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.

Shifting Cooking Gears

Cooking has always been about experimenting for me. Going by the recipe is fine for somethings, like candy making or if I know I enjoy this person's particular formulation of the dish, but by and large I like to tweak recipes. Non-baking recipes I'll usually just make up as I go along. Baking recipes are more chemistry dependant and therefore harder to do on the fly.

Lately though, I feel like I am having to reinvent the wheel, knowing what a wheel looks like but having to make it with very limited and somewhat unsuitable materials. It's exhausting trying to do that for every dinner.

Lately I've been having PCOS flare ups, partly just because and partly because there has been some stress in my life, so I've had to switch back to a stricter low-carb/low-GI diet. This would be annoying but par for the course, if we hadn't started a gluten-free diet for DH. He's had 'stomach problems' all his life, which I have been trying to solve for the 3 years we've been married and I've been in charge of procuring his food. Gluten-free was the last on a long list of things we've tried, and so far seems to be the most successful. We'll look into having proper testing done at some point, but since he just took a new job in a new city, the timing is not right for finding a specialist in our current area.

So in short, I am facing the challenge of cooking both low-carb/low-GI (LCLGI) and gluten-free. Lots of LCLGI food is gluten-free because if you aren't using any grain-flours you aren't going to be including gluten. It's also rarely recognizable as analogous to its carb-loaded counterparts, and to a certain extent just requires recognizing that there is no substitute for pasta or bread. Gluten-free foods, of which there are TONS on the market right now all nicely labeled, are rarely LCLGI because they are made with rice starch, tapioca starch, potato starch, etc. Pretty much everything I can't eat. Thus I am faced with the choice to make two different dinners, or to try and find food that lies in the overlap that we both find palatable.

Of course, some things don't really change. Meat is gluten-free and low-carb. Vegetables, pace potatoes, ditto. But there is something so fundamental to having some kind of starchy thing, and that's mostly where the problem lies. DH can have rice, but I can't. There are both low-GI and gluten-free pastas on the market, but of course they occupy opposite ends of the spectrum. I can have rye or spelt bread in small amounts, but he can't. I can make risotto with rice for him and risotto with barley for me, but that seems absurd. The best LCLGI and gluten-free recipes feature coconut flour, which has a noticeable taste for me that I don't always want. Most of the recipes I've come up with use almond flour which is unavoidably gritty, or oat flour which is gritty and whole-wheat tasting unless you really work to hide it.

 Cookbooks are typically one or the other, and if they are both they are typically one of the crazier diet fads, like paleo. While that is the closest to what we are eating, I just can't say we are going paleo. The whole diet is based on bad or non-existent science, cheese is something I rely on, and I can't get over the absurdity whenever I see a paleo recipe call for things bananas or brussel sprouts. Those yellow bananas you get in the grocery store have existed for less than 200 years, and look nothing like a paleolithic banana. Brussel sprouts only popped into existence in the 1300s. Coconut flour also did not exist in paleolithic times.

In short, food posts are probably going to be a little less "here's a recipe I made up last week" and more musing on what works and doesn't work as I try to reformulate, replace and otherwise revamp my repertoire of foods in the coming months. A journaling of success and failures so I hopefully don't have to repeat the latter too often. Also most likely they will be shorter interludes as I work on my Basic Physics series. And if you happen to follow me on Twitter (@PhysicsGal1701), now you know what all the food posting is about.

Cheers!

Apple Butter Muffins

When I woke up this morning, I wanted muffins. It happens, especially on the weekends. As I puttered around making coffee, I decided that what I really wanted was applesauce muffins, like my mom used to make. But I didn't have apple sauce, and I didn't have her recipe, which I couldn't use anyway since it would use white flour. Time to be inventive.

I didn't feel like dealing with the fussiness of my totally-from-scratch muffin recipe. I decided to gamble on retrofitting the muffin recipe out of my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, and use some apples-only apple butter I had in the fridge as both the apple sauce and the sugar.

This is what it produced:

Hello, delicious

It produced a muffin that did not collapse. That had the texture of a muffin. That had the taste of an applesauce muffin, without any sugar or artificial sweetner. That browned nicely.

Most importantly, it produced a muffin that my husband continued to eat through out the day to the point when I had to ask him to leave me some for breakfast tomorrow. I made a dozen. There are 2 1/2 left. Most were eaten by my husband who hate healthy hippie food. THAT, my dear readers, is called success. 

Apple Butter Muffins

1 2/3 cup fine oat flour

1/3 cup almond flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

2 large eggs

1/2 cup unsweetened apple butter

1 cup milk

1 tsp vanilla

Sift together dry ingredients in a large bowl. In a separate small bowl, beat eggs. Add apple butter, milk and vanilla extract and whisk to combine. Form a well in the dry goods,  pour the wet into the dry and whisk thoroughly to combine (overbeating is less a concern with oat flour). The batter is going to be thin. Ladle into greased or lined muffin tins, and let sit a minimum of 20 minutes (you can easily make this the night before, and just pop into the oven when you get up). Bake in a 350 F oven for 30-40 minutes, until muffins are springy to the touch and a toothpick comes out cleanly. Let sit 10 minutes before eating.

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.