I'm Officially a Tweaker

 In Arizona, there are some lovely colloquialisms surrounding the crystal meth "issue" - a horrid plague of a situation that makes easy fodder for unfortunate jokes and references.  A "tweeker" as I finally understood it (after a few years of just glossing over it with discomfort) was someone who was all hopped up on the lovely chemical or someone jones-ing for it.  In both cases, these people were frightening spectacles, one-person train wrecks:  crazed looking eyes, tattered attire, scraggly arms, matted hair, maniacal voices, reachy arms and hands....a generally bedraggled appearance with a bit of menace thrown in.  The term was used casually and frequently by certain of my acquaintances ... it still makes me cringe, actually.

THEIR term makes me cringe, that is.  T-w-e-e-k-e-r.

So I decided to make up my OWN t-w-e-a-k-e-r term.  My "tweaker" is a person who changes, re-works, and finagles recipes.  My kind of tweaking has delicious results.  A person who has experienced something I have tweaked will have anything BUT a bedraggled, unfortunate, unhealthy appearance.  Quite the opposite.  Thus, I am a new kind of tweaker.  Not a born-again tweaker,  but a whole new kind of tweaker entirely.  We aren't going to get into the born-again thing.  Not in this post and probably not in any post.

The results of my recent recipe-tweaking have increased my confidence to a point where I'm trying things that would have made me nervous just thinking about a year ago (a tweaker's high?).  As I've mentioned before, I have a ton of baking books and cookbooks, several of which I really hadn't re-explored too much after starting this gluten-free thing.  Lately, I've been revisiting those books, sometimes finding great things to build, sometimes getting ideas for random things to make, and sometimes concluding that there are indeed parts of those cookbooks that are useless to me now.

One questionably useless section in the Joy of Cooking was the doughnut section.  Let me first say that I firmly believe that any baked good can be made without gluten.  Excuse me.  Allow me to clarify and expand on that:  not only CAN it be made, but it can be made tasty (tastier, maybe?), just as easily, and it can stay true to the original product.  When I say it stays true, I mean that a gluten free poundcake is a thick, luscious buttery slice of deliciousness that heartily melts in your mouth.  A cookie can be soft or crispy without any sand issue going on.  A yellow cake is fluffy, pillowy, with an open or dense crumb, depending on what kind of yellow cake it is.  You get the idea.  All that said, I don't think that I, personally can make just ANY baked good without gluten and have it live up to all those standards.  So, sometimes I don't try.

I love doughnuts.  Everyone likes doughnuts, but I salivate when I see them.  Fresh ones, that is.  Good ones, that is.  I have a reaction bordering on ecstasy when I get to lightly press a finger in a fresh, plain cake doughnut and see that cakey goodness bounce back at the exact speed I compressed it .  I chew them really, really slowly to taste every single crumb.

So, peering at this doughnut section in this great cookbook, coming off the high of 2 tweaking experiments gone extremely well, I decided to give it a go.  My tweaker's high lead me to tweak more, which should surprise no one.  I have made baked gluten-free doughnuts before, but I had never tried real, true, sour cream cake FRIED doughnuts.  It was another crazy night on Walnut Street.

The results were not perfect - I'd like the doughnuts to puff more when they are fried.  (Brief aside - frying has always intimidated me because it involves hot bubbling oil.  I was even feeling brave enough to do this.  It is NOT scary.  You ABSOLUTELY need a candy thermometer that can clip onto the side of your pan.  A gas stove helps.  Properly heated oil that is not overfull with whatever you're frying is a perfectly manageable entity.  Just don't get super excited to see how your creation smells while it's cooking and put your face really close.  The oil is HOT.)  I'd like them to cook a bit more completely without browning more and without lowering the temperature of the oil.  So, I need to figure out a slightly lighter batter.   In other words, more tweaking is in my future.  I'm addicted.

While the results were not perfect, they were quite tasty and tasted like doughnuts.  And I might make more tomorrow.  Timewise, you need a good 3-4 hours or so to make them, so plan accordingly.  2 hours of that is time for the batter to firm up in the fridge, so you don't have be there the whole time.  Or, you can make the batter then do the doughnuts the next day or 2 days later.  Whatever works for you as long as the batter gets that time in the fridge.   Plan accordingly and do this when you're not on a time crunch.

Here is the recipe and instructions.  Let me know how it works for you.  Worst case scenario (this is the reasoning that finally made me go for it):  your batter falls apart in the frying oil and you have fried nubbins of sour cream-cinnamon-almond-doughy to dispose of.  In  your tummy.

Ingredients
1/2 c. coconut flour
1/2 c. almond flour
1/2 c. arrowroot
1/4 c. tapioca flour
1 scant teaspoon guar gum
1/4 c. glutinous rice flour (Regular rice flour will work. Sorghum would probably work too.)
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt

2 large eggs
1/2 c. sugar
1/2 c. sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
Oil or shortening for frying - enough to fill a medium sauce pan 2 inches deep.  I used palm shortening and it worked great.  2 inches of palm shortening in my stainless steel sauce pan was almost the whole big container, so make sure you have plenty of your frying material before you start cutting out your doughnuts.

Whisk together all the dry ingredients in a medium bowl.  If you keep your almond and coconut flours in the freezer like we do, use your fingers to break up any clumps.  You need all the different flours to emulsify fully.

In a separate large bowl, use an electric mixer on medium or whisk energetically until the eggs are foamy.  Then add the sugar, sour cream, and vanilla and mix until blended completely.
Pour the dry ingredients into the wet ones and mix on low or energetically with a wooden spoon until everything has come together into a soft dough.
Pat the dough into a disk and wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate 2 hours or up to 2 days.

When you're ready, take out your disk and press or roll it out to a thickness of 1/2 inch.  (I put the disk on a big sheet of plastic wrap, put another sheet on top of it, and pressed through the sheet.  It was easy and quick.  Unless you really like rolling, there is no need here.)





You'll need to start heating your oil at this point.  Clip that thermometer on the pan when you start and leave it on - you need to monitor the temperature as you go.  I'd set it on low-medium heat and be patient.  If you go much higher in the interest of quickness (like I did), the oil will get way too hot and then you have to wait even more for it to cool down.  You need it between 360 and 370.  The temperature will drop when the first batch goes in - don't panic.  You can turn up the heat a smidge, and just keep an eye on it. Too low, and you have oil soaked but not fully cooked doughnuts, too high and you have burnt oil or doughnuts or both.  If you have never fried anything before, you might be expecting bubbly splashing oil (like I was).  Hot oil or shortening does not bubble until something is in it.    Even then, the "something" will have a halo of small bubbles around it, cooking it through, nothing crazy.  If you have splashing and boiling oil, it's way too hot.
Using a well-floured (rice flour works great) doughnut cutter or a small biscuit cutter, OR (my personal favorite) just roll gobs of dough into balls about 1 to 1 1/2 inches in diameter.  Drop three of those (whatever "those" are) into your oil at a time.  When one is done, carefully put in another.  They are done when they are a rich golden brown color all over.
It's best to keep 3 in at a time.  If you don't, and they all happen to keep cooking at the exact same rate, so you take them all out and put in three new ones at the same time (like I did), it'll be fine, you'll just have more variation in temperature, which is fine.
Put cooked doughnuts on paper towels to cool.  If you want, toss them in powdered sugar or a cinnamon & sugar mix.  Or just enjoy plain.  Or maybe with some coconut milk ice cream.  I guarantee, no matter how you eat them or serve them, the recipients of these Tweaked Doughnuts will look happy, well-fed, and healthy.  The only quality they might share with the aforementioned t-w-e-e-k-e-r is the reachy arms.  But once you taste one of these, you'll see why that's totally understandable.

Tweak on!

 

A Crazy Night

I did something crazy last night.  Perhaps not crazy on a clinical level, but pretty out of character anyway.  I followed a recipe almost exactly.  It's a recipe I've made many times, but just always tweaked a little bit or a lot, depending on my ingredient warehouse and my mood.  The first few times, I didn't have the exact rice flour called for.  The next few times, I subbed in some cocoa powder and STILL didn't have that dang rice flour.  I had regular rice flour, just not glutinous rice flour.  I had rice flour and various other finely grained flours in enough abundance that I felt no need to add glutinous rice flour to the mix.  Plus, it didn't fit in the cabinet.  Plus, sometimes the food budget doesn't allow for someone to recklessly buy 4 different kinds of flours every week.  And that's a good thing.  Because someone has to pick and choose which flours they buy when, and be pretty darn methodical about it, getting the timing right so that someone doesn't run out of tapioca and arrowroot at the same time because that could be disastrous.  It's a balancing act in art, really.

Back to last night.  I made chocolate chip cookies.  Gluten free, of course.  From the Blackbird Bakery Gluten Free cookbook (blackbird-bakery.com), one of my favorites.  The author, Karen Morgan, is meticulously precise and likes her food delicious whether savory or sweet.  Gluten free is not a limitation.  It's an invitation to experiment, to expand your horizons, and to make food that won't hurt your tummy.  It's just another way of eating, and one worth trying out if you haven't already.

Why is it worth trying out if you haven't already?  Well, no matter your current and long-held eating beliefs and ingrained habits, it's always interesting to mix it up and try something different to see how your body reacts.  You don't want to try just anything, of course - nothing known to be harmful or to create negative side effects, but perhaps something less accepted, something unusual, something that all the cool kids aren't doing.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I do not have celiac disease.  I did not have a known strong intolerance to gluten.  Nor did I overeat carbohydrates.  I had a pretty well-balanced diet.  However, I've been limiting gluten intake for probably about 8 months now, and there is a noticeable decrease in water retention.  Yay for less bloating!  Yay for not feeling overly full EVER.  But that's just me.  The change took awhile to kick in - just like with any type of lifestyle change, they tend to take awhile to truly become part of your lifestyle, and only then, only when you proceed accordingly without focusing on the change, do you free yourself to experience the internal and external changes that are wrought by a change in diet that agrees with your body.

In any case, who doesn't need chocolate chip cookies in their life?  And their pantry?

Here is the recipe I followed.  Feel free to tweak:  substitute up to 1/4 flour with cocoa powder and/or any nut flour.  If you don't have glutinous rice flour, just use regular.  If you like milk chocolate chips, by all means, substitute away, and add up to 1 additional cup of chips.  That is one piece of the recipe I did not follow.  She calls for 3 cups total of chips, and I use about 2 or a bit less than that.

1 1/4 c. glutinous rice flour
1 1/4 c. sorghum flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp guar gum
1 1/2 c. packed light brown sugar
1/4 c. plus 1 tbsp granulated sugar
1/2 c. (1 stick) plus 2 tbsp unsalted butter at room temperature
3 large eggs
4 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups chocolate chips of your choice (or more to taste)

Combine all the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix thoroughly (use a hand mixer, food processor, or stand mixer).  Add the butter and mix on low speed (or pulse, if using a food processor) until blended.  Add all the eggs at once and the vanilla and mix until light and fluffy.  Fold in the chocolate chips until evenly distributed.

Cover and refridgerate for at least 2 hours or up to 5 days (she says 2 days, but I've kept it for a week, just baking 6 cookies at a time every day).   If you use just a bit of dough at a time, be sure and keep the rest wrapped up nice and airtight and cool.  You can freeze it as well, for up to a couple weeks, I'd estimate.  If you're lucky, like I am, maybe you live with someone who likes to be a batter tester for these times when you use just a bit at a time.  He is willing to sacrifice himself for the cause of testing the batter at least once a day to make sure it's safe for your consumption.  I live with just such a selfless person.

Position a rack in the center of your oven and preheat to 325.  Line 1 or 2 baking sheets with parchment (this works MUCH better than greasing a pan for these cookies).  Using an ice cream scoop or other spooning implement, place equal sized mounds of dough at least 1 inch apart on your baking sheets.  As long as all your cookies are about the same size as one another, make them however big or small you like, just adjust the cooking time accordingly.  If you're using a 1 1/2" ice cream scoop, your cookies will take about 13-14 minutes until they are done and soft.  The middles should spring back when pressed gently.  Bigger cookies = longer cooking time; smaller cookies = shorter cooking time.  Remove from the oven when done and let cool for 5 minutes before removing from pan to cool completely.

Important Note!! These cookies firm up more as they cool, so if the bottoms are golden brown, they mostly spring back when pressed, and you like soft cookies, take them out.

Enjoy!