Almond Biscotti (Low Carb, Gluten Free)

I love almond biscotti. I learned to make it when I was young (like, middle school?) and somehow never got cut on gratter boxes. I also haven't had one in about 2 years, because traditionally they aren't very low carb.

But I have recently discovered the power of XANTHAN GUM. And yes it sounds like a space alien but it's 'all natural' and more importantly it acts like the protein/binder gluten, which DH can't have and isn't found naturally in any of my low carb flours, especially not my prefered one, almond flour.

The first step is to make almond paste that isn't full of sugar. Fortunately, if you have almond flour, egg whites, and your prefered granulated sweetener of choice (I like Splenda, because I don't have to convert the volume measurement, and erythritol makes my tongue break out, so goodbye Truvia) you can make almond paste! Just throw equal quantities of almond flour and sweetener into a food processor, pulse to combine, then add a couple of egg whites. Start with one and keep adding until it is roughly the consistency of play dough. Voila! Almond paste. If you want marzipan, add more sugar. A nice extra touch is to add about 1/2 tsp of almond extract per cup of almond flour.

After that, it follows standard biscotti procedure. How many it makes depends on how you cut them--if you like your biscotti thick there will be fewer. at about a 3/4 inch slice, I got about 18 large biscotti. They stay slightly moist on the inside. You could leave them in a warm oven, or slice them thinner

YUM

Recipe
 1 batch almond paste (1 cup almond flour, '1 cup' sugar sub, 2 egg whites, 1/2 tsp almond extract)
 4 tablespoons cold butter, cut into small pieces

 1 3/4 cup almond flour + 1 1/2 tsp xanthan gum
 1/2 cup sweetener (3 tbsp honey also works, but raises carb count)
 1/2 tsp baking powder
 heavy pinch salt (to taste)
 2 eggs
 1/2 tsp vanilla

Pulse almond paste and butter together in food processor (or stand mixer). Add almond flour, xanthan gum, sweetener, baking powder and salt. Pulse/mix until well blended. Add eggs and vanilla and pulse/mix until mixture is uniform. Form mixture into a large loaf measuring about 6 inches by 18 inches and 1 inch high for large biscotti,or two loaves about 4 inches by 12 inches by an inch for small biscotti, on a baking sheet lined with a silpat or parchment paper. Bake at 350 F about 30 minutes. It should be lightly golden and springy to the touch. Gently transfer to a cutting board and let cool 5 minutes. Use large, sharp knife to cut into even slices, 1/2 inch to 1 inch thick. Lay them cut side down on the baking sheet, bake another 10 minutes. Flip slices gently, and bake another 10 minutes. Cool on tray, then store in a dry place. May soften over time; if that happens, place in a warm oven(even a toaster oven works!) for 10 minutes, and the crunch should be restored.

Fruit Pie, Take 1 and 2

There is nothing quite like apple pie once apple season starts. Apples are available all year round of course, but there is something about the start of school and the arrival of fall decorations that demands apple pie.

Pie requires a crust. In the old days, I would use good old all-purpose flour. These days, that's not an option, which means experimentation with oat and/or almond flour. I had previously (and very very recently) perfected the whole wheat crust, and having learned from my recent semi-failure with oat/almond crusts, I thought I had learned from my mistakes in the non-wheat pie crust department. Use less butter, more water, let it rest a good long while, work it a little more than you would normal pastry dough. Roll it out on wax paper.

This incarnation was definitely more pie-crust like than the last one. It rolled out alright, though it was still far more fragile than I wanted it to be. During baking it browned nicely, and got fairly flakey in places. Too flakey actually. Sadly, it still had the structural integrity of a crumb crust. The top crust collapsed as the apples underneath it cooked down, and extracting a slice is impossible. It resembles more an apple crisp than a pie when you dish it out.

The flavor for the crust was also somewhat lacking (the filling was perfect however-a little tart and a little sweet). I don't usually think of crusts having a flavor, but my husband complained it tasted a bit like cardboard and it was definitely lacking something. Butteriness for sure, what with the significantly lower butter content, something else was missing that I can't quite put my finger on. I suspect the 'cardboard' flavor comes from the oats, so I think the next incarnation will need some extra flavorings to mute that aspect. A little vanilla and cinnamon maybe.

The structure is a little tricker, but my theory was that I would have better luck making it less like a basic pie crust and more like a laminated pastry. The proteins in oats are not nearly as long and stretch or easily formed as the gluten in wheat. They need more coaxing to come out, as well as more time in liquid. An overnight rest for a very wet, low butter dough, then rolling out, buttering, and booking the dough like you would for puff pastry. I thought that the longer absorbing time, combined with the repeated rolling and folding will give me the protein structure I needed, while folding in the butter will give me the flakiness and buttery taste.

 So for my second try, I made up a very wet, low fat oat and almond meal dough, and pulsed it in the food processor a lot longer than I would normal pastry. It looked kind of like chocolate chip cookie dough made with really warm butter. Then I stuck it in the fridge until it firmed up.

Then I had to wait for it to soften before I could  do anything with it. Isn't that always the way? Eventually, I was able to roll it out into a rectangle, spread softened butter over the middle square, and book it, just like I've seen my mom do a hundred times with puff pastry dough for angel wings.

I did this three times, using two tablespoons of softened butter for each booking, which brought me up to a total of 1/2 cup of butter for about 3 cups of oat/almond flour. With each booking, the texture got smoother, and less crumbly.

First booking.

After 2 bookings.

At the end of it, when I cut it in half for top crust/bottom crust, you could kind of see the layers in the cross section.

My greatest hope for flakey pastry dough.

And then, back into the fridge to let the butter harden up.

The next day, I rolled out the dough. It was a little stiff, but it behaved almost like a normal dough. You could pick it up and move it without it falling apart, which was a huge step forward. I made it a little thick, but that's my preference.

You can see in the next picture, it actually holds up pretty well. You can see the edges are holding up their own weight against gravity and not crumbling.

My one error with this pie happened here. I used completely frozen fruit, and I didn't use enough of it. Live and learn. I was impatient.

The top crust also went on without incident, and stayed intact. I added an egg wash to aid browning, though that turned out to be unnecessary.

In cooking, the crust did sink down over the fruit.

But, this crust didn't crumble. It eats like a normal crust. Its a little flakey, and tender. It still has an oatiness my husband dislikes, but I think that's the nature of the beast, and is will be less noticeable if there is enough filling and the filling's spices are included in the crust. Overall, I think I have hit upon a good, if somewhat labor intensive technique for getting a good oat pie crust.

~PhysicsGal

Oat/Almond Pie Crust (makes 2 thick crusts)
2 1/2 cups oat flour
1/2 cup almond flour
Water
1/2 cup butter
honey/sweetner to taste
Spices to taste.

In a food processor, pulse together the flours and 2 tablespoons of butter, along with any honey and spices. With the  processor running, drizzle in enough water to make a wet, sticky dough like a cookie dough. Wrap, and refrigerate over night or longer.

Take dough out and allow to soften (how long will depend on the ambient temperature in your kitchen). Roll out into a rectangle on wax or parchment paper. Spread 2 tablespoons of softened butter over the central square. Fold in each side, and then fold the whole thing in half. Wrap, and let rest at room temp for 30 minutes. Repeat two  more times, then divide, and refrigerate for at least several hours. Roll out and use as you would normal pastry dough. If good browning is desired, use an egg wash. 

Things look better in the morning.

I recently order a huge bag of really, really fine almond flour and about an equal amount of very fine oat flour. They greatly improved the texture of my Oatmeal Muffins to the point they were like normal wheat-based muffins and not cornmeal (they still don't rise very much, but who cares?). I've been wanting to experiment more with them, since I have so much and neither flour seems to hurt me. What I have learned so far is that experimenting with baking/pastry is a lot harder than experimenting with other types of cooking, and that unless you really mess up*, the results are still delicious.

This particular experiment was inspired by the fact that I have been missing Pop Tarts of late. Yes, those almost-entirely-fake, super sweet toaster pastries. They were a treat for really long car trips and going down the shore when I was a kid. So sue me, I'm nostalgic. But I thought that I could make a healthier approximation with homemade almond/oat pastry dough and some no-sugar-added fruit butters.

So last night I blindly plunged ahead. I probably should have looked up a recipe for pastry dough using almond flour. Or even one that was half oat, half almond like I wanted. I would have seen that almond flour crusts use a lot less fat to hold it together. When making a traditional pastry, I usually used a 1:2 butter to flour by volume (I do not fear fat). Almond flour only needs a 1:5 or less fat to flour ratio (I used a 1:4. I added half the butter I was going to and noticed it was already too 'wet'). Even if I had used the correct amount, it seems a lot of nut crusts have more in common with a crumb crust than the pastry crust I wanted and needed for this application. Even with an egg thrown into the mix, it was too wet and crumbly to be a good dough for pastry. It is, in its present state, very much like a butter cookie recipe. More experimentation is needed on this front.

However, I had made this dough, I was going to use it. After letting it chill for a couple of hours, I rolled out small ovals and put in about two teaspoons of fruit butter and folded it over or layered another piece of dough on top or made a really, really big jam thumbprint with half the dough. They baked up nicely, and looked really great.Until I tried to pick one up and it crumbled. I mean, just fell apart. I eventually enlisted a large spatula to get it onto a plate so I could at least see if it tasted good. It did, but wasn't exactly a pastry.

This morning  I sat down to write a post on "delicious failures". I wanted to take some pictures of the remaining 'pastries' and a picture of how it crumbled. Lo and behold, they didn't crumble when touched! I'm guessing the butter component set  over night so while the the 'pastries' are still delicate and melt/crumble in your mouth, you can actually pick one up. They would never survive a lunchbox, but at least they don't need a fork.

You can see where this one cracked when I tried to pick it up last night

This one has apple butter in the middle. More importantly, its holding together. 

I still want to do some more experimenting with this one before I post a recipe, but its a good lesson learned. Even if your baked goods look terrible straight out of the oven, they may be perfectly fine later.

~PhysicsGal

*Exhibit A: The great sugarless, honey-less spelt carrot cake. Exhibit B: The oatmeal coffee cake with more salt than sugar and not nearly enough milk. blech and crumbly to boot.

Oatmeal Muffins

Hello, I'm PhysicsGal and I'm addicted to baked goods (Hello, PhysicsGal). The problem is, except in small amounts or special circumstances, I can't eat baked goods made with wheat flour. Which for this western-European-descended blogger, is basically all of them. Sorely missed for me at the moment, having found sufficiently low carb deserts, are muffins. Not English muffins, which are good and they already have low carb versions in my grocery store, but American-style muffins, which are basically icingless cupcakes by a different method.  If anyone has found a better way to start the day (pace bacon and eggs) than a homemade blueberry muffin out of the oven, I haven't been informed of it.

So for a while now I have been tinkering with making an oat-based muffin. Oats are afterall the breakfast grain of choice. Nutritious, full of fiber, nutty and cheap. Too bad I can't really stand oatmeal without a lot of brown sugar. Granola is ok, but you can only eat it so long before it loses its appeal. I had seen a couple dozen recipes for oatmeal muffins, but none of them really suited my needs.

So I tried making my own from scratch. The first couple were...interesting failures. The first was like a lumpy soft granola bar. The second had WAY too much salt and the consistency of stale cornbread.

This latest batch is I think a winner. They don't rise very much, but they have a nice, silky texture with a slight grittiness from almond flour, like a store bought cornmeal muffin. I make mine just barely sweet so I can have it for breakfast, but additional sugar could be added to taste. This batch was plain for testing purposes, but any number of additions could be made. I think mixed berries would be wonderful.

The trick as it turns out is to give the oat flour lots of time to hydrate. I made my oat flour from 'old fashioned' oats that I pulsed as fine as I could get in my food processor, so its a little on the coarse side, and it turns out that oats just don't absorb liquid all that quickly. Starch type? All that fiber? I have no idea, but I know that its true. But it does absorb a lot of liquid. When you mix up the dry ingredients for this, it will be genuinely soupy. Potato leek soup soupy. After about 4 hours its the consistency of cake batter. By the next morning it's the consistency of a muffin batter. Mix in your leavening,  and bake as you please. So long as you let the oats soak in all your liquid, and have a roughly 1:1 oat to liquid ratio, you can be pretty adventurous in other aspects I think.

Enjoy!

PhysicsGal's Oatmeal Muffins

The night before, combine:
2.5 cups oatmeal flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
[Opt: additional sugar to taste]

Stir in:
2 egg yolks, beaten with
1/3 cup oil or melted butter
1/4 cup honey
2 cups milk

Mixture will be very thin. Cover, and let rest in a refridgerator a minimum of 4 hours and preferably overnight.

When ready to bake, heat oven to 350 degrees.

In a very clean bowl, start beating the reserved egg whites to stiff peaks.

In a small bowl, combine 1/2 cup nut flour or oat flour with 1 tablespoon baking powder. Sprinkle mixture over the top of the refrigerated batter, and stir to combine.

When egg whites are glossy and peaks no longer collapse, stir in one third of the foam to the batter. Gently folding in the remaining whites.

Spoon into greased or lined baking cups. NB: since these don't rise very much, you can fill the cups almost to the top without the muffins baking into each other.

Bake 20-25 minutes, until tops are getting speckled with brown and a toothpick comes out clean.

Edit: These stay very moist for several days, and freeze beautifully. Allow extra time for thawing, since they have twice the moisture content of normal muffins.

Enjoy!

~PhysicsGal

Nearly-No-Sugar Almond Cookies

Pretty much anyone who has meet me in real life knows that I love to cook, and in particular I love to bake. Growing up it was kind of the household hobby to make cookies or cakes or pies on the weekends or whenever we finished the previous one. Cookies in particular were a near constant. We never had soda (unless we were sick or it was a holiday), or chips or any of the various colorful kid junk food, but there was always homemade cookies. In college, cookies were a kind of stress release. Exams were always accompanied by at least two kinds of cookies, one of which had to have chocolate. When I need to give people a thank you gift, I give them cookies.

So it was rather a blow to my reality when I was told that for health reasons, I shouldn't eat cookies. Not in the generic "don't eat junk food sense" but that I needed to avoid refined flour and sugar or suffer serious consequences in short order. Being determined and prone to culinary experimentation anyway, I tried a whole bunch of disastrous healthy cookies. Note: do not ever try to make cookies with rye flour. No amount of flavoring will help.

Earlier this week however, I was struck with inspiration, and an overwhelming desire for a shortbread cookie. A bag of almond 'flour' was sitting in the back of my pantry. Shortbread cookies are significantly less cakey than other cookies, containing in their simplest incarnation flour, butter, sugar and salt. Surely I could approximate it with almond flour?

Low and behold, it worked. As I was cutting the butter into the almond flour in the food processor, it came to me that I might need a little more binding power. What better than an egg? Add a skimpy 2 tablespoons of honey to 2 cups of almond flour and a handful of slivered almonds, chill in the fridge to firm up, and dole out teaspoons of dough to bake at 375, I had 6 dozen bite sized almond cookies that were halfway between a macaroon and a shortbread cookie. Keeping the dough in ball form let it stay softer in the middle and more macaroon light, flattening the cookie let it be more shortbread like.  I calculated that each cookie has just under a half gram of sugar, which is perfect for my needs, and probably most low-carb people. That half gram is the only carb in the whole cookie. If you can tolerate a little bit more sugar, dipping half the cookie in melted chocolate just makes it better. [If you can't have any carbs  whatsoever, I suspect, though have not tested, adding another egg and using an artificial sweetner would work as well]

I left the flat ones in the oven a little too long, but they still taste good. Just, toasted

Recipe for Nearly-No-Sugar Almond Cookies

2 cups almond flour

1/4 cup butter

2 tbsp honey (the darker the better)

1 large egg

1 tsp vanilla 

Optional: 1/2 cup slivered almonds

In a food processor, combine 1 cup of the almond flour with the butter. Pulse until thoroughly combined. Add egg, honey and vanilla. Pulse until a wet dough forms. Add almond flour a 1/4 cup at a time until the dough is the consistency of  a chocolate chip cookie batter. Stir or gently pulse in the slivered almonds. Wrap dough in plastic and refrigerate at least 30 minutes until dough has firmed up. Dish out 1 tsp  worth of dough onto a parchment lined baking sheet (about the size of a grape). Leave in balls for a soft cookie, flatten for a crunchy cookie. Bake 20 minutes at 375 or until just beginning to brown around the edges. Let cool. 

Unlike grain based cookies which stale in a refrigerator from the crystallization of the starches, these cookies keep very well in a closed container in the chill chest. 

Enjoy!