Thought Bloggles

It's Saturday, and you know what that means: Baking experiments! Ok, maybe you didn't know, since I haven't posted so much about it, but at least today I did one, testing how gluten behaves in various solutions. Would it poof up in the oven? Would it form durable bubbles? How wet would it get? What would the final consistency be? I decided to keep the tests as simple as possible, using just a liquid and gluten, not even adding salt. I did four tests in little teflon pans: #1: I took 50ml cold water and poured 25g gluten into it, stirring as best I could, then let it stand for half an hour. #2: Seeing how #1 clumped up, I now took 100ml cold water and slowly poured 25g gluten into it while stirring, then let it stand for half an hour. #3: With the oven preheated, I again took 100 ml cold water and slowly poured 25g gluten into it while stirring. #4: Lastly, I beat one egg and slowly poured 10g gluten into it while stirring, then beat it some more. I pour four into t...

Due to  +Mickey Blake 's recent insulin resistance diagnosis, we've been eating a low-carb diet for the last several months. While I don't have a diagnosis myself, I have followed the diet, initially mainly to make cooking easier, but after a while also because it just made me feel better in several different ways: Disclaimer: I'm not a medical doctor or even close, this is just what changed for me. I have noticeably more energy. Where I would usually wear out in the late afternoon with my mind just fizzling until I got some food, I now keep fresh throughout the day. At the end of the day, I feel tired, but more in a physical way rather than a mental way. I still like to take a short nap mid-afternoon, especially on busy days, but I can certainly keep doing more things for longer than before. I need less sleep.  My daily sleep need has dropped from 8-9 hours down to between 6 and 7 hours. Even when I stay up late, like this New Year's Eve where I didn't get...

As promised, an update on the brunkager after they were done. They worked, and even though I used the sunflower seed flour together with baking soda, they didn't turn green. It appears this particular reaction also requires oxygen, and this is a very compressed dough that was then wrapped and put in the fridge. They came out quite nice (I forgot to get some Zitronat, so they were lacking that lemony taste), but definitely softer than the usual ones. Now I like a softer cookie and eschew the efforts to make them as crunchy as possibly, so this was very much my thing, but your mileage may vary. Over all it was a success that I will repeat and refine next Christmas. Brunkager This is a modified recipe based on  God Mad  (no, nothing to do with a Divine Hulk), 6th edition. I'll only write the recipe with my replacements and modifications, for the original, get the book. Note that this recipe takes some planning, so read carefully before commencing. 125 g butter 100 g xylit...

Everybody has their particular cookies that they just must have for Christmas. For me, the cookies are the Danish traditional pebernødder ("pepper nuts", known as Pfeffernüssen in Germany) and brunkager  ("brown cakes"). With our recent dietary changes, these cookies presented a challenge. Between these and the sugar cookies, I have baked quite a lot this Christmas, and our buckets of almond flour are getting emptied at a surprising clip. With the l-carb shop offering almond flour for as little as €12/kg , I can afford to go through some - that's at least a better price than the €30+ seen in some shops. Here's the recipe for pebernødder - the brunkager must wait till tomorrow since they have to rest for several days. Pebernødder This is my mother's recipe, with low-carb replacement marked in bold: 500 g flour (replace with 200 g flour, 300 g fine almond flour ) 1 tsp ammoniumcarbonate ( hjortetaksalt,  in Germany Hirschhornsalz) - use 1 1/2 to 2 ts...

Low Carb Sugar Cookies (based on the Better Homes and Gardens recipe) Makes about 40 cookies 120 g butter, softened 100g xylitol in crystal form (e.g. Xucker) 1 egg 1 tbsp vanilla extract 140 g fine almond flour 10 g coconut flour 10 g gluten 1/2 tsp salt 1/2 tsp baking soda zest of one lemon (optional) Pre-heat oven to 180C. In a medium bowl, blend together butter and xylitol, then add egg and vanilla. In another bowl, mix the remaining ingredients, then sift them into the wet ingredients and blend well. (The dough will start out looking dry, but will come together shortly.) On a well-floured surface, roll out the dough, flipping it repeatedly and dusting with more flour to keep it from sticking. Apply your favorite cooke-cutters and place the cut-outs on a baking sheet, not quite touching each other. Bake for 9 minutes (or until the cookies start to brown) in the top part of the oven. The gluten can probably be replaced with more coconut flour. Not sure what non-gl...

Going further on my quixotic quest for a low-carb flour replacement, this time I threw myself at a classic Danish Christmas delicacy: Pebernødder (pepper nuts). These are traditionally made not to sit in a tin, but to be put in braided paper hearts and hung on the Christmas tree (next to the live candles) for all to nosh on as they please. This is my mother's recipe: 500 g flour 1 tsp ammonium carbonate ("salt of hartshorn" or "baker's ammonium") 1 tsp cinnamon 1 tsp cardamom 1 tsp pepper 125 g butter 250 g sugar 2 eggs Zest of 1 lemon Mix dry ingredients, blend in the butter, then add the eggs. If the dough is dry, add a bit of oil (just not olive oil). Let stand in the fridge for at least an hour, then roll into 1cm-thick sticks, cut into short pieces, and bake at 200C for 8-10 minutes. When rolled out, the dough should be moist and pliable, only barely flaky. After baking, they should be soft and have a distinct poofed-up appearance (due t...

Looking around on the internet for how much almond flour to use instead of regular flour, I kept finding big variations, from 1:1 replacement to 1:2. Since baking is fairly finicky with the amount of ingredients, this confused me. But when I grabbed an extra bag of almond flour at the local grocery store (yes, there are specialty flours at the grocery store here), I noticed a difference in consistency and decided to take a closer look. Here's a close-up of the two flours using a macro lens. On the left is MeaVita Mandelmehl, on the right Borchers Premium Mandelmehl. In both cases, I've used a blunt instrument to gently distribute the flour to better see the difference. The flour on the left, the MeaVita brand flour, is in much larger chunks than on the right. The MeaVita flour also feels more moist, though I don't know if that's a direct effect of the size or because more oil has been extracted from the Borchers flour. It is, however, obvious that the two flour...