So I seem to have been have some bad making Mojo recently, I recognise my brain isnt really in the right place and so my baking has been suffering - HOWEVER I did make the closest thing the bread I have yet using Richard Coppedge's recipe (they were SO CLOSE, fluffy on the inside with a really good crust like a baguette but I didnt keep them in the oven long enough and they were a bit soggy still inside).
Also I made the most amazing coffee cream puffs ever. I kept checking the flour because they were so good, and didnt taste GF.
So good infact I forgot to take photo's of them. I'll make some more and post pics later along with the recipe.
Made some pretty decent Yorkshire puddings too, but I think I can improve on them so I'll do some more tweaks before I post that.
I did try and make a pizza base using the bread recipe, but I messed up the order of ingredients and while they didnt come out bad when I pre-baked them, the bases ended up really soggy when I put toppings on. So I need to look into how to avoid that.
So anyway - I just need to persevere and get my head back in the kitchens space these recipe have so much potential (preferably before I go broke from buying so much GF flour!!).
I decided to buy his book from 2008, knowing that the flour blend he uses is a bit out of date BUT his techniques are where it's at and I wanted to see what other interesting ways of doing things he's got. He's got a new book out next year which I might get as well depending on how things go to keep myself updated with how he's doing things.
I nearly died when I opened it - there's recipes for stollen, and doughnuts, sandwich bread, puff pastry. The new year is going to be full of fatty delicious foods by the looks of it! very excited to have a go with it all.
Tuesday 23 December 2014
Monday 8 December 2014
Testing testing - Gluten Free Pancakes.
So this is a bit later than I'd hoped, partly because Asda had run out of the GF flour and partly because I had a stomach bug. No one want panckes made when you've been ill!.
So Step one:
Time to adjust my trusty Doryaki recipe. I choose this recipe because I know it works and makes lovely pancakes with normal flour. Basically it's a lovely soft sweet scotch pancake - fingers crossed it still will be when we're finished!
4 Medium eggs
60g Sugar
60g Honey
1 tsp Baking soda, dissolved in 1 tbsp water
240g GF flour (Doves Farm Plain)
9g Gram Flour
8g powdered egg white
3g xanthan gum
40ml Corn/Sunflower oil
80ml Milk
60-80ml Milk
So the orginal recipe uses 30ml of milk and from what we know about GF flour we-re going to need more as it's thirsty Richard Coppedge recipe 3/4 (around 180ml) milk but uses less eggs.
As a rough guide I tend to add around 2tbsp (30ml) more fluid per 100g GF flour so we're looking at possibly an extra 60-80ml milk maybe we'll see how the batter looks and if we need to add a bit more.
Lucky me when I ordered the Gram flour from Asda what I got was exactly what I wanted - Besan Flour which is a combination of Chana Dal and Yellow pea!
From what I worked out last time, for the whole recipe we'll need around 9g Gram Flour, 8g powdered egg white, and 3g xanthan gum and all I'm going to do is add the gram flour and egg white to the flour and mix it gently with a hand whisk and I'll add the xanthan gum in with the 80ml milk to let it's do it's work as a hydro-colloid (lightly whisking with a fork to incorporate at first - it'll look a bit gunky after it's rested for a while, give it a quick stir before adding it in) - I'm going to add that bit of the milk to the mix before letting it rest (remember thirsty flour!)
Wow! It looks like a stretchy dough at this stage! That's pretty interesting something is definitely doing it's job pretending to be Gluten in this.
We're still going to let is rest, so the the flours have a chance to soak up some moisture. I'm then use the 60-80ml to loosen up the dough to make it a looser batter to fry, it needs to be runny enough to fall off the spoon but thick enough to keep a bit of shape (a lot is down to personal preference anyway so make it to the thickness you want!)
The mix didn't flatten quite a well as I'd hoped and was making quite chunky pancakes so I used the back of a spoon to help smooth it out a bit - this seemed to work pretty well. You need to be very careful with the heat of the frying pan, too hot and they will just burn, you want a pretty low heat 2 or 3 on mine works about right for me, but I had mine too high to start with and they ended up burnt.
If you want to pipe pancake shapes/patterns this batter will be pretty good.
Mine tasted off...so off in fact I decided I better check my ingredients and discovered my oil was out of date by about 6months (this is what happens when you have a baby). Gross.
Apart from their rancid taste - the pancake texture and colour was really good so I will try again but with different oil next time!!
So Step one:
Time to adjust my trusty Doryaki recipe. I choose this recipe because I know it works and makes lovely pancakes with normal flour. Basically it's a lovely soft sweet scotch pancake - fingers crossed it still will be when we're finished!
4 Medium eggs
60g Sugar
60g Honey
1 tsp Baking soda, dissolved in 1 tbsp water
240g GF flour (Doves Farm Plain)
9g Gram Flour
8g powdered egg white
3g xanthan gum
40ml Corn/Sunflower oil
80ml Milk
60-80ml Milk
So the orginal recipe uses 30ml of milk and from what we know about GF flour we-re going to need more as it's thirsty Richard Coppedge recipe 3/4 (around 180ml) milk but uses less eggs.
As a rough guide I tend to add around 2tbsp (30ml) more fluid per 100g GF flour so we're looking at possibly an extra 60-80ml milk maybe we'll see how the batter looks and if we need to add a bit more.
Lucky me when I ordered the Gram flour from Asda what I got was exactly what I wanted - Besan Flour which is a combination of Chana Dal and Yellow pea!
From what I worked out last time, for the whole recipe we'll need around 9g Gram Flour, 8g powdered egg white, and 3g xanthan gum and all I'm going to do is add the gram flour and egg white to the flour and mix it gently with a hand whisk and I'll add the xanthan gum in with the 80ml milk to let it's do it's work as a hydro-colloid (lightly whisking with a fork to incorporate at first - it'll look a bit gunky after it's rested for a while, give it a quick stir before adding it in) - I'm going to add that bit of the milk to the mix before letting it rest (remember thirsty flour!)
Wow! It looks like a stretchy dough at this stage! That's pretty interesting something is definitely doing it's job pretending to be Gluten in this.
We're still going to let is rest, so the the flours have a chance to soak up some moisture. I'm then use the 60-80ml to loosen up the dough to make it a looser batter to fry, it needs to be runny enough to fall off the spoon but thick enough to keep a bit of shape (a lot is down to personal preference anyway so make it to the thickness you want!)
The mix didn't flatten quite a well as I'd hoped and was making quite chunky pancakes so I used the back of a spoon to help smooth it out a bit - this seemed to work pretty well. You need to be very careful with the heat of the frying pan, too hot and they will just burn, you want a pretty low heat 2 or 3 on mine works about right for me, but I had mine too high to start with and they ended up burnt.
If you want to pipe pancake shapes/patterns this batter will be pretty good.
Mine tasted off...so off in fact I decided I better check my ingredients and discovered my oil was out of date by about 6months (this is what happens when you have a baby). Gross.
Apart from their rancid taste - the pancake texture and colour was really good so I will try again but with different oil next time!!
Wednesday 3 December 2014
Gluten Free - Flour blend? No thanks. (As yet untested Maths)
So the Craftsy video I was talking about is done by a guy called Richard Coppedge from America's Culinary Institute - which is basically a technical school for people in catering. He's been working with Gluten free things for a long time, and has also written a book which has very mixed reviews and is now a bit out of date with his current methods but sounds like it has lots of useful recipes in.
His idea is to create flour blends with the right mix of protein and gums to replace Gluten in recipes, which while might be more effective for catering isnt quite as useful (and is pretty expensive) for us casual once in a while bakers so my plan is to adapt his recipe using a ready bought pre-mix of Gluten free flours and then adding the right percentage of proteins/gums needed for the right recipes.
For this I will refer to my good friend Bo Friberg (I don't actually know him, but his pastry chef book is sooooo useful). In his book he explains about bakers percentages - so I'll use that to work out what weights of the protein/gum additives I need.
I think it's probably important to talk about technique a bit here - baking with GF flour doesn't have the same risks as flour with gluten in one sense as over beating it wont make much different with the flour, what it will make a difference with is the Gum's you add. So be careful with that, over mix the gum and you're probably going to end up with a chewy product.
It sounded to me from the Richard Coppedge's book reviews that the recipes were sound, but based on a lot of baking experience and that the techniques used were important to the final product so people who just wanted to throw something together wern't getting much joy out of it.
My first and most dangerous step is to substitute some of the ingredients he uses. I am doing this with the full knowledge that results may change from this, but the ingredients he uses are expensive and hard to get. Depending on the results I might invest in some of those ingredients, but I'm not made of money - neither are most people so I wanted to bare that in mind.
Rather than use Yellow Pea flour (for those of us in the UK there is ONE mill in Scotland that produces this and it's definitely not cheap) I'm substituting with Gram flour which is made with chickpeas - it has a similar level of protein but may have a slightly more bitter taste something I will need to look out for in testing.
Rather than use Guar gum I'm going to use Xanthan gum, because I already have it and it is now very easy to source (you can get it from most supermarkets now). I am aware there is a debate around it, and if I find the recipes work well I think I will most likely invest in buying some guar gum and see if it makes much difference. Guar Gum seems a much more natural product and I havnt heard as many people complaining that it causes them as much problems as Xanthan gum but for now it's what I've got and it should work in a very similar way.
To avoid having to faff around too much I'm going to use a pre-bought flour blend which will either be Doves farm GF plain flour or Asda's own brand (both are pretty similar) which is a mix of rice and other GF flours and starch's.
So at the moment Richard Coppedge is using 2 blends of flour, one high in protein, one with just the gum and he mixes them together to create the right blend depending on the recipe.
His high protein blend looks like this:
412g GF Flours (white rice, brown rice)
340g Starch (potato starch)
71g Pea flour
64g Powdered egg white
24g Guar Gum
His low protein mix looks like this:
714 GF Flours (white rice, brown rice, Sorghum, Buckwheat)
185g Starch (Potato, tapioca)
7g Guar Gum
So you can see quite clearly blend A has more starch, protein and gum to create structure and elasticity where B would be a much more crumbly 'tender' affair - we're talking bread vs cake.
Because the flour blends I will use already contain some starch, I need to take into account that blend contains quite a bit more so I may consider adding some additional corn flour at some point.
So how does this look in bakers percentage? I'm going to ignore the starch for now and lump it in with the flour for simplicity.
Blend A:
Flour and Starch 100%
Pea flour 9.5%
Egg white 8.5%
Guar Gum 3%
Blend B:
Flour and Starch 100%
Guar Gum 0.7%
My scales don't do less than 1g so I will need to round up, but basically for recipes I would have used bread flour in for every 100g of plain flour mix I will need 10g of legume flour (in my case Gram flour), 9g of egg white and 3g of Gum
And for recipes that would have used cake flour for every 100g flour I will need to use 1g of xanthan gum.
Realistically there will be recipes that will combine the 2, for example his pancake recipe called for a ratio of 3:5 of mixes A and B so very roughly per 100g I'd want to use around 4g Gram flour, 3g of egg white and 2g of Xanthan gum.
This is all looking very precise so I'm afraid those teaspoons and tablespoons might have to retire and it's time to invest in some digital scales.
Just for reference his Muffin mix used a ratio of 1:1 so you'd want to halve it, the same for pie crusts and also the non enriched bread recipe. So we're talking for 100g plain GF flour - 5g Gram flour, 4g egg white, 2g xanthan gum. Remember we're having to round up the 0.5gs so if you're using a larger measure say 200g then remember to calculate from scratch as numbers will be quite different otherwise.
I found a copy of his recipe for pate a choux online which used his old formula's for the flour blends but seemed be a ration of 1.5:1 of equivalent blends so rounding up we'll call it 2:1 - 100g plain GF flour, 7g Gram flour, 6g egg white, 2g xanthan gum.
Phew.
Next time - Some actual experiments to see if any of this actually works!
His idea is to create flour blends with the right mix of protein and gums to replace Gluten in recipes, which while might be more effective for catering isnt quite as useful (and is pretty expensive) for us casual once in a while bakers so my plan is to adapt his recipe using a ready bought pre-mix of Gluten free flours and then adding the right percentage of proteins/gums needed for the right recipes.
For this I will refer to my good friend Bo Friberg (I don't actually know him, but his pastry chef book is sooooo useful). In his book he explains about bakers percentages - so I'll use that to work out what weights of the protein/gum additives I need.
I think it's probably important to talk about technique a bit here - baking with GF flour doesn't have the same risks as flour with gluten in one sense as over beating it wont make much different with the flour, what it will make a difference with is the Gum's you add. So be careful with that, over mix the gum and you're probably going to end up with a chewy product.
It sounded to me from the Richard Coppedge's book reviews that the recipes were sound, but based on a lot of baking experience and that the techniques used were important to the final product so people who just wanted to throw something together wern't getting much joy out of it.
My first and most dangerous step is to substitute some of the ingredients he uses. I am doing this with the full knowledge that results may change from this, but the ingredients he uses are expensive and hard to get. Depending on the results I might invest in some of those ingredients, but I'm not made of money - neither are most people so I wanted to bare that in mind.
Rather than use Yellow Pea flour (for those of us in the UK there is ONE mill in Scotland that produces this and it's definitely not cheap) I'm substituting with Gram flour which is made with chickpeas - it has a similar level of protein but may have a slightly more bitter taste something I will need to look out for in testing.
Rather than use Guar gum I'm going to use Xanthan gum, because I already have it and it is now very easy to source (you can get it from most supermarkets now). I am aware there is a debate around it, and if I find the recipes work well I think I will most likely invest in buying some guar gum and see if it makes much difference. Guar Gum seems a much more natural product and I havnt heard as many people complaining that it causes them as much problems as Xanthan gum but for now it's what I've got and it should work in a very similar way.
To avoid having to faff around too much I'm going to use a pre-bought flour blend which will either be Doves farm GF plain flour or Asda's own brand (both are pretty similar) which is a mix of rice and other GF flours and starch's.
So at the moment Richard Coppedge is using 2 blends of flour, one high in protein, one with just the gum and he mixes them together to create the right blend depending on the recipe.
His high protein blend looks like this:
412g GF Flours (white rice, brown rice)
340g Starch (potato starch)
71g Pea flour
64g Powdered egg white
24g Guar Gum
His low protein mix looks like this:
714 GF Flours (white rice, brown rice, Sorghum, Buckwheat)
185g Starch (Potato, tapioca)
7g Guar Gum
So you can see quite clearly blend A has more starch, protein and gum to create structure and elasticity where B would be a much more crumbly 'tender' affair - we're talking bread vs cake.
Because the flour blends I will use already contain some starch, I need to take into account that blend contains quite a bit more so I may consider adding some additional corn flour at some point.
So how does this look in bakers percentage? I'm going to ignore the starch for now and lump it in with the flour for simplicity.
Blend A:
Flour and Starch 100%
Pea flour 9.5%
Egg white 8.5%
Guar Gum 3%
Blend B:
Flour and Starch 100%
Guar Gum 0.7%
My scales don't do less than 1g so I will need to round up, but basically for recipes I would have used bread flour in for every 100g of plain flour mix I will need 10g of legume flour (in my case Gram flour), 9g of egg white and 3g of Gum
And for recipes that would have used cake flour for every 100g flour I will need to use 1g of xanthan gum.
Realistically there will be recipes that will combine the 2, for example his pancake recipe called for a ratio of 3:5 of mixes A and B so very roughly per 100g I'd want to use around 4g Gram flour, 3g of egg white and 2g of Xanthan gum.
This is all looking very precise so I'm afraid those teaspoons and tablespoons might have to retire and it's time to invest in some digital scales.
Just for reference his Muffin mix used a ratio of 1:1 so you'd want to halve it, the same for pie crusts and also the non enriched bread recipe. So we're talking for 100g plain GF flour - 5g Gram flour, 4g egg white, 2g xanthan gum. Remember we're having to round up the 0.5gs so if you're using a larger measure say 200g then remember to calculate from scratch as numbers will be quite different otherwise.
I found a copy of his recipe for pate a choux online which used his old formula's for the flour blends but seemed be a ration of 1.5:1 of equivalent blends so rounding up we'll call it 2:1 - 100g plain GF flour, 7g Gram flour, 6g egg white, 2g xanthan gum.
Phew.
Next time - Some actual experiments to see if any of this actually works!
Going Gluten Free
I never did really catch up on posting on here, but I have added a few recipes to the website as I've made them.
Something terrible happened when I tried to lose some baby weight a few months back...I discovered I was wheat/gluten intolerant. As someone who loves all things carby and made of wheat this was a bit heartbreaking. Especially after I tried eating some GF bread.
Now I've had a bit of time to get used to it it's not so bad, I have lost over stone just from cutting it out and not really any other effort which is great, and I feel a lot better generally. Turns out it was causing all the lower back ache, and joint ache I was getting, not to mention the panic attacks (seriously - I NEVER would have associated them with eating wheat, but there is a definite correlation), my eczema also weirdly got loads better - again something I wouldnt have associated with it. So it's a good thing.
Just sometimes I really want fluffy bread or a doughnut.
I did get a blood test for coeliacs, which came back negative, so I'm lucky in the sense that if I do break and scoff a doughnut, I'm not actually damaging myself (but I WILL regret it for about 3/4 days afterwards with a bad stomach, and some emotional freaking out).
So anyway I've been learning a lot the last few months and I thought I'd pick up this blog again and share. Going GF is a bit of a nightmare and can be a bit confusing so I think it's helpful to read other people's tips.
I live in the UK and surprisingly I've found that Asda seem to have the best GF own brand alternative foods so far. Which was a massive surprise to me. Their bread is pretty decent (and handily split into 2 vacuum packed halves) and their pasta actually tastes like pasta and doesnt dissolve in water (I'm looking at you Heinz pasta).
Something I am also beginning to learn is not to trust the cooking instructions on the packets, I get the feeling they often just copy it from the 'real' packaging which means it doesnt often work that well. Take the pasta for instance - cook it as per instructions and it turns into a mass of chewy half cooked stuck together horror.
Soak it for say 30mins before hand in cold water, make sure you add it to a pan of already bubbling boiling hot water (with a touch of olive oil in the water to make sure the bubbling doesn't get out of hand). et voila. Perfect pasta. Which is so good you can actually eat it cold (seriously). The science is something to do with the extra starch I think.
I had to spend a fair chunk of time searching on the internet to find that bit of advice which is daft because if they actually put it on the packages surely more people would buy it as they wouldn't be put off by the frankly inedible pasta they get otherwise. It was only because I was desperate that I kept looking for another way.
I tried making bread btw - it was a disaster. But I was never any good at bread WITH gluten in so I wasn't particular surprised. I will keep trying though - I did manage to go from inedible scone, to inedible crumpet. So there was some progress just not a lot but I promise I will keep at it.
The hardest thing about gluten free baking, is learning to bake all over again, the cooking times are different because there is more liquid, the consistency to eyeball a mix is different (again because of the liquid). There is so much science involved into how gluten works in baked good that getting your head around understanding that to be able to change your own recipes is a head ache.
I do feel like I'm getting somewhere though.
Fortunately I've been doing normal GF cakes for quite a while for other people with success with the addition on some extra liquid in the batter and some xanthan gum so it's not all failure.
I've just watched a craftsy class on some gluten free baking and it's confirmed some thought's I had already been arriving (increasing protein) at so hopefully soon I'll get some experiments done and we'll see if we can get somewhere with that.
Something terrible happened when I tried to lose some baby weight a few months back...I discovered I was wheat/gluten intolerant. As someone who loves all things carby and made of wheat this was a bit heartbreaking. Especially after I tried eating some GF bread.
Now I've had a bit of time to get used to it it's not so bad, I have lost over stone just from cutting it out and not really any other effort which is great, and I feel a lot better generally. Turns out it was causing all the lower back ache, and joint ache I was getting, not to mention the panic attacks (seriously - I NEVER would have associated them with eating wheat, but there is a definite correlation), my eczema also weirdly got loads better - again something I wouldnt have associated with it. So it's a good thing.
Just sometimes I really want fluffy bread or a doughnut.
I did get a blood test for coeliacs, which came back negative, so I'm lucky in the sense that if I do break and scoff a doughnut, I'm not actually damaging myself (but I WILL regret it for about 3/4 days afterwards with a bad stomach, and some emotional freaking out).
So anyway I've been learning a lot the last few months and I thought I'd pick up this blog again and share. Going GF is a bit of a nightmare and can be a bit confusing so I think it's helpful to read other people's tips.
I live in the UK and surprisingly I've found that Asda seem to have the best GF own brand alternative foods so far. Which was a massive surprise to me. Their bread is pretty decent (and handily split into 2 vacuum packed halves) and their pasta actually tastes like pasta and doesnt dissolve in water (I'm looking at you Heinz pasta).
Something I am also beginning to learn is not to trust the cooking instructions on the packets, I get the feeling they often just copy it from the 'real' packaging which means it doesnt often work that well. Take the pasta for instance - cook it as per instructions and it turns into a mass of chewy half cooked stuck together horror.
Soak it for say 30mins before hand in cold water, make sure you add it to a pan of already bubbling boiling hot water (with a touch of olive oil in the water to make sure the bubbling doesn't get out of hand). et voila. Perfect pasta. Which is so good you can actually eat it cold (seriously). The science is something to do with the extra starch I think.
I had to spend a fair chunk of time searching on the internet to find that bit of advice which is daft because if they actually put it on the packages surely more people would buy it as they wouldn't be put off by the frankly inedible pasta they get otherwise. It was only because I was desperate that I kept looking for another way.
I tried making bread btw - it was a disaster. But I was never any good at bread WITH gluten in so I wasn't particular surprised. I will keep trying though - I did manage to go from inedible scone, to inedible crumpet. So there was some progress just not a lot but I promise I will keep at it.
The hardest thing about gluten free baking, is learning to bake all over again, the cooking times are different because there is more liquid, the consistency to eyeball a mix is different (again because of the liquid). There is so much science involved into how gluten works in baked good that getting your head around understanding that to be able to change your own recipes is a head ache.
I do feel like I'm getting somewhere though.
Fortunately I've been doing normal GF cakes for quite a while for other people with success with the addition on some extra liquid in the batter and some xanthan gum so it's not all failure.
I've just watched a craftsy class on some gluten free baking and it's confirmed some thought's I had already been arriving (increasing protein) at so hopefully soon I'll get some experiments done and we'll see if we can get somewhere with that.
Wednesday 14 May 2014
September 2013: Cupcakes and panda roll cake
I had another go at a picture roll cake, and made a panda - so many possibilities! I love Panda's.
August 2013: Cake picnic!
I also made another delicious coconut curd cake.
July 2013: Matcha Custard and Chocolate Cake, Strawberry Cream Cake, Chocolate and Strawberry Cream cake, Mille Fuille, Early Grey Profiteroles, Cake Tattoos.
So in July I was in the mood to make fancy cakes.
I got some Organic Matcha powder and experimented with it a bit. I decided to make lots of different things, I made some Matcha Crème Patisserie . It looks a bit grim in the bowl, but it's actually super tasty and looks much nicer in real life, a pale green. If you want it more vivid then add more Matcha powder.My favourtie combination ended up being Matcha Crème Patisserie and Chocolate cake. So I made a chocolate cup by coating the bottom of a silicone cupcake case with chocolate, putting a circle of chocolate sponge in the bottom and topped it with a swirl of Matcha German butter-cream...which ended up a bit grainy (still working on getting that right). Next time I'll just use whipped cream instead.
I topped it with a strawberry from my garden (Im a terrible gardener so I was super proud I actually got some good strawberries from my plant).
I also had a go at some Earl Grey Profiteroles. Which were absolutely heavenly. I just made some choux pastry (pipped into blob shapes) and filled it with Earl Grey flavoured crème patisserie, and topped them with a Lemon and honey drizzle. (water icing made with 1tsp lemon extract and a drizzle of honey) SO GOOD. They tasted of summer, they were so light and delicious the only regret I had was not adding some whipped cream into the crème patisserie as I think that would have made them perfect.
I discovered a Japanese lady called Junko who makes deco rolls. I think she's amazing - she's so creative and I had never thought about decorating cakes this way before. Essentially you make a roll cake and then colour part of the batter with food colouring, and pipe it on the bottom of the cake pan - cook to set it, then add the rest of the cake batter. It's a brilliant idea and her's are so amazingly cute.
I just used my normal cake batter filled with whipped cream. I printed off a picture about the size I wanted, put it under some greaseproof paper and the traced over it. Sadly my totoro was a bit too complicated to look good, but Hello Kitty came out so well. I was very proud.
I just used my normal cake batter recipe - but whipped the egg whites into a meringue to make it more like a chiffon cake. (So basically make as normal but only add the egg yolks with fat and half the sugar, add the flour and then add the egg whites whipped with the rest of the sugar last).
Here is an English translation of the recipe she uses for her roll cakes - which I really need to try because they look so fluffy and pretty!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)