Search Results for '("C'

[Mike Nolan]

My wife's grandmother had a 'Christmas Coffee Cake' recipe that we tried to make several times and it never came out right (or at least matching my wife's recollection of what it tasted and looked like.)

It called for 'sour cream', and I've always suspected that given the age of the recipe it was really using heavy cream that had gone sour rather than the cultured stuff you get at the grocery store these days.

I've wondered about using creme fraiche to make it, as I think it is a lot closer to traditional 'sour cream'. These days I tend to keep heavy cream on hand for keto cooking and baking, I could also try letting a cup of it sit on the counter to go sour.

I'll see if I can find the recipe (it's in the Nebraska Centennial Cookbook, which my wife's mother edited) and post it.

[Mike Nolan]

I've tried a number of keto-friendly recipes, ones without wheat, barley, rice, oats, corn or rye. (I generally don't do anything with teff, millet, sorghum, kamut, quinoa or other grains, so they didn't factor in to my testing, though I may play with teff to see if I can make a good injira.)

Mixed results--at best. Texture is an issue, few of them have the lightness you get with wheat. The ones that used a lot of whipped egg whites tended to be a bit lighter, but IMHO the egginess is an issue. It does not appear you can make them with liquid egg whites, not sure if powdered egg protein would work or not, so you need a plan for what to do with multiple egg yolks. (I've made gluten-free angel food cake and ladyfingers with powdered egg whites, the ladyfingers were more of a success though we used both in a gluten-free trifle, by the time the pastry cream, jello and fruits were added the cake and ladyfingers were not impacting flavor much.)

Almond flour is a common ingredient in keto baking and I got tired of the taste of almond flour quickly. Other nut flours didn't seem to help much. I concluded that flax meal adds a bitterness I don't like.

Fathead doughs (almond flour usually with cream cheese and mozzarella) never really gave us a 'bread' feel, though the taste wasn't too bad and it actually toasted fairly well. If I HAD to make my own keto breads without any wheat products, I'd probably start with a fathead recipe and see what I could do to improve it, a task many others have attempted with only modest results.

Coconut flour has potential but the trick is to avoid it tasting like a coconut candy.

I'm still playing with fibers, such as bamboo fiber and oat fiber, I don't know if the latter meets the criteria of 'grain free', though.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm making potato leek soup, not super low in carbs (hopefully under 20 carbs/serving before adding croutons.)

I've got some semolina bread croutons, they're about 50% carbs, but I'm taking some of the Aldi white keto bread and drying it out in the oven, it has essentially zero net carbs. I'm told it makes OK croutons once dried out.

[aaronatthedoublef]

The pie looks great Mike. Joan - you are a good friend!

Has anyone experimented with making grain free bread? I have a friend who is trying it with marginal success.

I did not bake this week but Violet did. She made her first cake for my birthday. It came out very nicely. I made the frosting mostly because I wanted to try a new method. I also did the clean up for her so she only had the fun part of baking.

Last week was a challah bake but the temple was locked up on my bake day (Thursday) so I had 15 lbs of dough sitting in the fridge. I came in Sunday and gathered it up and brough it home. Can't waste that much dough. I've given away a few pounds of raw dough and a couple dozen 100g rolls and I still have plenty left. It seems to still have rise as I pull it out of the fridge and make rolls, proof, then bake. I haven't weighed how much is left.

[chocomouse]

I have a lot of cookbooks also - commercial books by "known" authors and spiral-bound books from mostly women's groups. Except for a few recipes from some of them, I rarely use them. A couple of weeks ago, I pulled out my Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home and am determined (when life settles down) to select a few recipes to make. I'll let you all know when that actually happens! If there are any apple recipes in the book, that might be soon!

[BakerAunt]

I, too, have the cookbook disease. I even have some Bon Appetit magazines that I need to go through to see if there are any recipes that I might cook or bake. (We won't talk about the piles of cut out and printed from the internet recipes that I have.) I gave up cabinet space in my small kitchen for a large, three shelf bookcase, and I have a row of cookbooks on top of it. Out in our Annex, I have two bookcases of cookbooks. I easily have over 300.

I need to look up some recipes from them to try.

[Mike Nolan]

Playing around with the recipe tool in Carb Manager, it looks like my croissants (small, 40 grams each) are about 15 grams of carbs each. If I use allulose, cream and carbalose flour, I can get that down to 5 net carbs each (10 total carbs). Adding chocolate sticks to make chocolatines adds another 5 carbs back.

Will have to try that to see how they taste but based on the apple pie I made on Sunday probably similar to the croissants I made some years ago using soft red winter whole meal wheat flour instead of AP flour.

[kimbob]

Very interesting article, BakerAunt. Today I received the new KA Big Book of Bread from Amazon. I haven't looked through it all yet and am enjoying it immensely. I LOVE reading cookbooks. I have at least 300 cookbooks (no exaggeration). I buy them new, at the thrift, library book sales, library discards, Thrift books online, antique shops, etsy, used book stores, flea markets, etc. I have a bunch from my mother and grandmother. I'm obsessed with them! 😂 I've found lots of good recipes. Anyone else have this disease?

[chocomouse]

I really wish I was not allergic to wool and could knit and wear all the lovely things I see that knitter/crocheters have made. The shawls that Kimbob gave my sister and I are gorgeous - she does beautiful work; thank you Kimbob. I will post a photo when I get unpacked and organized. Unfortunately, when we are at a big festival such as Rhinebeck or Maryland (hi Skeptic), I do not have time to chat because there is usually a line waiting to check out - I may be allergic to wool, but I am not allergic to money, so I am the cashier and manage the needles and other accessories that support the yarn hoarders.

[Mike Nolan]

The shape changed during final proofing and baking to the point where it looked less like a turkey, but it was an interesting idea and demonstration of bread shaping skills. If it had been done with dead dough (which doesn't rise much, if any), it would have made an interesting centerpiece.

[Mike Nolan]

The apple pie is pretty good, I used the all-butter crust recipe I usually use, but with Carbalose instead of pastry flour. I did have to add a bit more water to get it to form a dough, that's typical with Carbalose products. Could have used a little more cinnamon, but that's always subjective. (And Diane almost always thinks a recipe needs more cinnamon.)

This year's Winesap apples are a bit more tart than the ones I got (at a different orchard) last year, I noticed that when I was peeling them, and I also didn't adjust the recipe for the difference in sweetness between sucrose and allulose (about 70% as sweet), but sometimes that recipe is almost too sweet.

The Carbalose crust was reasonably flaky, perhaps a bit more assertive in taste than pastry flour, but it definitely tastes like an apple pie.

Instead of an egg wash, I used cream, with just a little sparkling sugar (adding less than 1 carb per slice). I took it out of the oven a few minutes early because the outer edges were getting dark but the crust seems fully baked.

I used my new pastry rolling bag from King Arthur, it seemed to help keep the crust from fracturing. Now I need to test it on pizza dough.

[Mike Nolan]

Haven't tried it myself, but the idea makes sense, sort of like breading or tempura but without the frying part. I'm not fond of the taste of cornstarch (or the carbs), I wonder what else might work?

https://www.mccormick.com/articles/lifehacker/get-extra-crispy-roasted-vegetables-by-adding-a-li#:~:text=After%20a%20few%20weeks%20of,thirty%20seconds%20of%20extra%20work.

[BakerAunt]

Alas, Mike, for me it is not just about peeling off the skin after the chicken cooks, unless the chicken is on a rack that allows the fat to drip off. If I allow the fat to drip into the rest of the food that I will eat, it causes digestive issues. To get around the problem with another recipe, where the chicken cooks on a bed of rice (which meant the fat on the skin dripped into the rice), I skinned the chicken, then made a Panko coating. that protected the chicken from drying out but meant that i did not have the fat issue.

[BakerAunt]

For dinner on Saturday, my husband had leftover roast chicken and the rest of the mushrooms and noodles. I also had roast chicken, but I made a pasta salad which included the last of the summer vegetables from the farmers market: small cucumbers, multi-colored cherry tomatoes, red bell pepper, green onion, and Greek olives. I made a simple dressing of olive oil, red wine vinegar, and Penzey's Sandwich Sprinkle. I used an interesting pasta that I found at Marshall's. It looks like little pumpkins, with one end more closed than the other, and half are orange and half are not colored. I needed to cook them at boiling for 7 minutes. (There were no directions on the package.)

Earlier today, I made applesauce. I used about five pounds of organic Rubinette apples. When I was putting the cooked apples through the food mill, I had too many tiny pieces of apple skin getting through. It was too much to pick out, so I grabbed my stick blender and pureed. That makes a creamier applesauce. I like the regular texture better, but it was the only way I could get rid of the little bits of apple peel. I am thinking of looking into an electric mill that can separate the peel and the cores after I cook apples.

I made the applesauce for my husband, as it is easy for him to eat while recovering from the dental procedure.

[BakerAunt]

By bonus younger son and daughter-in-law are taking the plunge and getting a bread machine. They want their son to have good, healthy bread but were dismayed by the cost. He asked about recipes, which gives me an excellent opportunity to try some single loaf recipes to send to them. I remembered that Zen had done a scaled version of the three-loaf recipe for Grandma A's Ranch Hand Bread (posted at Nebraska Kitchen from the defunct King Arthur Baking Circle), so I looked it up, then looked at how I had adapted the three loaf recipe and made some changes to the single loaf so that it is two-thirds whole wheat with some flax meal, as well as buttermilk and some special dried milk. I replace the butter with olive oil. I am not going to experiment with raising the dough or baking it in the bread machine, but if they want to do it, that is fine. At least they will have good bread! I'm giving them volume measurements but will also tell them about scales.

I have a second reason for this experiment. When we take our next extended trip, I plan to take along the small bread machine (a first generation one!), as it is lightweight and more compact than the Zo, even though the Zo does a better job and can handle more dough. That way, we can have good bread away from home. I will package up ingredients for the recipe and take along a small dough bucket.

I will add to this post after the loaf, which is on its second rise with the oven heating, has baked.

Addition: The loaf did not have the oven spring that this bread has when I bake three loaves, so I must have done something to affect that. I'll see how it is tomorrow when we cut into it. I know that Zen, in her notes on scaling it down mentioned that she had used just 1 1/2 tsp. of yeast but thought that 2 to 2 1/2 tsp. was probably needed. I used 2 tsp. If I try it again, I will increase the yeast.