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So this leaves a mystery: Why the mildewy bread? My best guess so far is that it’s something in the water. Our tap water tastes fine, but Point Richmond does have a dubious past as far as water is concerned. This Point In History: An Historic View of Point Richmond cites an account of the town’s water supply in the old days as “vile, tasting like rotten eggs, and very hard. Dead cats were found in it and sickness was on the go from it.” Mercifully, our water source has changed since then, but I got the Brita out all the same. I haven’t tried bread again with filtered water yet, but hopefully it will help when I do.
On closer inspection, the flour mixture itself smells slightly mildewy. It's worked okay for other recipes, and I haven't gotten sick yet, but I've decided that rather than investigate further, I'm just going to switch to the more expensive stuff and see what happens. Of course, now's probably just as good a time as any to experiment a bit more with the flour mixture recipe itself. What I'm calling "most-purpose flour" right now is basically just a mixture I tried that worked, and I've stuck with it with relatively few modifications. I may try branching out to some more readily available starches.  ACK on topic -I'd been thinking for a while about experimenting with gelatin as a source of protein structure. Then Jen came across a recipe that appears to do just that. It's time to do some systematic tinkering. I'm thinking of starting out with a plain white bread recipe (most-purpose flour, water, yeast, sugar, and salt), and dividing it into several groups: - control (as is) - gelatin added - soy protein added - gelatin and soy protein added I probably can't do this right, though, until I have a real kitchen scale. The cheap grocery store model was leaving me with growing doubts, until finally I tested it by weighing 2 cups of water (which should be just about exactly 16 ounces at this altitude). The needle barely broke the 11-ounce mark. Needless to say, this is not the standard of accuracy to which I ordinarily aspire. So it is now guessing wildly at the weight of the contents above it in the trashcan. Boo.
Slightly off-topic thought: "Canola" = "CANadian Oil, Low Acid". So... "Canola oil" = "Canadian oil low acid oil"? Isn't this just like ATM machines and PIN numbers and UPC codes? I guess if the Canola Council of Canada says "canola oil", I should get over it. Still, though, it doesn't feel right—it makes it sound like there's a canola plant out there, ready to be harvested. (There isn't; canola is actually refined rapeseed oil.) I will probably use the phrase "canola oil" in recipes, but the more pedantic part of me would first like to voice its dissent. I made this a few weeks ago, working only on the knowledge that English muffins are made from yeasted batter that's cooked on a griddle. I started with a very moist, basic batter, and found that these, while surprisingly close for a first attempt, had too little structure and collapsed into a dense mess when flipped. So I upped the flour from 1 cup to 1.5 cups, and the result was improved. They were still too moist on the inside, though, and playing with the heat caused an odd dilemma: medium heat browned the undersides before the muffins were cooked through, and lower heat dried them out without really cooking them, denying them the benefit of the gelatinization/retrogradation process that builds starch structure. A brief tour of the oven helped this, but I'm hoping to eliminate that step in the future and simplify the process. My first guess is that some additional xanthan gum and protein powder would do the trick, as it does for breads. The pleasure of fresh-baked English muffins is one I believe every person should get to enjoy (especially if you've been deprived for a long period of time). The only drawback was having to air out the house because of all the smoke created by stray cornmeal on the skillet. Hopefully a nonstick skillet (which I unearthed just after making these) will help in that respect next time. <h2>English Muffins</h2><h4>v1.1 | yield: 6-8 muffins | gluten-free | casein-free</h4> <ul><li>1 large egg, at room temperature</li><li>3/4 c warm water (~110°F)</li><li>1 1/2 cups most-purpose flour, protein added</li><li>1/2 packet (1 1/4 tsp) rapid-rise yeast</li><li>1 tsp sugar</li><li>1/2 tsp salt</li><li>cornmeal, for dusting skillet</li></ul> Beat egg in 2-cup liquid measuring cup. Add warm water and whisk with a fork to combine. Add remaining ingredients (except cornmeal) and combine well. Let rise until almost bubbling over (rising time will vary). Meanwhile, preheat oven to 300°F, and place a cooling rack on an oven rack in the center position. Heat a lightly oiled cast iron skillet over low heat. Use a sifter to dust the skillet with cornmeal, and then drop about 1/3 cup of batter at a time over cornmeal. Clean excess cornmeal from between batter mounds to avoid smoke. Cook until underside is golden brown and top is beginning to look dry, then flip onto a cornmeal-free area of the skillet. Continue to cook until browned, and move to rack in oven. Let bake for about 10 minutes, then remove and cool. Serve toasted with bumbleberry jam. No, really. That stuff is tasty.
Well, there are two main reasons for my relative lack of posting of late. The first is that I've just been having trouble getting back into the LJ groove; the second is that there's not too much more to report. Which is good! Because baking has become far less experimental, and more about just making food. Here's the scoop on the flour mixture I use (this yields just shy of four pounds): <h2>Most-purpose flour</h2><ul><li>2 (16-oz) bags white rice flour</li><li>1 (14-oz) bag tapioca starch</li><li>1 (12-oz) bag potato starch</li><li>1 cup millet flour</li><li>2 1/2 Tbsp xanthan gum</li></ul> (Net weights are based on the flours I've found at the Asian market. The exact ratios don't seem to be too incredibly critical.) No protein, you ask? Ah, observant you are! I've been finding that the protein is redundant if I'm making cookies, muffins, or anything else that contains eggs. Since that means extra cost, and extra protein intake (which isn't great for the ol' kidneys), I abstain when mixing batches of flour. I'll add some protein powder to the mix if there are no eggs, though—as well as extra xanthan gum if I'm making something like bread or bagels, which require more gluten-like oomph. About a tablespoon of soy protein powder and a teaspoon of extra xanthan gum per cup of flour usually does it. I find the texture with this mixture is closer to wheat flour than any of the component flours/starches, which I believe is because wheat has an unusual starch granule size distribution. If you measure the starch granules in wheat flour, you'll find two predominant sizes. Almost all other starches have a more bell curve–like distribution around a single size. So my theory is that having a combination of flours creates the same textural effect as wheat's dual-maximum distribution. Like I said last time, I use this flour in just about everything. It often takes slightly more of this flour to get the right texture—up to 10% more—but otherwise I've been just substituting it for all-purpose flour in regular cookbook recipes. I will continue to post recipes if I come up with things. For example, the English muffins I made a few weeks ago were actually an act of invention, since there aren't boatloads of English muffin recipes floating around out there. Will post it next.
I'm just going to pretend it hasn't been well over half a year since my last post here. Just go with it. So I started experimenting with adding protein to the mix, with fabulous results. I've now got a basic flour mixture that I use for most things. It's based on a mixture of white rice flour, tapioca starch, potato starch, and millet flour, with xanthan gum for binding and soy protein powder for proteiny goodness. I've managed to make bread that actually looks and tastes like bread (though there's still plenty of work to be done), and just about everything else I've tried has worked, at least decently, with this mixture. I've even found that adding rice bran isn't half bad for mimicking whole wheat flour, though I still have to go easy on the potassium (which rice bran has in spades). Tonight, Housemate Jotan and I came up with a brilliant idea. We call it: <b>Alphabet Quiche</b>. The ingredients, in no particular order of course: Asparagus Broccoli Chili pepper Dill Eggs + egg yolks Freshly ground pepper Granulated sugar Heavy cream (or half cream and half milk) Italian mushrooms (aka Crimini) Japanese potato starch Kosher salt Large onion Millet flour Nutmeg Olives (on the side) Parsley Queso (aka cheese, preferably Gruyère) Rice flour (white) Soy protein powder Tapioca starch Unsalted butter Vegetable oil Water Xanthan gum Yellow bell pepper Zucchini I also opted to add some bacon. And, of course, the potato starch doesn't have to be Japanese. Mine just happens to be.
Well, the cookies came out of the oven, and they were delicious! (If I do say so myself...) As promised, photo documentation: <center><table border=0 cellpadding=4 cellspacing=0><tr><td align=center valign=top><a href="http://www.space-pirates.org/gfbaker-pics/1.jpg"><img src="http://www.space-pirates.org/gfbaker-pics/1t.jpg"></a><br /><small><b>Fig. 1.</b> The dough before baking</small></td><td align=center valign=top><a href="http://www.space-pirates.org/gfbaker-pics/2.jpg"><img src="http://www.space-pirates.org/gfbaker-pics/2t.jpg"></a><br /><small><b>Fig. 2.</b> The dough in the oven, after 5 min</small></td><td align=center valign=top><a href="http://www.space-pirates.org/gfbaker-pics/3.jpg"><img src="http://www.space-pirates.org/gfbaker-pics/3t.jpg"></a><br /><small><b>Fig. 3.</b> In the oven, after 17 min</small></td><td align=center valign=top><a href="http://www.space-pirates.org/gfbaker-pics/4.jpg"><img src="http://www.space-pirates.org/gfbaker-pics/4t.jpg"></a><br /><small><b>Fig. 4.</b> The final cookies</small></td></tr></table></center> I made three cookies from each group (from left to right: the control group, group F, group O, group S). As you can see, there's a marked difference in the dough from the beginning. After five minutes in the oven (Fig. 2), the difference is even more dramatic. The control group has begun to melt, Group S has begun to melt even more, and Group F is actually showing signs of rising. By minute 17 (Fig. 3), the cookies have, more or less, assumed their eventual morphology. The final cookies (Fig. 4) were all tasty, but in different ways. The control group was slightly thin in the batter, with crispy edges and a slightly chewy center. Group F was all chewy (<lj user=aethera>'s favorite), Group O was (not surprisingly) oatmeal cookie-textured, and Group S was even thinner and crispier than the control group. Apparently the added baking soda reacted too quickly to form much of a lasting rise, and neutralized the acids in the baking powder, resulting in a flatter cookie. To my taste, the perfect chocolate chip cookie lies somewhere in the range represented by the control group and Groups F and S (Group O was very specifically an oatmeal cookie, and would probably have been better with raisins). The flavor was amazingly ideal for a chocolate chip cookie; the biggest difference seemed to be in my original plan—using butter and brown sugar. Perhaps half the additional rice flour of Group F, plus some baking soda, for next time. In the meantime, it's a good thing I liked them all—there's still plenty of dough in that freezer... So. On with the narrative. Emboldened by our success, we set about adapting the Moosewood Muffin recipe, which, in my pre–gluten-free days, I often made with pumpkin and chocolate chips, for use with rice flour. This was not an experiment; I didn't measure the ingredients very carefully. But boy, did they turn out strange! They had absolutely <b>no rise at all</b>, so when cooked, they were remarkably similar in texture to nian gao (a rice flour–based dim sum treat which I quite enjoy, but which doesn't work well with the pumpkin flavor). Well, at least the cookies went well. So my challenge, over the next couple days, is to figure out why the cookies turned out so well, while the muffins, with essentially the same flour mixture, turned out so atrociously. Off to Whole Foods for more xanthan gum (and maybe some guar gum for comparison), and then back for some good old-fashioned kitchen chemistry. In the meantime, remember: You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you knead.
Now, I can't tell if this is an epiphany or not. It struck in the middle of the night, which gives it about a 50/50 chance. It arose, in some ways, from my growing obsession with Alton Brown. It's not healthy, really. Recently, the imaginary conversations that usually run through my head when I'm having trouble getting to sleep have begun at times to morph into imaginary Good Eats episodes. And, of course, they now turn to gluten-free baking. Patently unhealthy as this is (I won't even delve into how it's affected my dreams—no, not like that), it has gotten me thinking about baking less as physics and more as chemistry. I was thinking about xanthan gum, and why it's become the de facto nearly-all-purpose gluten substitute. Simply put, it's sticky. It provides the cohesion that gluten-free flours lack on their own. But then I realized where it falls short, and why it works so poorly for breads. Xanthan gum is a polysaccharide—a carbohydrate. Gluten, on the other hand, is a protein (or rather, its components, gliadin and glutenin, are proteins). As such, it does more than just provide cohesion. It's responsible for the structural integrity of bread, not to mention the lovely golden brown crust of a freshly baked baguette... (ahem) I'm getting wistful. "No," Alton told my subconscious, "no carbohydrate can ever substitute for a protein. They don't, uh, form the right intermolecular bonds. Look: No gluten, no protein. No protein, no quaternary structure. No quaternary structure, no, uh, structural integrity." Then he looked confusedly at some sort of toy he'd apparently been using as a visual aid (I wasn't really paying attention; it <i>was</i> my subconscious). Wrinkling his nose, he tossed it dismissively aside, cuing a zany sound effect. The frame froze and dimmed, and a rotating, nondescript factoid heralded the arrival of a commercial break. When my conscious mind processed what had just happened, I realized that Alton was right. It is the quaternary structure of the protein complex that gluten forms when baked (or at least something like that) that gives bread its crumb, its rise, and its ... well, its breadiness. Which explained perfectly why my one disheartening attempt at gluten-free bread baking had turned out so dismally. No matter what type of GF flour I used, and no matter how much xanthan and/or guar gums I added, the end result was a pale, overly moist brick so dense I had to calculate its event horizon before attempting to take a bite. The dough had been plenty sticky, so it was able to form "cells" of water vapor and carbon dioxide as it baked. But there was too little intermolecular structure, so the walls of the cells (the dough separating the gas bubbles) were way too thick. Some gases were able to escape, but rather than forming channels and allowing circulation of hot, dry air as wheat bread would, it simply collapsed back down on itself and trapped moisture in. Hence the moistness and density. This also explained, I think, why my chocolate chip cookies take so much longer than normal to bake. Moisture is trapped in to some extent—though less, since it's a less floury dough—so it takes longer to cook out; also, without the flour proteins, they brown less quickly. (They still brown, what with the eggs and butter, only more slowly.) <b>So.</b> The question now is, where can I turn to get the protein content back into my dough? I'm contemplating another experiment (after we move up north, where it's actually cool enough to bake!), to test various sources of protein. Some ideas I've come up with so far: <ul><li><b>Eggs</b>—would also provide some fat for a moister (in a good way) bread</li> <li><b>Milk</b>—specifically, curds. If I strain cottage cheese, I should be left with most of the protein and fat, with less of the water of plain milk</li> <li><b>Cheese</b>—this seems to be in part how <a href=http://www.recipezaar.com/68293>pão de queijo</a> holds together, but bread shouldn't <i>always</i> taste like cheese</li> <li><b>Soy</b>—nice, pure protein, but probably too water-soluble to be useful</li></ul> I'm open to suggestions! I'm plotting this experiment for late August. Time will tell whether this is a dead end train of thought caused by cat-induced lack of sleep, or a true epiphany that could lead to some seriously... well... you know. (Sorry, Alton, you were saying?)
I finally got around to it tonight. I upped the sorghum flour to 1 cup, downgraded the xanthan gum to 2 tsp, added 3/4 cup rice flour, and used tapioca starch only for rolling out the dough—oh, and I added a tablespoon of sugar. It was super-yummy, but still a little hard. It wasn't the chewy sort of hardness of the last round, but more of an overly crispy texture, edible with a knife. Maybe more butter. More butter never hurt anyone, right? So. Until next time, don't go basting butterballs; please stick to the seventeen-pound turkeys you're used to...
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HERE'S something distinctly funky going on with the flours I've been getting at the Asian market lately. My last several attempts at bread have all been disastrous; the sponge nearly explodes instead of rising, and has an incredibly sour smell. At first I hoped against hope that it was just some of the local L. sanfranciscensis coming to say hi and turn the bread into sourdough, but no such luck. The one time I plowed ahead and baked the stuff, the loaf smelled like mildew and had grey splotches on the bottom and sides, almost like it had turned moldy in the oven! Naturally, this has been delaying the gelatin experiments (though I do have a nice, accurate new scale now).