Food, cooking, eating, and me

I know it’s been a while, but unlike other times of redolence and maybe debauchery, I’ve been working hard trying to perfect recipes worthy of posting. Unfortunately, some of these recipes require a lot of attempts before you feel like you’re starting to make progress. Then all of a sudden, you’re there.

I’ve got one here now.

Oh, this is perfect. Light, airy, crispy, gluten-free, and vegan.

Gluten-free vegan chocolate waffles

Makes 3 waffles

• 1 cup of rice flour blend (4 parts white rice flour, 1 part sweet rice flour)
• 3 tablespoons cocoa
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 3 tablespoons coconut oil, refined or virgin (non-vegan option: butter
• 3/4 cup water

Method 1: sift together the dry ingredients. Melt the coconut oil. Mix all together with the water and beat with a wire whisk until smooth.

Method 2 (when the coconut oil is solid): Place the dry ingredients and the coconut oil in the food processor and process until smooth. Dump into bowl and beat with wire whisk until smooth.

Heat a non-stick waffle iron on high. When hot, brush grids with a little coconut oil. Pour enough batter to almost cover the bottom grid, close the iron and bake until done. Remove, sprinkle with powdered sugar and eat out of hand, or serve with crushed berries.

I’m not sure what to call these babies. I just know that I went on a rice flour waffle-making binge, and realized that waffle batter poured into a waffle (or some other shape) made tasty breads for the table, without drying out as rice baked goods often do in the oven. Out on the prowl of kitchen stores, I found a pizelle maker, which I could undoubtedly make crackers from. But I was not in the mood to spend $40 on a pizelle maker that day.

Next time I was in the mood to shop, I went around my local stores. At Kohl’s I found a “quesadilla maker”, sort of an odd thing which is supposed to squeeze your quesadillas and seal them into little triangles, I guess. The issue was that the only one in the store was a demo model. They didn’t have any for sale at another local store. For all that, they didn’t have many small appliances for sale at all. As the clerk explained it to me, they stock up the store for the holidays. When the appliances run out, they run out and are not replenished by the central office. WTH? A store with no merchandise for sale? Is this Soviet Russia?

Anyway, I made a batter, poured it in, and baked. Mmm, good. Leftovers reheated in the toaster oven were just as tasty. You could serve these in a basket at any meal. The split peas give them a nice golden appearance.

Toasties

1/3 cup yellow split peas, soaked in warm water for a couple of hours
1 cup of rice flour blend*
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup water
3 tablespoons melted butter, oil, or shortening

Drain and rinse split peas, and put in the blender with the water until smooth. Add remaining ingredients and beat until smooth. Pour into a prepared quesadilla iron (or any other similar appliance) and bake until brown and toasty.

*Rice flour blend: Mix 1 pound of sweet (glutinous) rice flour with 4 pounds of white rice flour.

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.

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