Tomatilla!

Just for kicks – I am going to see if I can get some help. As you may know, I am close to building my wood-burning oven – but it now looks like I may have to come up with a GOOD gluten-free pizza recipe. In this case, good means NOT a batter you spread on a tray as in almost all the recipes I have seen so far.

So here is a ‘tag cloud of associations’ and maybe someone will see it and get creative and give me a good idea….

Now that I am experimenting with gluten-free cooking I have discovered one true tragedy. Real bread is an impossibility. Sure there are lots of recipes that SAY they have good bread. But the bottom line is that for REAL bread you need gluten. The gluten is what makes the dough ‘thready’ and that holds it together during rising and after baking. So now it is time to dig into some food science (Harold McGee) and see what I can come up with to fake it. And, no, Xanthan gum is NOT a substitute.

The situation is even worse for pizza – all the G-F recipes I’ve seen call for spreading some kind of batter across a pan and then par baking. That’s not a pizza either. So again, another challenge.

The other food I feared for was pasta. There are two kinds of pasta. There is the extruded kind that is most often what you buy dried. It is made only of flour and water and is actually harder to make at home. Macaroni is the quintessential example of this. And extruded seems to work quite well for corn, rice and probably lots of other gluten free flours. I recently made a really nice macaroni and cheese with brown rice macaroni from Trader Joe’s. So that one isn’t a problem. But for homemade fresh pasta you are talking about rolled pasta – typically made with egg. And I was worried that it would prove that gluten was a necessary component of the elasticity in this kind of pasta dough. Research provided me with a host of recipes and experimentation proved that bean-based flours were not going to work. Nor was the relatively grainy brown rice flour. So I went with some other things I had tried. Again most recipes called for Xanthan gum so I used it but next time we are going to try it without. The ONLY thing wrong with the pasta I came up with was a bit of a slimy texture – almost certainly due to the Xanthan gum.

This pasta I made into taglialini – very fine square cut threads of pasta – a lot like angel hair. I rolled it on a cheap Italian stainless steel hand cranked pasta maker and it did take a little extra work at the thicker stages to develop the dough smoothly. But after that it worked great and I even rolled it one stage thinner than most recipes suggest. without any trouble.

Gluten Free Pasta Take One

2/3 cup cornstarch
2/3 cup fine cornflour
2/3 cup tapioca flour
2/3 cup white rice flour
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp Xanthan gum
3 tbsps olive oil
6 eggs

Put all dry ingredients in a sturdy bowl and stir to combine. Add the six eggs and olive oil and thoroughly mix, then kneed in to make a stiff dough. Adjust flour if needed or add a little water. Once thoroughly combined, wrap dough ball in plastic wrap and let sit for 30 minutes to rest and then reknead.

Break about 1/6th of the dough ball off, rewrap the rest to prevent it drying out and then roll the small piece according to your pasta maker instructions or by hand until very thin (less than 1mm or about 1/16th of an inch. I then cut it using the pasta maker cutting attachment into taglialini.

If you want to use it right away, put a big pot of water on to boil as you start rolling. I then made a sauce before cooking the pasta. In this case it was a typical light Italian sauce made by frying 6 finely minced cloves of garlic in 1/4 cup of olive oil along with a sprinkling of chili flakes. I then added 1/2 a bunch of Italian parsley, finely minced and about 2 cups of cherry tomatoes cut into halves and cooked until the parsley wilted. I added a squeeze of lemon.

Then I cooked the pasta in boiling water for just under 2 minutes, and served with the sauce and a sprinkling of shredded parmesan.

For sources of good gluten free recipes, see the following:

Gluten-Free Girl
Better Batter Recipes
Karina’s Kitchen (Gluten-Free Goddess)

First, Happy New Year to you all! I am determined that this year will be different, better and far more worthwhile. So a lot of changes are planned . I started out with the simplest – no New Year’s Resolutions! In the past they have just been a way to feel guilty. No more….

Next, we are rapidly becoming a gluten-free (as well as often vegetarian) household. It is looking likely that 1.5 of us have celiac disease – possibly VERY badly. Wheat is gone. So is barley. So is rye (not much of a loss that last) and so are most oats (because they always apparently have some wheat byproduct left from the mill). The biggest concern is of course, beer. Fortunately sorghum appears to work and Briess actually has two varieties of Sorghum extract that have the required characteristics to produce beer – mostly rather lightish apparently – kind of like Budweiser only it tastes of something. In fact A-B, the brewers of that foul concoction, actually make the top-selling gluten-free beer (Redbridge I believe) and I have had it and it tastes quite a lot better than Bud. Not brilliant, but not bad. So I have hope on the brewing front. I plan to try additions of dark rice syrup and molasses and roasted non-gluten grains to bring up the taste. So there’s challenge number one.

Next up is bread – despite all the many great gluten-free food blogs out there, I sense that the bread (and especially pizza) under discussion is NOT going to cut it. Especially since I amnow committed to the wood-burning oven project. Whatever pizza and bread recipes I come up with have to work in a 500 degree or hotter wood-burning oven. So that’s challenge number two.

There are of course things like cakes (especially the famous lemon cake) that will have to be redone, but that sounds more doable, so I have hope.

Coffee roasting is going to continue. I really enjoy roasting a new pound every week and a half or so and recently I roasted the best coffee I have ever tasted bar none – no matter what. It was an Ethiopian Yergachefe that I got from More Coffee and it not only had the best aroma, it delivered far more of the taste than coffee usually does. I roasted as usual to the beginning of second crack and got a coffee rich in complex caramel, roasted almonds and complex fruit flavors. It had great depth and also lasted well. I did, however, do one thing different. I dropped a whole cinnamon stick into the coffee before I roasted it and roasted the cinnamon along with the coffee. It added a VERY subtle layer to the coffee as a whole and the layer stayed with it because I kept the stick in the jar with the beans. Once or twice during the week I also broke a small piece off the stick and ground it in with the beans. You can buy cinnamon-flavored coffee commercially but the stuff is disgusting – heavily infused with an artificial flavor (or at least artificial tasting). You can also make cinnamon coffee by adding a small piece of cinnamon stick as you grind regular beans – that is MUCH better. But it is nothing compared to roasting the cinnamon with the coffee. I got the idea many years ago from ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by Lawrence of Arabia (a really interesting book) and just now got to try it. As I recall, they mostly did it with cardamom, so that’s next to try. So, more coffee roasting is challenge number three – I’ll try to provide roasting and tasting notes – mostly for me so I can figure out what I like best.

One thing we did a little of just before the holidays that I plan to do more of is canning. First off, the family and a friend harvested about ten pounds of rose hips from the yard. They then made lots of things, but the one that was best was rose hip syrup – basically boiling chopped rose hips in a big muslin bag with sugar and pectin and then canning the result. It is really fantastic – very much worth the time and effort. They took most of the day and ended up with about 8 pints of rose hip syrup, about two pounds of rose hip tea and six loaves of rose hip bread. I was inspired by their example. We still had about ten pounds of persimmons left from harvesting half of our half of the tree in the back. We had already given away about twenty pounds and eaten another eight or so. But they weren’t going to keep forever, so I peeled them and cooked them down slowly for two hours just covered in water. Then I pureed them, added two pounds of sugar, two lemons cut in halves and a cinnamon stick. I cooked this mixture down for about four hours on VERY low, fished out the lemon and cinnamon and canned it. By that point I had about 8 pints. That was the first project. Next I made some Meyer Lemon Dundee Marmalade. Our neighbours have an infamous Meyer Lemon tree. Let’s just say that after picking 40 lemons I couldn’t tell anything was gone! So what is Dundee Marmalade? First off, British (or REAL) marmalade is less sweet than American marmalade. Dundee Marmalade is then different in that it is made with larger chunks of citrus peel and it is cooked longer, caramelizing the marmalade a bit more. To make it, I juiced all 40 lemons and removed SOME of the excess membranes from inside the left over lemon peels. I discarded all the seeds obviously. Then I chopped all 40 lemon peels into pieces at most a quarter inch square. These all went into a large stockpot with enough water to just cover, two pounds of sugar and all the lemon juice. I then simmered it VERY low for a couple of hours, added another pound of sugar and then added pectin in the form of all the persimmon peels from the butter, carefully wrapped in a cheesecloth package (apples and pears work well for this too, or you can just buy some pectin…). This all simmered for another two hours. I occasionally skimmed foam off the top. Then I removed and thoroughly squeezed out the persimmon peel package. Then I left it all to sit with a lid on overnight (yes) and resimmered it the next morning for another two hours. At this point is was far more brown than yellow, and tasted very marmalady. So I canned it. It was good. So more canning this year – it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

Well, Ilva, over at the truly lovely blog Lucullian Delights, has decided to take on Paper Chef so that it doesn’t die out. I’m really happy because she has always been one of its biggest supporters (and one of the best entrants). This way my little monthly event will carry on.

For those of you coming over here from her blog or who have no idea what I’m talking about, below is a little potted history of Paper Chef.

Essentially it is a little event for food bloggers modeled loosely on the Iron Chef and on Ready, Steady Cook, the BBC cooking show. Food bloggers have a weekend to devise, make and write about some creation that uses the assigned four ingredients. For full details of how it works, see this post that includes the rules.

For some idea of what it comes out like, please see these two posts with links to many of the past events…

Thanks Ilva!

This year, I was again honored to be asked to help judge the annual Food Blog Awards, the prestigious awards for food bloggers that were started four years ago (I think – maybe it was three – I’m getting old) by Kate at Accidental Hedonist and then taken over by the other Cate at WellFed.net.

Anyways, I and some other fantabulous judges, just finished a LONG weekend of looking at food blogs and picking finalists from the nominees. Now the time is right for everyone to go vote. So do that – go vote.

No axe to grind here except participation. There were a LOT of nominees and judging was tough – it took several go-rounds to shake out all five of the finalists in many categories. There were several categories where it was hard to pick five – I’d have preferred to pick seven, or ten or…

I found lots of new and new-to-me blogs as well as a host of already deservedly well-known blogs.

So go support your community and make your opinion known and felt…

It seems that quite a few took my most recent post (just below) to mean that I was giving up the blog altogether. Don’t know how they got that form my completely clear and lucid prose.

In fact I am just saying goodbye to the Paper Chef (which lives on in Sweden – but I can’t tell you how to participate – to the shame of my ancestors I can’t speak or read Swedish). I haven’t been able to give it the care and attention it needed for a while and it was silly to pretend otherwise.

But I’m going to get back to my old haphazard blogging ways – in other words, when I feel like it. That is likely to mean chutney and also persimmon butter sometime soon.

It is time for me to face facts. I no longer have the time or energy to keep Paper Chef going. I don’t have time to even write short notes in what was – more than four years ago now – intended just to be a personal record that would help me remember how to repeat dishes I’d made that I and others liked.

So, first of all, I would like to give a huge thank you on this day of thanks to all of you – all the food bloggers out there who loved and supported Paper Chef. You made it a wonderful and fun couple of years while it was going strong. My apologies for not being able to keep it running.

And thanks specifically to everybody who ever entered and particularly to those of you in the last year or so who have pushed me to continue.

May you all have a joyous (and thankful) Thanksgiving.

If I get started now I think we can pull this off! So….

Paper Chef 26 ingredient nominations are now open.

the current ingredient list is: Zucchini (courgettes), crawfish (crayfish), scallions (spring onions), cocoa nibs, italian prune plums, saffron, blueberries, olives, chicken, peaches, rosemary, five spice (the chinese blend of five spices), ‘skin’ (presumably of anything), basil, cod roe, lard, sardines, caraway seeds, lemon cucumbers, cardamom and apples.

You can only nominate ONE ingredient this time around since we now have a list and you cannot nominate those used last time (smoked swordfish, chile peppers or eggplant/aubergine) and please don’t skirt around it by nominating smoked salmon or something similar.

Winners – let me know your address and at some point in the future I’ll mail you a copy of Digital Dish.

As a reminder, here are

The Rules

Absolutely only the fun of it and for no other reason whatsoever, the Paper Chef challenges each and every one of you reading this to let loose your culinary imagination and make up a dish of your own. Loosely based on the ideas of the Iron Chef, fond TV favorite in the US and Japan, and on the British show Ready, Steady, Cook! (fond favorite in the UK), the Paper Chef is all about creativity and constraint, challenge and cooking.

About a week and a half before the event opens, I post an ingredient list from previous events here at Tomatilla! Older ingredients fall off the list, as does anything that actually got used in an event. Those ingredients are ‘banned’ for a month just to prevent the choices being cream and chocolate and cream and chocolate and cream and chocolate and…you get the idea. Any reader of the blog can nominate a new ingredient (one nomination per month per person please) and it can be anything within the bounds of good taste (both kinds).

Three ingredients are chosen at random from the final list and the host (usually me but not always) picks one more ingredient that is topical or seasonal or that suits our whimsy. The first three random ingredients are announced on the Wednesday before the first Friday of the month (hey – they are official rules – so they should be incomprehensible). The fourth special ingredient is announced on the first Friday of the month.

Then you get five days (Friday Noon to Wednesday Noon) or so to make up a recipe, cook it and post the recipe to your blog. Then post a comment here or send an email to owenl1998 at yahoo dot com to be included in a roundup. Optionally, if you are up to speed on these things there will also be a Technorati tag to place on your post to make it easier for everyone to find posts.

It is also absolutely OK to substitute if you just cannot find an ingredient or if you or someone who will eat the dish has an allergy – just try to substitute with something close to the original to remain in the spirit of the occasion. We know that ingredients are fresh and in season at very different times in different places around the world.

There are a constantly changing set of categories categories every month at the discretion of the judge (but always at least one). Despite extremely fancy creations from many entrants, a good simple entry is just as likely to do well.

The previous month’s winner gets to be judge if they want (and is ineligible to win that month but can still enter) and gives out whatever kinds of awards they like. It is also OK to NOT want to judge, in which case I’ll find a judge of some nature for that month.
I’ve had lots of questions about things like photographs. Photographs are NOT necessary to take part. Nor is having you own blog – I’ll be happy to post a recipe for you if you want. However, it is clear that having a nice photograph will help influence the judges – if they see it looking good it is a lot easier to imagine it tasting good…

We aren’t sticklers for timekeeping here – but turning an entry in after the judging is done probably means you won’t win. And – on the point of competition – most of the people who enter seem to like it being a competition – so it is one. But it is NOT a competitive competition – it is more like a collaborative competition. People love to see the inventive ideas others come up with.

OK, despite all my intentions I am not getting updates done at anything like an acceptable pace. However, in an effort to keep moving, here are the official winner(s) of Paper Chef 25. Since we had a couple of single dish entrants and a couple of multiple dish entrants I am going to just decide to have a singel dish winner and a multiple dish winner this time around.

As usual, it is practically impossible to make any kind of differentiation – the entries are always all so very good. But a choice must be made. So for nest single dish entry, the winner is Mrs Anderson (Heather) of Gild the Voodoolily for her chowder. Abby of eat the right stuff was a worthy runner up (and not a first time entrant as I had said) for her smoked aubergine and elephant garlic soup. And we also had Jonski Farms enter a burger, dip, almost-bengan bhartha combo.

Hard as that decision was, the multiple entry was even harder, especially since the two entrants are two of my all time favorite food blogs ever. Both of them have won Paper Chef before. Both could write knockout cookbooks (and should!) I thought about awarding a tie but that would be a cop out. So I thought and thought and thought some more. And ended up giving the win to Ilva of Lucullian Delights because the pasta dish she made is so simple. Runners up are the Belly Timber crew and especially their ‘Oven-roasted Indian eggplants filled with a paste made from the extras on hand: bell pepper, garlic, chives, Thai chiles, and more of that delicious cherry-smoked cod.’

I am going to ask that all four winners and runners up be part of the next judging panel if time allows – let me know if you are up for it – the next Paper Chef will be kicking off very shortly.

I know that I am holding fire on announcing a Paper Chef winner – especially since the next one is due to kick off pretty shortly! So that’ll come later today.

In the meantime I just need to record a few notes about things I have cooked recently so they don’t slip my brain entirely. We hosted a few parties lately and I actually got to make some new things that came out well. So, in no particular order, with recipes to follow later:

mushroom and onion puff pastry tartlets
pork tenderloin stuffed with sundried tomatoes and goat cheese in a red wine sauce
roasted root vegetables
basic bruschetta
red wine and paprika marinated chicken
polenta slices with heirloom tomatoes
A twist on kir
Fresh heirloom tomato and garlic sauce for pasta

there was probably more but that is all I remember.