Food, cooking, eating, and me

Somewhere in this blog is a post, maybe two, on using whole dried beans in baking.

I’m still down on bean flours, still trying to use up the ones in my cupboard. But it occurred to me that it might give better results to steam the bean bread rather than baking it, since it would not overcook on the outside before it was done in the middle. And just for you, my readers, I decided to take the plunge and see if it worked, so you didn’t have to.

I don’t have an exact recipe for you. What I did was soak 1 cup of dried white beans, 1 cup of brown rice, and 1 cup of blanched almonds separately. The beans may take several hours to overnight, even in warm water. I discarded the bean liquid and rinsed the beans. The rice and almond soaking liquid I reserved.

First I put the rice in the food processor. Hm. that didn’t grind it up very fine.at.all. I added some liquid, didn’t help. I added the almonds to it and processed it, then finally ended up putting it in the blender, to which I had to add a great deal of liquid in order to get it smooth. Next time I will start with raw brown rice that I will grind as fine as possible, soaking and then blending it, again, separately.

The beans are easy to grind up smooth in the food processor. After they are a gritty mush, add liquid bit by bit until they turn into a smooth, fluffy paste.

I mixed everything together, added a tablespoon of yeast, 1-1/2 teaspoons of salt, 1 tablespoon of baking powder, 1/3 of a cup of sugar, and a teaspoon each of xanthan gum and guar gum. I added 1/4 cup soft butter, 1/2 cup of sweet rice flour and 1 cup of white rice flour and mixed it all up.

What I’m not telling you, since I didn’t measure, is how much liquid I added to blend and process this. Obviously you’ll have to do whatever works for you. But when it comes to adding rice flour at the end, the amount you add should be enough to make it at least firm enough to scoop and pack into a greased nonstick loaf pan.

I steamed a small sample, which seemed okay. So I packed the rest into a large loaf pan, which it almost filled. I let it rise an inch, then put the loaf pan on a rack in a roasting pan with a dome lid. I buttered a piece of foil and set it on top, added an inch of water, turned on the fire, and set the timer for 15 minutes after it came to a boil. At 15 minutes I lowered the heat and tightened up the foil so it wouldn’t expose the surface to more steam than necessary.

I wasn’t sure how long it would take. I figured with a loaf pan that big, it would probably take more than an hour to bake in the oven. I ended up steaming it for 2 hours.

Surprise! it was brown on the surface, including the top, but with a softer crust that makes slicing easy. It has no beany flavor or texture. It is quite bread-like, in the “old-fashioned moist farmhouse bread” style I like so much.

I made a sausage and egg sandwich for breakfast. Oh, my!

This is mostly a rant. My personal preference is to mix 3 parts white rice flour with 1 part sweet rice flour, which gives the mix a little clinginess. I’m getting back into using gums. I’ve been using 1/2 teaspoon of a mix of guar gum and xanthan gum per cup of flour, which doesn’t seem to bother me. The mix tastes and feels a lot like wheat flour in many ways. Not only that, but it’s cheap.

So what’s the deal with the bean flour blends? Yecch. They don’t taste particularly good, and they feel like, I don’t know, hummus in your mouth. If you don’t overcook whatever it is to death, they taste gross and raw bean-ey. People buy them for me when I visit so I’ll be able to bake while I am there, probably because they cannot imagine not eating baked goods.

I think it’s a conspiracy to get people to spend $3.50 a pound on a specialty item rather than $1 a pound on something that can be bought at any Asian market.

I am trying to use it up now. Recipes soon. And yeah, the whole site is going to get a makeover really soon.

A reader asked me about sweet rice flour, which he had been unable to find in his area. I suggested looking in Asian stores for “glutinous rice flour”, which is another name for it. Sure enough, he and the clerk finally found it, although they were at first understandably concerned by the resemblance of “glutinous” to “gluten”.

Various types of glutinous rice are used in Asia. In Korea and Japan, they use short-grain glutinous rice, while in Southeast Asia, they use long-grain. I understand there is a black type in Thailand, but I have not seen this.

The first time I ever saw long-grain sweet rice in a Cambodian store, I asked the clerk how I should cook it, and he said, “Very carefully.” OK.

If I want to boil it like regular rice, I rinse it well and soak it for a few hours in my rice cooker before turning it on to cook with a regular cycle, one cup of rice to 1-1/3 cups of water. I like salt in my rice, so I add 1/2 teaspoon per cup of rice. I understand I’m the only one who ever does this, as the traditional method is to soak it in water for a long time, then steam it over simmering water. Personally, I love my Zojirushi neuro fuzzy rice cooker and would need a really good reason to cook it any other way.

Sweet rice when used in cooking tends to get moist and stay soft. So a sauce or pudding thickened with sweet rice flour will not harden up when chilled like one thickened with white rice flour. Sweet rice flour used in baking makes the product moister and stick together better than without. I prefer not to use xanthan gum in baking, as it causes blisters on my tongue. I find that using some sweet rice flour in a baking recipe often gives the result I need.

The Japanese make mochi, which are soft rice cakes made by pounding steamed sweet rice, either with giant mallets in a stone mortar or with a powerful machine. I will have to talk about mochi sometime…

Here’s a photo of the different types of rice I happen to have in my cupboards right now. Can you tell I like rice?

1. Long-grain sweet rice
2. Arborio rice, for risotto
3. Short-grain sweet rice
4. Jasmine Rice
5. Short-grain Japanese rice
6. Long-grain brown rice
7. Brown short-grain sweet rice
8. Black Chinese forbidden rice
9. Lundberg mixed brown rice
10. Short-grain brown rice

Brownies, brownies, brownies. No apologies, I make them super-chocolatey, adapting a recipe from the James Beard cookbook, American Cookery.

The flour I use is the same as for most of the things I bake—3 parts white rice flour to 1 part sweet rice flour. Aside from that, I use the maximum amount of chocolate in the recipe and reduce the sugar to make the effect more intense than sweet.

I am sensitive to xanthan gum, so I don’t use it, and I find that most sweet baked goods don’t need it.

So…

• 1 stick butter (or 7/8 cup coconut oil, if you can’t handle the dairy of butter
• 4 ounces unsweetened chocolate
• 1-1/2 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 3/4 cup white rice flour
• 1/4 cup sweet rice flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Optional:

• 1 cup walnut meats, broken
• 3/4 cup dry fruit, soaked in 2 ounces of liquid (water, brandy, or juice) until the liquid is absorbed (OK to hurry by heating this, covered, in the microwave.)
• chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Grease a nonstick or silicone square 9″ x 9″ or rectangular pan.

Melt together butter and chocolate, stirring until smooth. Add sugar. Stir until smooth. Add eggs and vanilla. Stir until blended thoroughly. Add flour and salt, then nuts and/or dried fruit, if using. Scrape into the prepared pan and bake about 45 minutes, or until the center is no longer liquid.

Remove from pan when almost cold and cut into squares. How many pieces you can cut depends on how many of the optional ingredients you added.

Everybody knows (they do, don’t they?) that Rice Crispies have barley malt flavoring in them, which makes them non-gluten-free. Erewhon makes a crispy brown rice cereal that is gluten-free. Last night the draw was too great. I read the recipe for crispy rice treats on the back of that bag of gluten-free marshmallows I bought at Walmart, tore it open, and started measuring.

I don’t use margarine (IMO, margarine is not a food, but a product of a chemical factory) and I’m trying to avoid butter as much as possible, so I substituted coconut oil (LouAna brand, also a Walmart product) for the butter in the recipe. I greased one of those flexible silicone baking pans with coconut oil. In fact, the box had exactly the amount of rice cereal called for by the recipe after the single bowl I had eaten, so I didn’t even need to measure. I melted the coconut oil with the marshmallows in a pan, stirring until it was a goo, added the crisp rice cereal, mixed, and packed half in the pan. A few chocolate chips, and I packed the rest on top.

Later, when the pan was cool, I turned it out on a cutting board and sawed it into squares with a bread knife. It made far more crispy rice/marshmallow squares than I needed – 16 giant squares, but food for the soul.

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.

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.

As the weather warms up, my thoughts turn to cold composed salads, things lined up on top of salad greens. Think of Cobb salad, not as itself, but as a starting point for inspiration.

The past couple of days I have put dry greens in the bottom of a rectangualr glass baking dish, and put rows of things like cooked asparagus, rinsed canned black beans, halved hard boiled eggs, chopped cooked bacon, green olives, and walnuts. Yesterday I cut the tomato and put it into the salad first. Today I held it back and put it in at the last minute, preventing the salad from picking up too much water.

I include a little covered takeout cup of homemade mayonnaise to dip into.

To eat, I pick off the pieces, and when they are mostly gone, I put salt, pepper, vinegar, and olive oil on the salad greens and stir before eating them.

It’s an incredibly attractive lunch. Everyone is always very jealous…

My father was always a pumpernickel kind of guy. When I was growing up, we would share store-bought pumpernickel bread spread with Liederkranz cheese. My mother would make him keep his Liederkranz in the milkbox on the porch, rather than the refrigerator. Ah, Liederkranz cheese!

Over the years I’ve made a fair number of loaves of pumpernickel bread. I have tended to make natural dark breads rather than those composed almost exclusively of white flour, as I find these more satisfying. One of my favorites I recall was a loaf made of dark rye flour, high in bran, and dark buckwheat flour, sifted to remove gritty chunks of seedcoat. Rye flour alone will make quite the dense bread. When you add other flours to it, it just hasn’t got enough gluten to hang together, so I added vital wheat gluten. It was incredibly tasty and filling, and it was naturally espresso brown. Yum. Of course, nobody at work would taste it. Most people pay lip service to healthy eating, that’s all.

Let’s flash forward now to the present. It’s been a couple of years since I intentionally ate any gluten, so I haven’t been doing any baking to speak of. But I just discovered xanthan gum, and I have been experimenting at making breads that are not only passable as regular breads, but even better, because I can make them just as I like them, not having to engineer my product for mass distribution to people who want all their bread to be high-fiber and dark, but taste like Wonder Bread.

So the recipe is made with buckwheat flours, both white and dark, cornmeal, xanthan gum, and various other normal bread-making ingredients. I mixed it in my Kitchenaid stand mixer until it was a non-sticky dense dough, and shaped it into a traditional round loaf. These don’t seem to rise as much as regular loaves, which is still ok for a pumpernickel.

When the bread is cooled, it slices into neat, thin slices. It makes great sandwiches and is good for toasting if a little dense. Next, a white type bread?

Buckwheat pumpernickel bread

I’ve always had a thing for brownies, and not just any brownies. They had to be chocolatey, the chocolatier the better. And not too sweet either. Of course they had to be sweet, being dessert, but there is something about a too-sweet cookie or pastry that, while addictively making me eat on, makes my tummy hurt.

So as I did with the chocolate chip cookies, I have always reduced the sugar in baking. My favorite brownie recipe is the one from James Beard’s American Cookery, which calls for 4 full ounces of unsweetened chocolate. None of this wimpy 1-1/2 ounces of chocolate, no siree!

After a first gluten-free casein-free recipe of mouth-melting chocolate chip cookies, I figured it was time for brownies. I substituted 2/3 cup white rice flour + 1/3 cup sweet rice flour + 1 teaspoon xanthan gum for the cup of flour called for, and 1/2 cup coconut oil for the butter. The finished product firmed up a little more than regular chewy-type brownies, but oh! it was good and chocolatey.

It is much better to eat a little something intense and satisfying than a whole, whole lot of something that is soul-suckingly unsatisfying. I don’t believe in substitute food. I make food that may be different, but is just as good as things I can’t have. Try it!