Daring Baker Challange - Tender Potato Bread

So my third challenge and the second one involving yeast, however it's savoury this time which I was quite happy with. Our challenge from Tanna was for Tender Potato Bread from the book Home baking by Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford. and you can find the recipe she challenged us with is here.

Bread is something I've toyed with since giving up gluten, I used to love kneading real bread before that as it was a great tension release but gluten free mixes tend to a) be wetter and b) don't have the satisfaction as there is no gluten to make it bounce back. I have made the occasional loaf for other people but if I'm not careful I find the skin contact can be enough to set my hands off and I like having the use of my hands.. I spent several years having to use both hands to pick up anything even vaguely heavy as I had so little strength in either one of them so I am wary about going back to that. One advantage I suppose of that symptom is that if I do accidentally eat something with gluten in I start to feel the ache across my knuckles in moments which stops me eating to much. Any way I digress back to Potato Bread.

I tried this recipe twice this month. The first time as close to the published version as possible and the second with a few more tweeks. I managed to forget to add Xanth gum both times but I think it will get made again and I'll report back if that makes much difference when I do.

Bread the first.

I used a generic baking potato as I didn't have a named variety of suitable type available and on the first try used about 14oz, we were told to use between 8 and 16oz. Flour wise I substituted my standard Dove Farm gluten free flour for the basic general purpose flour and millet for the wholewheat. I wasn't that happy about the millet but we were waiting on a bulk order of flour and other things and I didn't want to buy extra expansive bags in when I'd have loads in a few days. It proves I was intrigued enough to try it that I didn't wait till later in the month.

The dough went together well, being used to gluten free mixes the wetness didn't really phase me and I only added a couple of extra cups to the dough before it seemed stiff enough. I didn't knead it anyone than needed to incorporate the flour as this really serves no function without the gluten as the main reason for this is to develop the gluten chains. I left it to rise in the oven which has a special bread rising function as the kitchen was a little cold and after two hours it was wonderfully risen and full of bubbles as you may be able to see in the picture.

However when i came to shape it the dough was extremely sticky and pretty much poured out of the bowl so I added about another 2 cups of flour to get it workable. The shaped bread was put back to prove but it seemed to have run out of steam rather and only rose a small amount. I baked it anyway as I am fairly used to a mediocre rise on gluten free bread. Now I must admit to a couple of mistakes. I baked the focaccia to long and burnt the onion on it but much worse is I think I forgot to take the plastic wrap off first and that resulted in a plasticy glaze on parts of the bread!! We only eat a bit of it and from the underside to see what it was like then the rest went into the bin!

The loaf was better, rather heavy but quite edible though it had a distinctly bitter edge which was worse once it got a little more stale the next couple of days.

However it showed promise and after some discussion with knowledgeable members of the daring bakers I decided to try again. This time I decided to only rise the dough once as I was told that the second rise is mostly for developing taste and that as my flour has no gluten in it there would be less to sugars to feed the yeast.

Bread the Second.

This time I used a similar potato and cooked up nearly 16 oz. Instead of millet I used buckwheat as my flour order had arrived and indeed I added about 1.5 cups of that in total which gave the bread a distinctly wholemeal look. As I was only doing one rise this time I made sure I incorporated a bit more flour at this stage and in the end used about 6.2 cups out of the 8.5 max suggested in the recipe. I wouldn't expect a gluten free bread to use all 8.2 cups as most none wheat flours soak up more liquid than wheat does.

Once I had a nice dough I divided it into three. One third as put in muffin tins to make rolls, then one third was flavoured with tomato puree and a bit more flour added to counter the extra liquid. The final third as flavoured with cheddar cheese. These two flavoured doughs were roughly recombined so the two types swirled through the bread and then the whole lot was put in a bread tin. Both sets of bread were put to rise in the oven as before.
After two hours a good amount of rising had been done and after carefully removing ALL plastic wrap I cooked them, the rolls got about 30 mins and the loaf 50, the last 10 mins of which I removed it from the tin to allow the crust to develop all round.

This time round the texture was much better and the gluten eating members of the household actually asked if they could have some several times over the weekend meaning I didn't have my usual problem of worrying it was going to go off before I finished it. The cheese and tomato bread was espacally good and will be done again I am sure.

One final thing I decided is I want to develop my own general flour mix as my mum would have liked to try the bread but she has similar arthritic reactions to maize as I do to gluten and Dove farm's mix has maize in it. I like maize flour for some things but in a generic mix I could happily do without especally as there are becoming more flours available.

You can see how other Baring bakers got on by checking out the blog roll, out of something like 400 members I only know of two other who are gluten free they are Naomi at Straight into bed Cakefree and Dried and Sheltie Girl at Gluten a go go

Spinach, ricotta and pumpkin Lasagna

Inspired by posts on Ginger Lemon Girl and Book of Yum I decided to do a lasagna. I had several packets of gluten free pasta sheets and love spinach and ricotta lasagna so adding pumpkin sounded a idea worth a try.

The basic ingredients were as follows (for one tray, I made two so I have one for another day). I'm afraid I can't do exact measurements as I do much of this by eye.

1 packet of gluten free lasagna sheets (boiled for 2 mins to make sure they were nice and soft.)
1/2 a packet of frozen spinach, thawed
1 tub of ricotta
1/4 a largeish pumpkin, roasted and mashed to a puree.
About 1 pint of fairly thick white sauce made from gluten free flour, milk and butter.
parmesan cheese

I flavoured the white sauce with a little nutmeg and the pumpkin with a shot of roasted pumpkin and sunflower seed oil.
Then I layered it as follows, a little sauce, a layer of pasta, layer of pumpkin and a tiny bit more sauce. More pasta, layer of ricotta, layer of spinach, more sauce, pasta then a good layer of sauce. Finished off with a topping of parmesan cheese, then cooked till golden.

The dish tasted very good, was just right moisture wise and was very filling however the pumpkin got rather lost against the spinach and ricotta, next time I might try pumpkin with something else but it isn't a veg we cook much so I'm not sure what might go well. This is the one meal the small one hasn't eaten with us this week, partly as he was hungry when he came in from school and partly because I knew he would not like the green part!

(edit, pasta goes rather soggy when frozen. still edible but much better fresh)

The weeks menu

Well I've be organised to sort a menu but not organised to post it in time for the Monday round ups.. However I think it's a start and as we are all under the weather with colds I will let myself of. In future I want to join in the Gluten Free Menu Swap and if I'm doing that I might as well do Menu Plan Monday as well. The Gluten Free menu swap has an ingredients of the week. This week it is mushrooms, I do have some in the fridge and will probably do a mushroom side dish but one of the family as mild problems with them and as he is under the weather I will not be adding them to the main dishes as when his system is low the tends to react to them badly.

So this week the menu is as follows.

Monday Pasta and mince.
Gluten free pasta of course and mince means something more like a bolognase sauce than straight mince, so some vegs, tomato etc and in this case a little bacon that needed eating to supliment the mince as I was feeding more than expected.

Tuesday Sausage and bean stew
A few gluten free sausages, lots of black eye beans, chickpeas, potatoes, parsnip, carrot, an onion and two tins of tomatoes. Plenty left for lunches.

Wednesday Chicken noodle soup from Use real butter because it sounded wonderful.

Thursday either veggy stew or mixed roast vegs with either cauliflower fritters or cauliflower cheese. (Thursday is the day the veggy box is delivered so it depends what is left from this week's box by then)


Friday Lasagne possibly with pumpkin like the one Ginger lemon Girl did but certainly with ricotta and spinach because I love that combination.

Looking at that, all the meat is at the beginning of the week and it's quite a few pasta dishes but we haven't had much pasta recently as we had mostly run out. We got a new bulk order from Suma last week so I am making the most of having a selection, all gluten free of course.

So far this week we have eaten the evening meal before the small one's bedtime which means we can eat together. This works better when Tom is on an early shift but he is this week and next so will make the most of it by eating at the table.

Choc Sponge Pud

I love British puds and traditional food in general so when I found out about a new blogging challenge called the Great British Pudding Challenge I had to consider joining. The first challenge is a chocolate sponge pudding. Such a hardship !

I haven't made many sponge puds since I stopped eating gluten and the few I have were done by the microwave method which while it is fast didn't give me that good a result. However when I started cooking gluten free anything resembling the real thing was good enough so they filled a gap but now I am more picky as the flours are available to do better than that and my confidence has grown to try adapting recipes.

This recipe is done by the traditional steaming method which takes much longer but all the best things take time and once the mix is made up all you need to do is make sure the steamer doesn't run out of water so can be getting on with other things which in my case was cooking tea, we had lamb chops with a salad. For a steamer I used a large pasta pan, one of those with an internal pan like a colander which can be pulled out to drain the pasta or in this case to lift the pudding basin away from the steam.

The original none gluten free recipe is here. All I did was to replace the flour with a gluten free general flour mix and it worked very well. The mixture is easy to make up and the resultant pudding is very chocolaty indeed. I used Bornville Chocolate for the chunks as I love dark chocolate. The texture was very good and light though I think from seeing pictures of a couple of others mine might be a little more crumbly than a gluten version but not so much it spoilt the feel in the mouth.

We all ate it with cream though I suspect had Tom not been feeling low with a cold he would have made custard to go with it as well.

My small one insisted on being pictured with the pudding as well sorry it's rather dark it was getting close to his bedtime so I wanted to get it served up.

Quince Apples and menu planning

I have got a lovely box of fruit off Freecycle yesterday. The lady referred to them as quince apples, having looked on the internet a bit and smelling them, which is a wonderful smell, I think they are real quince.. there is a variety called apple quince which look very like these. Either way I plan to make them into jelly, though I might use a few with some apples to make a pie or similar because the fragrance is wonderful.

I have also decide I really need to get back to doing weekly menu planning. I did do this quite regularly before I was feeling sick all the time and it is a good thing to do. The best day to do it is Friday as we get the veggy box Thursday evening and planning the meals round that is a good idea.

There is a weekly gluten free menu swap which I would like to join in with and a bigger general one, Menu plan monday run on orgjunkie which has lots of people joining with all sorts of eating styles. Angela, from Angela's Kitchen uses the monthly menus at familyfun.com which look worth considering. I don't think I'd use them all the time as I need to use the vegs we get and so forth but at least they are mostly based on basic ingredients not mixes and such like some I have seen.

Should food choices be made for us?

This is a subject that has been coming up regularly recently at least around here. There was the news articles about a report saying we should all be buying UHT milk, then a discussion with friends about if we should be only sold the 'healthy' options to counter the growth in obese people and now this article which suggests supermarkets should be encouraged to make choices for us.

My first reaction is No way I don't want someone else making such choices for me but when I think properly about it that isn't totally true. Ideally what I want is all the facts so I can make an informed decision and if a shop was making the choices the way i wanted them made I'd have no problem with it. Currently, for instance I get vegs from a local organic shop because I want organic veg and I know and trust the shop owner, even if I didn't know him organic means something specific which I can pretty much know will be attired to if it is labelled as such here.

I think the problem comes for me when the choice is taken from me completely or if it is being made by people or groups I don't fully trust and that includes the government. After all how can I trust a government who is meant to represent the people and yet is determined to allow GM crops to be grown here in 2009 even when the vast majority of the people of the country are against it and they said not so long ago they didn't have any plans to allow it in the foreseeable future. I'm not going into that particular subject any farther in this post though.

So back to choices. In principle I have no problems with retail companies having guildlines about what they will and will not buy if it is things like only buying from fair trade sources or so forth. That as a principle is something I can support and encourage, if it is to improve the lifes of others or to stop an animal being driven to extinction such as a ban on ivory.

I think the problem comes for me when it is things like telling me what I can and can't eat. Inform me fine, educate everyone fine and something we need to do more of but choosing for me that I will only be able to buy UHT milk no thanks, yes I know the argument about UHT is it will cut down the amount of energy needed for refrigeration (ie ecological) but I buy milk direct not through a supermarket so the equation is very different for me. In the discussion with friends someone asked why they sold several different types of the same margarine one lower fat that the other why didn't they sell only the healthy one. I think that hits the point for me.. they were very much assuming the lower fat one was more healthy become it was lower fat where as I don't believe it is that simple. Lower fat options are often higher in sugar, more processed and so on which can be as bad. Many drinks targeted at kids here proudly state they are sugar free BUT they have sweeteners in them which my son reacts badly to so if these so call healthy drinks were the only option what does he drink?

It is the nanny state attitude I worry about.. the view we the consumer don't have the ability to make the right choices ourselves so rather than taking the harder but ulitmently better path of educating people it is similar to make the choices for us but one choice is not always right for everyone. I do want more information and more accountability however.. a pipe dream? possibly but without dreams nothing worth wild ever happens.

Curried Cauliflower Fritters

We have had these twice in three days and I've had no complaints and several compliments about them. They are a lovely different way to serve Cauliflower which I find can be a bit bland. The most common way we eat it normally is as cauliflower cheese often with a bunch of other things added such as tomatoes, spring onions and possibly bacon or similar. These fritters however are totally different, they are as crisp and cauliflower cheese is soft and spicy to it's smooth flavour.

Cauliflower is a form of brassica with a large flower head which is the part you eat. It is normally white but a seed catalogue I was reading today had green ones, purple ones and even a bright orangy yellow. I believe the changes in colour effect the nutrients in it but I don't know how well the colour stands up well to cooking however they are certainly interesting to look at. There is a really un-usual green type called Romanesco which has spirally fractal like heads.

The recipe is adapted from Jamie Oliver's new book "Jamie at Home" His instructions are much longer than mine but i hope you get the jist.

1 Cauliflower, cut into similar sized florets. wash and dust with flour and put aside.

Batter

1 tsp cumin seeds
2 tsp black mustard seeds
good shake of chilli flakes (Jamie uses 2-3 dried red chills)
1 tsp black peppercorns
200g GF flour (Jamie used Self raising flour)
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp turmeric
350ml water (Jamie uses beer but I'm not using my GF beer when I can't finish the bottle because I'm pregnant)

Crush the first four spices in a mortar and pestle, mix with flour and turmeric, pour in most of the water and whisk, you are aiming for a batter the thickness of double cream. season with salt.

The fritters are deep fried at 180C, heat your oil to the right temp. Dip each floret in batter and fry a few at a time till golden then drain on kitchen paper and sprinkle with sea salt.

Notes

These need to be eaten straight away as they soften down otherwise.

Next time I plan to try some or all the flour as gram flour (chickpeas) as I think the flavour would work very well.

Very good and morish. I did a small bowl each the, as a side dish, first time round and was told they could eat more. The second time was with a roast dinner which worked very well too.

I plan to try the same batter with some white fish as I think it will work and I've been craving battered fish. It's a British thing, fish and chips is a comfort food but very much not gluten free.