roll into thick slices to expose the lovely filling, and serve with a bit of the sauce over.
We had it with balsamic roasted brussels sprouts, and rice.
It was even terrific as leftovers the next day!
Posted by Berry at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)