Food, cooking, eating, and me

I love to eat, and I love to cook.

That love has brought me a bookcase full of cookbooks. It has taken me through to a Culinary Arts degree. It has brought me to the point where I love to play with recipes and experiment until I master some technique or perfect a recipe list.

I remember as a person in college, loving to cook, but finding many recipes that just didn’t seem to work for me. My bread used to come out heavy and tough. Looking back, I’m not really sure why, nor what happened to change that. In cooking school I took baking courses, which was undoubtedly a major factor. But one thing I feel is that it is important to become one with the process. Only then can you help it evolve.

As a kid, I lived in a household that was all natural. My mother was totally fanatical about this. We bought all kinds of organic foods back when it was in no way trendy or fashionable. We ate, as a snack, medicinal-tasting bars masquerading as “healthy candy”. Nowadays these things are sold at a premium price, with names like “power bars”. I don’t eat them. I eat food, not medicine. If you need to take into consideration the health-bestowing qualities of a food when you judge its edibility, as far as I’m concerned it’s inedible, and I won’t eat it.

Finding that first wheat and now dairy do not agree with me has made things more challenging. I still feel, as I always have, that we should concentrate on the good things we have to eat, rather than buying nasty or inferior materials as substitutes for the food items we no longer can have.

I have no objection to eating rice a lot. I don’t like most store-bought cookies, and I’m finding that gluten-free homemade cookies can be better than the best store-bought cookies, as good as their homemade wheat flour counterparts, so long as you have the right recipe.

My quest is to find, to develop those recipes and print them here. Be seeing you.

I’ve been wanting to do baking and develop recipes for my old favorite baked goods, but I haven’t been motivated to cook the same things over and over until I get all the bugs out, at least not immediately. I’ve decided that when a recipe is close enough so that I like it and think I’ve made some good progress, even if I’d probably play with it a few times before declaring it perfect, that I’ll post the recipe with my observations. If you want to try it, you’ll know in advance what to watch for.

I’ve been wanting to do a cake for a while. Though “cake” may imply “fancy” nowadays (and I have nothing against fancy) I’ve been thinking that making plans that are too complex might keep me from starting the project, considering how busy I am. Also, not having perfected any of the components would make taking on a complete project a bit more challenging than necessary.

The recipe I ended up choosing to play with came in its original form from the latest version of Joy of Cooking. It’s a vegan chocolate cake recipe, and as with many eggless cakes, it can be gummy. Following on the soft and chewy chocolate cookie recipe I was working on last time, I decided to substitute a blend of white and sweet rice flour in the hopes that the sweet rice flour would make it moister and hold together better.

This worked. It is super-moist, as you can see from the name I’ve given the recipe. It is soft and springy, but not at all gummy. Although it is intensely dark, the chocolate flavor is not intense, so I’d probably want to use chocolate next time instead of cocoa. I will probably decrease the proportion of sweet rice flour, as the cake has moistness to spare.

Super-moist gluten-free vegan chocolate cake

I’m not 100% happy with the way the recipe came out. In fact, I’m probably only about 50% satisfied. But I thought the results were interesting enough to share this with you guys.

To begin, I’ve never been a fan of soft chocolate chip cookies. Give me the thin and crispy ones anytime. When I worked in a little cafe, baking muffins and cookies, the owner wanted the dough cooked only til soft. Once I accidentally baked them crispy and got in trouble. Of course the problem was that she was under the impression that the difference between crispy cookies and soft cookies is that the soft ones are still half-raw, something I have never liked. Then, because there is still moisture inside, they dry out and get hard in a very unappealing way.

I recently saw an article in the Boston Globe about crispy chocolate chip cookies and soft ones. The recipes were different, decidedly so. The soft cookies had a recipe more like a brownie or cake. In other words, they had more flour and egg and less sugar.

The recipe I picked to make was the one on the back of the Ghiradelli bittersweet chocolate chip bag. Their recipes are too sweet and have too many chocolate chips for me, but still I didn’t bother to adjust that. As I no longer cook with butter, I substituted solid coconut oil for that. Since I like to play with flour substitutions, I usually just try whatever I feel like using. Today I replaced 1-1/8 cup of all-purpose flour with the following:

• 3/4 cup white rice flour
• 1/4 cup sweet rice flour
• 1/8 cup potato starch
• 1 teaspoon xanthan gum

The cookies are soft and chewy, while being properly browned on the bottom, and a little thick in the middle. They are in fact soft and chewy in a very, very good way.

I’ll be working on this again.

I haven’t had pancakes since I gave up gluten, and I’ve been getting a craving for some real maple soggy pancakes lately. So yesterday I decided to see if I could make some purely buckwheat flour pancakes using xanthan gum. I used a recipe I’d long used for pancakes during my glutening years, substituting white buckwheat flour for white flour and adding 1 teaspoon of xanthan gum per cup. I also added a bit of dark buckwheat flour, as it suited my mood that day to make the pancakes a bit earthy.

I found that the pan must be pretty hot for them to rise properly, but otherwise, they came out very much like buckwheat pancakes normally do. They soaked up real maple syrup just like I wanted them to. I had two servings leftover, which I froze individually in freezer bags.

Buckwheat Pancakes