Gluten-Free Gastro-Gnome

The Placebo Diet

2010-02-22T19:04:00.002-07:00

One of the highlights of the past year was the two weeks I spent in Banff, Alberta, at Science Communications 2009. Supervised by Jay Ingram, one of my childhood Science Communication Heroes, we learned a little about a lot of aspects of communications.

One of my favourite sections was science writing. In one afternoon we had to develop a 700 word science story. Several months later, the article I wrote that day in August has become a thousand word article, published by someone else on the web.

Please visit The Mark News to read my article "Autism and the Placebo Diet." A friend of mine, who has a son with Autism read it this morning, and replied:

"Thank you. People like Jenny McCarthy have really put things like the gluten free diet in the news making those of us who don't think its right for our kids feel guilty. Meanwhile the hard science quietly advances with out a celebrity champion and mothers like me and my friends never hear about it."

Rhinestone Shades and Cheap Sunglasses

2009-10-25T21:46:00.005-06:00

As you may know, I started this site as a catalogue of my dietary adventures, or occasionally misadventures, as I learned to cook for my son, heretofore known as the Maestro. We started with a diagnosis of Sensory Integration Dysfunction (SDI) and a potential connection between Gluten & Casein and altered sensation. By following the diet strictly, and comparing what happened when we missed something, I have concluded that for us the GFCF diet doesn’t directly make a difference with SDI. The both of us get a headache -or worse- when we eat gluten. A headache makes any condition more difficult to deal with. Over the years, we have seen diet make a huge difference in the Maestro’s behaviour, to the point that eating the wrong thing can turn him into someone else for days. Since we prefer the standard version of him, there is now a long list of foods that he has to avoid if any of us are going to be happy.

He is now in grade one, and for a boy with his mental acumen he has had a surprisingly difficult time learning to read. Partly this is due to what turns out to be a fairly severe case of ADHD, and partly (or so we hoped) it was due to Irlen, or scotopic sensitivity syndrome. I wrote about Irlen Syndrome a few years ago, but it turns out it was on my now-closed chemistry blog. This is what I said:

I have several relatives who have what is called Irlen syndrome in the United States , or Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome (SSS). The basic gist is that certain wavelengths of light interfere with the brain's processing of visual stimuli. Wikipedia has a good sample of what written text may look like to someone with SSS; in talking to some of my cousins about it, they say that things appear differently to each of them. A few of my siblings have it, but not nearly to the extent that my cousins do. My siblings all seem to feel better when they wear colour-tinted glasses, and they had trouble at math. Looking at the sample text below, which I think is supposed to be Times New Roman font, you might expect a problem keeping track of a negative sign in an equation.

Do I think I have Irlen Syndrome? No, I don't think so. Everything is looking the same as it used to, it just hurts my eyes hurt to look at white things. I suppose that if I get some more sleep this weekend, and it doesn't go away, I may need new glasses. This is just one of those issues in my family that you have to consider, like to eat or not to eat wheat. When half your siblings wear coloured lenses on a regular basis, and your cousins ALWAYS wear glasses and a sun-visor, light sensitivity is going to make you consider Irlen Syndrome. ”

In the spring, we took the Maestro for an Irlen screening, and were told that he had it. They gave us some coloured plastic sheets that are supposed to help when you put them over text you are trying to read, but they didn’t really seem to make a difference. The next step is to spend one million dollars on a full diagnosis of the helpful and harmful wavelengths of light. Then you send away for a pair of glasses that filter the light you see reflecting off everything, not just pages of text. Luckily, the lenses are included in the one million dollars, and you just need to find a pair of Ray Bans, out of which you can pop the lenses.

Even though we hadn’t seen a noticeable difference with the overlays, we felt like a full diagnosis and glasses was the thing to do. This summer, we spent three days in another city so the Maestro could spend time each day looking through colour filters. We spent several weeks combing the city to find glasses that block peripheral light and that the Maestro would wear. We finally mailed them off and spent 4-6 weeks waiting, trying not to get our hopes up that lightly tinted glasses would solve all of our problems.

What problems? Well, the Maestro is at a great school that is really dedicated to working with students on what they need, but it was clear that reading was becoming a big problem. It didn’t seem to matter how much we worked with him, sight-word recognition was not getting much better, nor was his ability to differentiate things like p and d or b, or m and w. Then there was his attention deficit and his hyperactivity, which makes it tough to concentrate on something long enough to make progress, whether you can see the letters or not. His impulsiveness and his noise offends people, who then tell us that we just need to be harder on him more consistently so that he will decide that misbehaving isn’t worth the consequences. Or worse, people get offended and instead of telling us what we need to do better, they complain to our neighbours about our bad parenting.

So how can Irlen glasses help? Well, if you look here (and you really should. I’d put the figure here, but it’s an animation and won’t copy) you can see samples the several different ways that Irlen syndrome can distort what you are trying to read. Scroll down to the distortion effect box, and try out the various options. If getting rid of those visual effects doesn’t make recognizing the, them, and they, easier, I would be surprised.

Then there is the simple overwhelming nature of seeing the world this way. Here is a great picture of a Brain scan, done on a person with Irlen Syndrome. Areas with brain activity are shown in white. The set on the left are done without glasses on. Compare the same brain on the right, when the person puts their glasses back on. With a brain that active, focused on nothing in particular, concentrating on the task at hand is going to be difficult.

Does Irlen syndrome cause ADHD? Can putting on a pair of glasses make it go away? This is the sort of thing we were trying not to get too hopeful about, but the hope was the reason we were getting the glasses in the first place.

He’s been wearing the glasses consistently now for three weeks. In that time, we’ve seen leaping improvements in his reading. He recognizes and remembers words by sight, rather than trying to chant the letter combinations that he has trouble seeing. We got an email from his teacher last week, saying that she could tell that our hard work was finally paying off and that he is making great gains. We’d been working hard the whole time, and it is only now that he has his glasses that the time and effort invested is paying any dividends.

Interestingly, he has also become much calmer. We haven’t had to talk to him once since he put on his glasses about getting in someone’s personal space, which was one of the things that required consistent consequences to curb. (The preceding sentence brought to you by the letter c.) We asked him this morning why he wasn’t invading people’s space anymore, and he said that he forgot all about doing it. I’m not sure exactly what that means, but whatever had driven him to try to talk to people an inch from their noses is no longer there. Reward, punishment, reminders, nothing we have ever come up with for the past five years has ever made a difference for this behaviour, and it simply disappeared.

Not all problems have disappeared. Now that the letters stopped moving, he still has to learn to read. Now he can learn, though, which is a huge improvement. He still has to pay attention to the task at hand, and that may or may not be solved by glasses. When people ask me what difference the glasses make, I tell them that he has gone from having ADHD to just having ADD.

Those of you who have never met us, who only know me through this blog, may wonder why we haven’t just put him on medication. It would be sooo much easier than all the diet restrictions and baking, which haven’t completely worked anyway. Now there are these glasses, which are just weird. Just put him on drugs, already! Many others consider medication a crime against children, and would never consider it. This is almost 1500 words, and medication is too big a topic to sandwich in here. It must suffice to say, for now, that ADHD medication can’t fix moving letters or gluten sensitivity.

Others might figure that the concept of "fixing" a kid like the Maestro is the problem, and he is who he is. Today, the Maestro got himself dressed for church, packed his activity bag and put on his socks and shoes without being reminded. We were on time, and he ended up with the things he wanted in his bag, which then kept him occupied through the meeting. The things he packed, well... those are uniquely him. If he can focus on being the himself that he wants to be, that's progress.

P.S. The child formerly known as The Maestro now wants to be known as Obi-Wan Kenobi. I think I'll call him Ben.

Treats? Treats

2009-09-28T13:41:00.000-06:00

Evan appreciates having treats. I don't mean that he enjoys treats, though he certainly does. He appreciates them, kind of the same way Ben Gunn, the maroon on Treasure Island, appreciates cheese.

A couple of weeks ago we were at a family gathering; desert was pie and ice cream. Evan can eat neither of these so he had a piece of gum. Yesterday he went to a birthday party. While everyone else was eating cake, he munched on a few pieces of what may be the only gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free*, corn-free, grape-free, coconut-free non-gum candy in the world. He routinely watches other kids have fruit snacks, potato chips and juice boxes that are off-limits because they have some trigger food on the ingredient list.

Today we had company for dinner, and there was wheat-flour carrot cake with cream cheese frosting for dessert. Knowing this ahead of time, I made a rice-flour carrot cake for us. With the lemon glaze from the freezer, It was one of the rare times Evan had it just as good as everyone else. As he finished his second helping, he gave me a big grin and said, nodding, "This is great, Dad. Yeah. Really great!"

After dinner, one of the other husbands asked me what I do for fun. Pretty much the only thing I do is bake, but I don't usually think of this as "for fun"anymore. It doesn't really count as leisure since I have to do it for us to live.

Ben Gunn spent three years on Treasure Island before Jim Hawkins and crew arrived. For three years he lived on salted goat meat and fruit. When he met Jim, one of the first things Gunn did was ask for a piece of cheese. He said that he would dream he was eating cheese, only to awaken and find himself in a cave, with nothing but salted goat for breakfast. When he finally got his cheese, you can imagine that he enjoyed it, but he probably appreciated it in a way that most of us never will. Tonight as Evan thanked me for making him a good cake, it seemed like he appreciated it,

Carrot Cake
3 cups shredded carrot
3 eggs (or equivalent flegg)
1 cup oil
2 cups brown rice flour
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp xanthan gum
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

Mix everything together well, and put in cake pan. One of the joys of GF baking is that you don't have to worry about mixing order so much. Bake at 350 F, until it looks done. Voila!

* gum always contains soy lecithin. I think it is the soy oil that bothers him and soy lecithin seems to be fine, at least in the amounts they put in gum.

Red Lentil Soup (Plz I can haz sum?)

2009-06-14T17:32:00.009-06:00

Years ago, when I was a sophomore organic chemistry student, I was eating my lunch before class when the cute girl I had recently started sitting next to asked what I was eating. What I was eating was Red Lentil soup, which I love. I love this soup, and expect that everyone else will, too, so I asked her to taste it.

Afterward, she confessed that she thought "Not only is this guy willing to share his lunch, but he can make very tasty lentil soup. I should date him!" So, she did. It has been 11 1/2 years since she tasted my soup before class, and 10 years since we got married.

Not only does this soup have great lentils, and rich spices, but it doesn't call for additional salt. Be sure to rinse the lentils well, until they stop foaming.

RED LENTIL SOUP

Heat 2 TBSP olive oil
Saute, about 5 minutes :
2 large onions, diced
3 carrots, diced
3 cloves Garlic, minced

Add, saute 1 minute more:
1 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp marjoram
1/2 tsp coriander

Add:
6 cups stock
1/4 cup fresh or 1 TBSP dried parsley
29 oz can tomatoes, pureed
2 cups well-rinsed lentils

Simmer until lentils are tender, adding more water if needed.

Add 2 TBSP red wine vinegar.

If desired to make the soup thicker, take some out and blend it. Return blended soup to the pot.

Lentil Paste

2009-06-07T21:32:00.003-06:00

I recently went to a workshop on eating legumes. It was mostly on things I knew (how to soak beans so you can cook them) and things I didn't care to know (how to make your own tofu). I did pick up one new tip -- Lentil Paste.

The way the story goes is that you can replace half of your oil with legumes, which seemed a little strange at first, since a bean and a measure of oil aren't really that similar. It turns out that if you have some cooked lentils, you can put them in your food processer with enough water that they process well, until you end up with a paste, like thin peanut butter. THIS replaces half the oil in your recipe.

Since I have recently started using Flegg for baking instead of egg, the amount of protein per muffin has gone down considerably. Lentil paste in a Flegg muffin is the perfect solution, at least every five days when lentils are up in the rotation. I've made a couple of different things with lentil paste, and so far everything has turned out fine.

Here is my original recipe for pumpkin muffins, as provided by my friend Sharon, for the second annual pumpkin fest.

1 1/2 c sugar
1 c pumpkin puree
1/2 c oil
1/2 c water
1 eggs

Mix together well, then add:

1 2/3 c all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp cloves
3/4 tsp salt

Put in muffin pan, and bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

However, since then, I have learned to modify recipes slightly. OK, more than slightly these days. Here is my new and improved, hypo-allergenic Pumpkin Muffin Recipe:

1 c sugar
1 c pumpkin puree
1/4 c oil
1/4 c lentil paste
1/2 c water
4 TBSP half strength Flegg

Mix together well, then add:

1 2/3 c GF flour (Rice, sorghum, millet, whatever is up in the rotation)
1 tsp xanthan gum (muffins do well with 1/2 tsp per c of flour)
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
~~1/4 tsp cloves~~ (omitted, because the Maestro doesn't dig it)
3/4 tsp salt

Put in muffin pan, and bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

Sweet and Sour Lentils

2009-05-25T15:07:00.002-06:00

When Riley and I started dating, this one was her favourite. It was the Red Lentil soup that first got her attention, but this one kept her coming back.

It has the familiar sweet & sour flavor that is a hit with our kids, but lentils instead of meat, of course. This makes it a good choice for Lentil day, especially since lentils are one of the few legumes we can rotate at the moment.

2 c. water

1 c. brown/green lentils

2 buillion cubes

1 bay leaf

½ tsp salt

¼ c. (pine)apple juice

¼ c. cider vinegar (plain vinegar is not as good, but will do in a pinch)

¼ c. brown sugar, packed

1 can pineapple tidbits , drained (optional)

1 T. corn starch or tapioca starch

½ c. cold water

1 med onion, chopped

3 carrots, sliced

1 garlic clove, minced

½ green pepper, chopped

Olive Oil (as necessary )

Appx. 3 cups cooked rice (1 ½ cups uncooked)

1. Rinse lentils in running water until they stop foaming.

2. Combine first 5 ingredients in a large pot. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 30-40 minutes.

3. Combine last 5 ingredients in a deep pan. Saute in just enough oil to lubricate the pan, until the vegetables are as crunchy or tender as you like them.

4. When the vegetables are done, add the juice, vinegar and brown sugar. If your lentils are done, you may add them at this point, or after step 5.

5. Simmer the vegetable/juice/vinegar mix for 10 minutes.

6. Mix 1 T. cornstarch (ir Tapioca) and ½ c cold water in a jar. Shake well and add to mixture. Cook at medium heat until the mixture thickens.

7. Serve over hot rice.

Flegg, the DIY vegi egg

2009-05-17T21:58:00.003-06:00

How do you make Flegg?

You take flax seeds, about 1/4 cup, and boil them in a cup of water until the water starts to resemble egg white. About the time that it foams and boils all over the stove, you know it is done. (If you are paying attention, you can skip the boiling over part.) You quick filter it, before it cools too much, and voila! You have vegi egg white. One TBSP replaces about one egg.

It is a pain to work with. I've been making mine about half strength, and doubling the amount I use, and it is still a pain. It is a non-Newtonian fluid, which means that if you try to spoon it out, you get nothing, and if you try to pour it, you get everything. I need to get some ice cube trays so that I can freeze it in one egg portions instead of measuring it every time. I recommend that when you go to the store to buy whole flax seed, you also buy a metal strainer and some ice cube trays.

If you don't pour it into single serving portions while still hot, the best way I have found of measuring it is to dip in a measuring spoon and scoop out a blob. Quickly scrape the top of the spoon with a knife, like you do when measuring out flour. This cuts off the flegg in the spoon from the flegg outside of the spoon.

You have to cut it because flegg is composed of soluble fiber; it is long carbohydrate strands that hold onto water and hold things together. It isn't going to replace your xanthan gum or your gluten. It kind of replaces the structural properties of the egg protein. You will know that you have used too much if your end product feels gooey, like when you use too much xanthan gum.

Flegg is NOT an emulsifier, meaning it won't hold your oil and your water together. I still haven't found a good non-egg-non-soy emulsifier. Mustard does the same job, but I don't' think mustard would help my brownies any. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know.

I have used flegg successfully in GF:
Bread
Muffins
Carrot Cake

It has done a passable job in pancakes (you have to use a metal spatula to flip them, because they are going to stick).

It has failed me spectacularly in:
Waffles (since a metal spatula isn't going to help you here)
Brownies (you REALLY need an emulsifier to keep all the fat in)

When my Dad taught me to make pancakes he told me that if your pancakes are sticking, the solution is to put more oil IN the pancake, not ON the pan. I think the sticking that happens with pancakes and waffles is the emulsification issue again. I don't know the microstructure of waffle batter, but it seems like the oil isn't where it needs to be to allow the waffle to come off.

So, we're back to toast most mornings. Rice with Teff, sorghum and uncontaminated oat, in a rotation, at least until we're ready to try millet again.

Flegg in the rotation.

2009-05-17T21:56:00.003-06:00

Flegg, not Frack, though that was kind of what I thought when I first had to try it. Flegg is a do-it-yourself Flax-based egg replacer.

You see, this past year, the Maestro started Kindergarten at a French Immersion school nearby, partly because the gifted school we wanted to get him into was full, and partly because we hoped that having him learn French would keep his brain busy enough that he would enjoy school. It turns out that they spent weeks learning the names of the colours and he was just bored in another language.

By Christmas break things were going so poorly that he was staying in the coat room for most of the morning, and something desperately had to change. I called the gifted school and through the judicious manipulation of conversational pause length, we got him a spot replacing someone who moved. We also started seeing a psychologist, who told us that he is an INTJ, which means, among other things, that he has "an unusual independence of mind, freeing the INTJ from the constraints of authority...for its own sake." This is not generally an appreciated trait within a Kindergarten classroom.

We also found out that he has some pretty serious ADHD, which is also not a generally appreciated trait within a Kindergarten classroom. We knew that he was H, but were actually surprised at the AD part. He focuses so intensely on things that he likes. He got the nom de plume of the Maestro because he knew all the instruments of the orchestra by the time he was three, by sight AND by sound. An english horn and an oboe are pretty tough to distinguish. He has since moved on to submarines, whaling, space, pirates, and now Star Wars. It turns out that that is part of the profile of ADD: intense attention on interesting things. It is the not interesting things that are hard to pay attention to.

The psychologist we have been going to is really good at finding alternative ways to treat ADHD, including changes in diet. The Maestro has been developing food sensitivities other than Gluten and Casein so we have been on a rotation diet the past few months. This is partly to help identify foods that are a problem, and partly to keep other foods from becoming a problem. Scientific studies on rotation diets are generally inconclusive; they tend to find that research subjects are unable to stay on a rotation diet.

I don't disagree. We haven't been nearly precise enough to satisfy control group issues. We've done the best we can, and statistical significance aside, it seems to make a huge difference. Here is a list of foods that have had to leave the rotation.

Eggs
Beans (especially soy)
Corn, in any form.
Grapes
Nuts
Coconut
Nitrates

Other things we are sceptical of, but haven't been banned completely.

Potatoes
Millet
Citrus Fruit
Tapioca

So, Eggs. What do you do without eggs? You don't do much baking if the second thing on the banned list is beans. The thing is, the best egg replacer I have come across is 1 tsp of soy powder and 2 TBSP of water. It works as a great emulsifier, keeping everything together, and it has protein that helps hold your stuff together. But if you can't have soy, then what?

You use Flegg.

A Loooooong Hiatus

2009-04-03T20:04:00.004-06:00

You may have noticed that I haven't posted in a while. And by a while, I mean almost a year and a half. A lot has changed in that time, including what we eat.

We have a few new recipes for baked goods, which was really the big challenge initially that started this whole thing off. We don't have a LOT of new recipes for baking, since I figured out how to convert almost any wheat flour recipe into GF on the fly. I haven't seen much point in posting those, since they come straight out of the Purity cookbook or Betty Crocker.

The biggest change in baking is the total absence of sorghum flour. About a year ago I spent several months trying to get back-ordered sorghum flour, to no success. There was this world-wide food shortage thing going on, and I suspect that most of the sorghum ended up being fed to cows instead of to me. We switched to Millet instead, and have enjoyed that as well, if not better.

My standard flour mix now is 1 measure each of brown rice flour, millet flour and tapioca starch. I added the brown rice flour since it has pretty good nutrition, and I can get it pretty cheaply. The reason I can get it pretty cheaply is that I now have a grain mill, which I love. I will have to tell you about it in another post. It has been almost everything I had wanted it to be.

Where does this blog go from here? I felt like I had reached the apotheosis of GF baking when I read the regular brownie recipe right out of the cookbook and converted it to GF as I went along. Riley thinks we should start posting some of our dinner menu, especially since I am now eating low sodium. I'm hoping to post a new dinner idea about once a week, so stay tuned.

Even more things about me

2007-10-11T13:00:00.001-06:00

The Thrilling conclusion...

5. I used to live a 20 minute bike ride from campus, and loved to ride my bike. For years I rode to work all through the year, regardless of the temperature. I don't like to ride in the snow or the rain, but I could ride until the temperature dropped below 15 °F. There is something about riding in the cold that made me feel alive. Now, I live a 20 minute drive from work, though when there are other people on the road it takes me 40-60 minutes. I haven't yet found a place in my schedule to get the exercise I used to get on my way to work. I used to swim, regularly but I sprained my elbow and had to stop. I haven't tried it in over a year, but I constantly mean to start again. Maybe Tuesday.

6. I don't like Taco salad, but I do like Tacos. I occasionally like pickles, but only by themselves. I always have to pull the pickles out of hamburgers and sandwiches. I've never eaten lobster. The few times I've had the opportunity I have declined. If I really love it I'd just be developing a taste for something that I can't afford. If I don't love it, I'd be disappointed after everyone telling me how wonderful Lobster tastes. I'd rather live not being hooked on or disappointed by Lobster.

7. I'm over 30, and I've never voted. As a Canadian, I can't vote in the U.S., and I've always been in the U.S. during Canadian elections. Because Canadian elections are conducted so quickly, I have always missed the chance to register for an absentee ballot. Home Town is having an election this month, but I haven't yet lived here long enough to vote.

8. My favourite novel is War and Peace. Once I got past the first third, and had figured out who the important characters are, I started to really care about them. The whole point of the book is how to be happy. Everyone has a different idea of what leads to happiness, and each finds that what they thought would lead them there does not. The question that lingers over every page is whether they will figure life out before it ends. The thing that I love is that the book is so long that Tolstoy has time to fully develop everybody's thought process, and show why they try what they do, and why it works or doesn't work. Anything shorter wouldn't be able to accomplish what Tolstoy is trying to do here. It's glorious.

Things about me.

2007-10-07T19:57:00.001-06:00

As you may know, I recently wrote, defending and deposited a doctoral dissertation. Then I loaded up my home, sold the house and moved to another country. Then I started a new job. This didn't leave a lot of time for keeping up with blogs that I otherwise enjoy. I have a bloglines account that keeps track of new postings for me, and I recently had the chance to go look at some of what I had missed over the last part of the summer. One thing I missed was the "8 random facts about me" meme that a number of bloggers participated in. Of course then, I missed the invitation from By the Bay to tell you 8 things about myself. Having just moved herself, By The Bay will either understand my tardiness and know that I didn't quit reading her blog, or she'll wonder what all the whining is about. Anyway, b etter late than never, so here I am.

In any other forum, not eating gluten would be a random fact, but I don't think it counts here.

1. I am by training a medicinal organic chemist; for my Ph.D. I designed and synthesized potential drugs for imaging breast cancer. One of the tenets of both chemistry and the biology that chemistry interacts with is that structure (chemical and biological) leads to function (chemical reactivity, biological response). I think that this has really affected how I approach baking. I tend to be less interested in following a recipe than understanding what each ingredient is doing. If I don't know what something does, I don't want to put it in my food. One result of this is that I don't post recipes as often as many (all other?) food bloggers, because I don't feel like the recipes themselves are that important, unless you have exactly the same taste as I do.

Some people don't want anything in their food that they can't pronounce. I can say [insert IUPC name here] but I still don't want it in my food.

2. The picture I use for my online persona is not really a picture of me. It is my kitchen gnome. His name is Gourmand, the Gastrognome. That is a pun that I end up explaining to a discouragingly high number of people. Gourmand now lives at my office because Riley doesn't appreciate his contribution to the aesthetics of our home.

3. That brings up another random fact about me that I occasionally wish was more apparent. The proper pronoun for me is He, not She. I suppose that people may get confused because my spouse, Riley, has a masculine name, and ElwoodCity isn't a name at all. Also, I bake, which is traditionally women's work. When our two-year old daughter Hildr was younger, Riley used to call her "girly". For a time she started to worry that by calling her girly, Hildr would end up feeling forced into a stereotypical gender role. Then she realized that if Hildr ended up feeling "girly" she might think that that meant she was supposed to use mow the lawn and use the power tools like her Mom, instead of baking like her Dad, so that's probably OK.

4. OK, those aren't exactly random. Here's a random fact: I don't use Shampoo. I have curly hair, and curly hair is usually much drier than straight hair. When I use shampoo, my hair gets frizzy, especially since I moved back to Home Town. This isn't to say that I don't wash my hair; I simply use conditioner to wash it with. When I don't wash my hair, it does get oil. I've been washing my hair this way since before I stopped eating gluten, and have had much less trouble with it than when I used shampoo.

I think that I talk too much, so I will only tell you four things about myself today, and give you the rest later in the week. I know. The suspense is killing you.

Muffin Mix

2007-09-25T06:51:00.001-06:00

I realized the other day that it had been since classes started since I had posted anything. Time sure does fly. I love my new job, and feel like most days I do a pretty good job of it. Yesterday I had 35 students staring at me blankly as I tried to explain how increasing the number of contributing resonance structures can actually lower the acidity of a proton. I want them to realize when they are confused about a concept; if it intuitively makes sense whenever I am talking, they will think they know it when really they don't. However, I don't want to be the one confusing them. Yesterday I felt like I accidently stepped over the line a bit.

Sunday morning we needed a snack to take to church with us, so I decided to make muffins. As I was getting out the mixing bowl, Riley asked me if I was sure I wanted to do that, because we needed to start out the door in an hour. By the time she had finished the question I had all my dry ingredients in the bowl, and just needed to add oil and water. From start to finish, I had muffins baked in 25 minutes. I have finally, after a year of needing to get to it, figured out a basic muffin mix. I wish I had pictures for you, but our camera went belly up a few weeks before the move.

25 minute Muffins

2 ¾ cups dry muffin mix

2/3 cup vegetable oil

1 1/4cup water

Mix, and Bake, 20 minutes at 350 degrees F.

So, what is in the mix? .

4 cups Sorghum Flour

2 cups Tapioca Starch

1 ½ cups Rice Flour

½ Cup Amaranth Flour (You may substitute more rice flour, I suppose)

1 ½ cups Sugar

8 tsp Baking Powder

6 tsp Xanthan Gum

4 tsp Salt

3 Tbsp Soy Powder

The Soy Powder is so that I don't have to include eggs with the wet ingredients. For someone with a soy sensitivity, feel free to leave it out, add two eggs and reduce the amount of water when you want get ready to bake.

I'm still thinking about the problem of egg sensitivity AND soy sensitivity, but haven't come up with anything yet. The problem is that both eggs and soy have high concentrations of an emulsifier called lecithin, which is structurally similar to soap in some ways but tastes a lot better. Lecithin is a great emulsifier, meaning that it holds the oil and the water together in one phase, like fat free Italian dressing, instead of allowing them to separate like normal dressing does. One question I need to find the answer to, I suppose is whether someone with egg and soy sensitivity can use purified lecithin, or if it is the lecithin itself that is a problem. Has anyone who can't eat soy tried purified Soy Lecithin in baking?

Using soy powder or soy flour instead of egg works fairly well in most things that I've baked. It's really only since we moved that I've been able to experiment with soy in Gluten free baking because Hildegard, for whom I did some baking, couldn't handle soy. 1 ½ tsp soy with some extra water, like a Tbsp or so, is a pretty good egg substitute in muffins and cakes, but it doesn't work as well in bread and works horribly with waffles. It may be the lack of cholesterol, I don't know, but they stick something awful in the waffle iron. It may be that if I added extra oil to compensate, it would go better.

Moved-in round-up.

2007-09-02T20:24:00.001-06:00

Time to start blooging regularly again. I have mostly-completed moving my fanily from the Midwestern United States to Western Canada to take a Faculty Postiion at Home Town College (HTC), Canada, where, incidentally, I did not attend school. Aside from the customs and immigration issues that were both more complicated and easier than expected, moving to another country entails a lot of adjustment, diet-wise.

It turns out that basing your entire food system around one grain doesn't work very well if you move to a place where no one else eats that food. You'll have a hard time continuing to eat Putine everyday if you move to Texas, for example. In my case, I discovered that Canada has, in general, not discovered the joys of baking with sorghum flour. At the very least, I expected to find Soem small bags of Bob's Red Mill Sorghum flour at some of the more snobbish grocery stores. But no, it was nowhere to be seen. Since the last time I bought Jowar flour from the Indian Grocery, it smelled like wheat flour, I have been hesitant to go that route. I finally make it to a hippy foods-type store on the west side of the city and found that they sell bulk sorghum flour for a pretty decent price. I have ordered a 25 kilo bag of it, which they tell me should come in next week.

The interesting thing about this sorghum flour is that it appears to NOT be the sweet white sorghum that Bob's Red Mill and Twin Valley Mills Uses. They couldn't tell me what kind it was, or where it came from except the assure me that it was a Canadian Source, and not from China. Instead of a pale amber, this type is more reddish. It is curious that in the mid-west I had amber soghum flour and purple millet flour, and here I have amber millet flour and red sorghum flour. Wikipedia lists over 30 varieties of sorghum, so who knows. This kind tastes a little more bitter than what I am used to, but it bakes the same, otherwise.

The other big news is that Canada has other types of rice pasta than I have ever seen before. Obviously, the U.S. wouldn't have had President's Choice , but a third company, Rizopia, is in competition with Tinkyada. I've tried them both, and they appear to be similar to Tinkyada, with the main advantage being that they are both cheaper. I've been stocking up on Rizopia products since they went on sale, 4/$5 for the past two weeks. That is simply unheard of with Tinkyada, which I have NEVER seen go on sale.

So I think we're set, food wise. With the bulk Sorghum, the sale on noodles, with the 2.99/gallon Soy Milk, being Gluten and Dairy Free here shouldn't be so tough. The last thing I need to find but haven't has been the Maestro's favourite Cheerios knock-off, the Apple-Cinnamon Perky-O's. I saw a box at the other hippy food-type store, but it was approximately ONE MILLION DOLLARS, so I didn't buy it.

I have something to say about Egg Substitutes (bad news, sorry) and a book review that I hope to get to this week. We'll see how it goes. Classes start on Tuesday, and I jost got my office and a teimporary computer on Friday. That's another post, though.

I'm still alive

2007-08-24T13:23:00.001-06:00

I know that it appears that I have retired, disappeared or become trapped at the border. In fact, I am simply taking a while to get everything set up in my new home/workplace, and have classes that start in just over a week.

We arrived in Canada with mostly minor annoyances only. The main problem was not in getting Riley, my American wife, accross the border; the big problem was the car. With defending, revising and depositing a dissertation, packing and loading the truck, and cleaning and selling the house, the ONE thing that was seriously neglected was the procedure for exporting a car from the U.S. and importing it into Canada. We got through the border; the car did not.

My Mom ended up driving to the border and pick us up. You'd think that a Ph.D. in his early 30s wouldn't need his mom to come get him anymore, but I think there are some things you just never grow out of.

Anyway, we're here in Home Town, and getting settled in. I have found most of the gluten and casein free things we need. I'll have to go into some more detail on that soon. Not all the products we used in the States are readily available here, and there are some new things to try. I think I have a 50+ lb bag of sorghum coming to me soon, but I'm not sure.

I think I really love my job. I don't have an office yet, which is another good story, but the situation here is a lot more fluid than I had realized. In fact, I need to log off in a couple of minutes to go sit in on a job interview. Things are fluid around me, but I am expected to be permenant, so the real question is what do I want to make of myself here. I haven't fully figured that out yet, to be perfectly honest, so it will be an interesting first few years.

Time to go. I have more to say, but I thought I should say something today. It's the post that's never started, as takes longest to finish, as the old Gaffer used to say.

Gluten Addiction?

2007-07-26T13:56:00.001-06:00

It's probably been a couple of weeks now, but Kate asked a question about the potential for becoming addicted to gluten. I mean, I think that many of us wish we could eat a juicy doughnut every once and a while, but Kate seemed to think that there is something more to it for some people. Are some people Jonesin' for a doughnut for more reasons than that they smell good around 4:00? I've read up on it while taking a break from getting ready for my dissertation defense and now that I've finished, it seems like a good time to share what I found.

First off, we know the incomplete digestion of gliadin produces peptide fragments that are also known as exorphins. Where that name comes from, I don't know. As I understand it, an exorphin will have comparable action but opposite effects to an endorphin. They interact with the opioid receptors, the mu, kappa and delta receptors, which are located predominantly in the central nervous system (CNS) as well as in the digestive tract.

These are the same receptors that are involved with opium and its purified components morphine and codeine, as well as heroin, which is a semi-synthetic derivative of morphine. Mu receptors generally are responsible for the analgesic effects, respiratory depressant, pupil constriction, euphoric and physical dependence properties. Kappa receptors also affect analgesia, as well as sedation, physical dependences and dysphoria, possibly by inhibiting mu receptors. Delta receptor action is poorly understood, at least when the book I was looking at was written.

An interesting side note that I hadn't been aware of before is the fact that the opioid receptors in the CNS become habituated, whereas the receptors in the digestive tract do not. The consequence of this is that to get the same high, an addict needs to take more drug than they used to, but as they do so the effect of the drug on the gut becomes more and more extreme. When you realized that morphine has been used to relieve diarrhea, it makes me think that perhaps they might need to be taking Alli to balance out the effects.

Biologically, these receptors are activated or deactivated by drugs but they are designed to function in response to chemicals that are made in the body rather than chemicals made in a poppy or a chemistry lab. These endogenous ligands are called endorphins. They are responsible runners high, where a person gains a boost of energy, mental acuity and relief from pain. It isn't clear exactly how this works, because inhibition of runners high using opioid receptor antagonists does not produce the opposite of these effects. Exorphins on the other hand DO cause the opposite effect of a runner's high: loss of energy, loss of mental acuity and the onset of pain. That sounds like a pretty complete explanation of what I feel when I ingest gluten, I'd say.

This is where the speculation and anecdotal evidence begins. I have found that my sensitivity to gluten has increased, rather than decreased as I have been on a gluten free diet. That is, I now get terrible headaches when I eat gluten that I didn't notice having continually before. My speculation is that a similar habituation process can occur with gluten that occurs with heroin. When I ate gluten all the time, I needed more to get the same effect. The difference is that heroin makes you feel good and gluten makes me feel bad. Now that I am off gluten, I have become de-habituated, if that is a word, and am more sensitive.

Second, if gluten peptides are interacting with the same receptors that heroin does, is it unreasonable to assume that for some people they can be habit forming in a similar way. I have often heard that heroin is relatively easy, though extremely messy, to get off of. The withdrawal symptoms are painful and messy, but they end and then the former addict can go on with life. However, approximately 25% of heroin addicts are never free of the craving, and must continue methadone treatment indefinitely.

We do know that aside from the usual withdrawal symptoms, there is something called protracted abstinence syndrome that can last up to six months. It includes depression, abnormal response to stressful situations, drug hunger, decreased self-esteem, anxiety and other psychological disturbances. My book says "Long-term opioid craving might result from a pre-existing or an opioid-induced hypofunction of the endogenous endorphin system. Therefore, to rehabilitate these addicts and keep them in a functional state, low levels of opioid may be necessary." Could there be an "opioid induced hypofunction of the endorphin system" that causes a person to crave gluten forever? I haven't found any research on it in the scientific literature, but it makes sense.

It may be protracted abstinence syndrome that persists for up to six months, and you are giving in and having a slice of Poppa John's pizza within that time frame, thus re-entering the craving cycle, whereas if you just refrained a little longer, you could break out. It may be that there is a persistent physical dependence similar to addiction. Or, it may simply the case that no one sells a good gluten free donut. Someone should do some fMRI studies on this, I think. That isn't my bailiwick, though.

(Information taken from "A Primer of Drug Action" by Robert M. Julien, M.D. Ph.D. 1995.)

Dr? Dr!

2007-07-26T12:21:00.001-06:00

I'm done. My defense went pretty smoothly, actually. I am now semi-officially Dr ElwoodCity, Ph.D. Of course, this makes my opinion on flour blends SO much more relevant than it was last week.

Gluten-Free, Quick and Easy

2007-07-23T13:00:00.000-06:00

I started blogging last summer after discovering that eating gluten-free would help my son, the Maestro. The Maestro has Sensory Integration Disorder, and avoiding gluten and casein has made a huge difference for him. It turns out that I am gluten intolerant too, and feel so much better since avoiding gluten. We all know that going gluten free can be a very intimidating process. Many of the rules of baking get reversed, if not completely thrown out, when you get rid of gluten. I had a lot of question that I couldn’t find the answers to. I thought that if I couldn’t find the answers, probably there were a lot of other people who were having the same problem I had and I needed to share what I had found. Recently I was given a copy of Carol Fenster’s new book, “Gluten-Free, Quick and Easy”. In many ways this is the book I had been looking for, but couldn’t find.

One of my biggest initial frustrations was the huge number of flour mixes that people recommend, and the variety of GF flours that behave completely different from each other. What would I like? What would I need? I have found too many lists that described the most common types of rice flour and omitted grains gaining in popularity. This book has the most complete list of gluten free flours that I have seen in one place, with a good description of the flavours and properties of each. It describes new flours fewer people have had experience with, such as Montina flour and Salba, as well as the most common flours such as rice or Garfava. There is also a smaller list of important staples in a gluten-free pantry that you need to make the recipes in the book, to eliminate the guesswork in getting started.

Another thing we were glad to see was what we call a “mega-cooking” plan. Before eliminating gluten, Riley was excited about making mixes for baking, and making multiple batches of dishes for freezing. Without all-purpose flour, all the air went out of that balloon for us. I have always wanted to do the math and make a big bucket of muffin mix. And waffle mix. And bread mix. And cake mix. The last six months, when my baking had developed to the point that I had the basic recipe that I wanted for scale-up, I have had job applications, interview trips and a dissertation to write instead of working on mixes. Later this week I have my defense, and I suppose I have become the target audience of a quick and easy cookbook. Now Carol Fenster has done the math for me, and there are mix recipes that she uses for her quick breads, her yeast breads and cakes. Carol also includes a plan for purposeful left-overs, called “planned-overs”. There is a month-long sample recipe plan for producing planned-overs and what recipes to use them in. Also, each section has a list of recipes that fit together using planned-overs.

Each recipe calls for ingredients that are naturally gluten-free, but there are also a number of ingredients that may or may not be gluten-free, depending on the brand you choose. For each of these, there are suggestions of common brands that are gluten free, such as tamari soy sauce (Eden, San-J,Hy-VeeI) or Oriental 5-Spice Powder (Durkee, Tone’s, Spice Island).

So far, I have made the bread machine yeast bread recipe, some Swedish meatballs, and a basic pie crust. I have always had better luck baking bread in a bread machine than I have had using an oven, but I have never considered that the pan I am using might be the difference-maker. Apparently it is. I have always had a hard time knowing if bread is done, but I learned that the interior temperature needs to be 200-205 °F. Jabbing my meat thermometer into a loaf of bread isn’t my first choice, but it sure beats having a loaf collapse because it isn’t done on the inside. Perhaps someday I will be able to know when a loaf is done based on the sound when I thump it, but until then a small hole is a small price to pay.

I have talked about my pie crust before, and wished that I had a pie crust recipe that was more malleable. I liked the flavour of my sorghum/tapioca crust, but it cracked whenever I tried to move it. Carol Fenster’s solution is to use some sweet rice flour to make a softer, more pliable dough. The Maestro and I made pumpkin tarts this weekend, and they turned out great.

So is this book perfect? No, but it is amazingly close. I think I will continue to use my basic flour recipe for most things, though the pie crust was easier to work with than anything I have come up with. I have to disagree with the explanation on the gluten-free status of oats. The problem with oats is NOT exclusively cross-contamination. A friend of mine who is a plant physiologist has run assays on different strains of oats, grown from seed and never processed with wheat. Some strains have gluten-like proteins that cause an antibody response and some do not. I am pretty sure he has never published this, so a thorough search of the primary literature is not going to reveal the difference. Anyone who decides to grow their own oats needs to keep the strain of oats in mind.

Overall, this book is a great resource for anyone starting on the gluten free lifestyle. I wish I had had it a long time ago. At the same time, someone with more GF experience can still learn a lot from it. The Maestro, who is now four, is already planning what kind of pie he wants to make with our new favourite pie crust.

Done (at least this stage)

2007-07-18T15:20:00.001-06:00

I have finished, printed and handed my dissertation to my committee. After printing and before handing it out, I found one important typo. Any bets on who in my committee finds it in the next week?

Now the focus switches to preparing a presentation for my defense next week and moving out of my lab. I also have a few things still to take care of in regards to moving out of my house, though Riley is doing a monster job of most of that. Now I should have more time to help.

No food news today, though I did get quite a kick out of learning more about the latest news from Glaxo-Smith-Kline, where some of my former class-mates work. Their new weight loss drug Alli (pronounced Ally) has some, shall we call them "interesting" <s>side effects</s> treatment effects. For a nervous laugh, check out this site, and visit the "How does it work" section, especially the part on treatment effects. I'm not sure any weight loss plan that includes bringing an extra pair of pants to work is for me.

Some links I missed yesterday

2007-07-17T08:16:00.001-06:00

There were a couple of links I wanted to pass on.

Karen has a website that seems like a perfect corellary to mine. I tend to focus on how to bake gluten free, though I have lately strayed to a more scientific discussion. Karen writes about what to eat when you aren't baking. Gluten Free Food Reviews takes all the guesswork out of the GF aisle. Take a look.

A different Karen, Karen Morgan, has a dessert fetish. Any dessert you want will eventually pop up at The Art of Gluten Free Cooking. She earns my love with her frequent inclusion of sorghum flour, and the artwork.

The abstract writing yesterday went smoothly after my lab-mate pointed out that my committee isn't really going to read it anyway. As of yesterday I had 90 pages, and over 24,000 words. Final edit today!

A few random bits

2007-07-16T12:13:00.000-06:00

Kate asked me a question about addiction to gluten. That is a great question, and deserves a great answer. I have been working on it a bit, and have come up with some information and some speculation. Stayed tuned for more.

I regret that I wasn't able to come up with a recipe for the Cooking for Karina post at Gluten Free by the Bay. That is a great idea, and when I get settled in our new place (still a long way off) I plan on working on a post about egg replacers. Karina, I hope that you found some good recipes.

I have been working on finishing off small bits of random flours that would otherwise be confiscated as I cross the border, and had some good bread using 3 cups 1:1 sorghum/rice flour, with 1/2 cup of Teff as an accent flour. Some of you might remember that my bread machine died recently, but oven-baking is going well since I figured out to bake it for what seems like too long. It doesn't freeze well, though, so I look forward to getting a new bread machine soon. That will also be after the move.

Congratulations, Shauna and the Chef! May you always have good eats.

The last thing we need for Riley's application for Canadian residency came in the mail today! And there was much rejoicing in the land.

Well, I should get back to the disseration writing. I think my abstract is now too long, and I need to cut it down, but I don't have everything that I want to say in it yet. The hardest part of science writing is the abstract, and I have to have everything done by wednesday.

Revolution Health and Gluten Sensitivity

2007-07-02T10:54:00.001-06:00

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from Cindy, at RevolutionHealth.com, inviting me to take part in conference call interview with representatives of the National Foundation for Celiac Awareness. The most common response I got from friends here to this news was a somewhat confused "But, you don't have celiac disease." That is true. My thinking on the issue was that if one is going to eat gluten free, the distinction is going to become a little fuzzy sometimes. If you are a gluten-free blogger, there feels like a difference between not having celiac disease and being a non-celiac. It's more like not being Tiger Woods. I'm not Tiger, but I'm not Tiger in a different way than Not-Tiger, the one who won the U.S. open last week is not Tiger. I'm not sure if that makes any sense to anyone but me. Anyway, here was a chance to talk to a real, live Gastroenterologist, and a Spokesperson for the NFCA. Why not?

No reason other than the fact that I have felt terribly behind on writing my doctoral dissertation, that is. I have a mostly complete draft that people are editing for me, so I have some time now to actually write a post about this issue, finally. The audio of the call can be found here. I wish it could be downloaded, but I haven't been able to do more than stream it.

The Doctor was Dr. Jay DiMarino, Director of the Gastroenterology Training Program and Director of The Digestive Disease Institute at Thomas Jefferson University and University Hospital, Philadelphia, PA. Several other bloggers were invited to play too. Shauna James was there, as well as Rachel, Gina, Diane, Sloan, and Jackie Collins, who is RevolutionHealth's resident Gastrogirl.

I had three questions that I really wanted answers to. First was where we Non-Celiacs fit into the gluten free world. I'm a little sensitive to this recently, as some of my more recent posts show. If you ask google about gluten sensitivity or gluten intolerance, you get websites that will tell you that there are many people who are sensitive to gluten and may actually have celiac disease. It is like my gluten sensitivity is merely and undiagnosed or sub-clinical form of celiac disease. Is that all I am, then? This then relates to my second question, which was the rates of false negatives with the diagnostic tests, and the factors that influence the incidence of false negatives.

Sloan beat me to the question of sensitivity vs. celiac disease. To paraphrase a little bit, Dr. DiMarino said that essentially, celiac disease is an allergy. It is an immune response, like Hay Fever is an immune response. The difference being, of course, that Hay Fever makes your nose run and your eyes itch while celiac disease rips your intestines apart. Gluten sensitivity or intolerance is more similar to eating a not-ripe apple. There is nothing wrong with eating apples, but under-ripe ones just didn't agree with you.

I have to say that I didn't really like the analogy. I understand what he was trying to say, that eating gluten is leads to an unpleasant response but that there is no built-in immune response. Feeling sick after eating a green apple suggests that someone needs to man up a bit, or at least not eat green apples on an empty stomach. They are too acidic, and too crisp. I've eaten green apples, and never had the headaches and fogginess that gluten gives me. This is a little more fundamental than a little excess acid making my tummy hurt.

He did mention the issue of prolamines, and seemed to leave it to me to explain. So, I will. Proteins are chains of amino acids, of which there are 20 different kinds. These chains fold into balls, or twist into coils. Gluten proteins are abnormally high in proline, an amino acid that is different from the others in that the nitrogen in the amino part is part of a ring. Because of this, when you unwind the coil or untangle the ball of protein, the section with proline doesn't straighten out the same as all the rest. So you get amino acid chains like rope with an occasional kink in it. For some of us, Dr DiMarino seemed to suggest, the proline kinks interrupt the enzymes trying to digest the protein, and we end up with short sections of indigestible protein called prolamines floating around in the gut.

So what do these proline rich peptides do? Well, if they get into the blood stream and travel to the brain, they fit into opioid receptors. If you inject them into rats, you get rats that behave as if they are autistic. This connection is the basis for the GFCF diet many autistic kids are on. I'm neither a rat nor an autistic child, so what do they do to me? Well, they give me a headache, for one thing, and make my head a little foggy. They don't bother my tummy, though. Dr DiMarino is the first person I have heard call them prolamines. I have seen them some places referred to as exorphins, like the opposite of the endorphins (the pain killers the body produces when we get excited about something).

So that is the difference between gluten sensitivity and clinically diagnosed celiac disease. It doesn't define the difference between sensitivity sub-clinical celiac disease, however. That begins to relate to my second question, about testing. I will leave that to another post, though.

Tragedy

2007-06-12T08:48:00.001-06:00

Last night just before going to bed, I hit stop on my bread machine and took the loaf out to cool. Then I hit stop, so that the machine wouldn't keep beeping at me as it finished its cool cycle. For those of you scoring at home, that is two hits on the stop button, which doubles as the start button.

Sooooo, it went through a second bake cycle while empty, and melted a huge hole in the top window. No more bread machine.

The Irony of Science and Celiac Disease

2007-05-30T14:46:00.001-06:00

My blog posts don't usually get a lot of comments. Many posts don't get any comments at all, so when I get a handful of comments on one post, I start to think that I have hit a resonant note with people. Well, either that or that I have had the same post at the top of my blog for almost a month. That DOES tend to allow more time for people to comment on it. Anyway, my last post on the misunderstood nature of an undiagnosed celiac, or undiagnosed anything, has prompted more shouts of "Amen, Brother!" than anything I have written in the past year.

As I write this, I am taking a break from writing experimental details for my doctoral dissertation, which I defend in July. Soon I will become Dr. ElwoodCity, and move to Home Town and join the Faculty of Science and Technology at Home Town College. For the past several years I have been working on the development of smarter imaging agents for the diagnosis of breast cancer. I mention this so you can see my comments in the context of someone who is clearly not "anti-science".

This is going to be a long post, because this is a big topic.

The thing is, there a limitations on diagnostic medicine, and those limitations contribute to the number of people who are undiagnosed for celiac disease. This is not in itself a problem. The problem is that far too many people don't understand what those limitations are, and so fail to even see them. If you don't see any limitations for diagnostic medicine, you are also going to be blind to the limits of what Scientists and Doctors to know about your health. Whatever they say must be both accurate and precise.

This was my main complaint with Kate Murphy's article. It implied over and over that if you have a positive test, you should be on a gluten free diet, because the test determines whether you have celiac disease. If you have a negative test, the only reason you would go gluten free is because you are buying into the newest fad diet. I'm sorry, but that just reveals who doesn't know what about science, and it isn't good.

The main thing that science tries to accomplish is the removal of uncontrolled variables. We figure out everything that may be affecting the outcome, and change them one at a time, keeping the others constant. That way we can say how each factor influences the outcome. In my field, that isn't more complicated than figuring out how you want to change a recipe. Cooks optimize recipes much the same way I optimize a chemical reaction. It is pretty simple when all the variables are things you control, like ingredients and temperatures. In the human body, it is just a tad bit more complicated.

The genetic differences in human populations, as well as lifestyle choices, will occasionally make the result of any diagnostic test worthless for one individual. This is why science preaches against relying on anecdotal evidence. Think for example if we were trying to decide upon a new set of dietary recommendations, and someone asked you what you ate in order to feel healthy? Would your answers be applicable at all to the people who live next door? To the majority of the population? No, because the people who frequent this blog have a completely different set of variables controlling how they interact with food than the majority of the population. Diagnostic tests are designed for the majority, not the individual.

The solution to this is to decide upon an acceptable threshold for false positives and false negatives. You take a population, divide them into groups of yes and no, responders and non-responders, and you give them the new test. Then you decide how to interpret the results so that the most people with a yes result are found, without including too many people from the no group. The result is that a certain number of people who should be yes are missed - a false negative. Some people who should be no are included in the yes group - a false positive. Every test has false positives and false negatives.

The current method of predicting response to hormone therapy for breast cancer patients has only a 5% false negative rate. That is really good. It has a false positive rate of 60%, though, meaning that if the test predicts that you will respond to hormone therapy, you have only a slightly better than 50/50 chance that you actually will. This is why I have a research topic. Shouldn't there be a way to improve that?

So here is the question - What is the false negative rate tests for celiac disease? Does anyone know? The gold standard test is endoscopy, which implies that the blood tests, while good, have either higher false negatives or higher false positives. To figure it out, we need to take a population and divide it into people who have celiac disease and people who don't, then perform endoscopies on all of them to see how the endoscopy results correlate with who has celiac disease, and who doesn't. Now, aside from the fact that that is a complicated study that no one cares enough to do, how are you going to do the initial division into groups? How are you going to select celiacs from "normal" people to have something to correlate your data to?

The only way I can think of is to put people on a gluten free diet, and see who feels better and who doesn't. Wait a minute... I think I've heard that somewhere before...

Oh yeah! It was in an article in the New York Times, by Kate Murphy. "The final proof is reversal of symptoms on a gluten-free diet." Thanks, Kate, for helping us know how we can know definitively whether we should be on a gluten free diet or not. The irony of the whole situation is that the people who claim authority for the diagnostic tests because they come from "science" understand the process less well, and is less scientific, than someone who just stopped eating wheat, barley, rye and oats (sometimes) to see if they would feel better.

So here's to you, undiagnosed celiac scientists!

(And this doesn't even address the issue of medical doctors, and their ability to think outside the box. That could be another whole post on its own, but I need to get back to work.)

Letter to Kate Murphy

2007-05-09T15:01:00.001-06:00

Kate,

A few months ago, you contacted me for an interview for an article you were writing about gluten sensitivity. I just read your article. I have to say, I rather suspect that has we talked you would have portrayed me in the demographic of "crazy people who stop eating gluten even though they haven't had a real doctor tell them they should." As such, I'm not that sorry I missed you.

I felt that your article was not a fair representation of people who have legitimate reasons to avoid gluten. Sure, diagnosed Celiacs meet your approval, but the rest of us must be crazy, obviously. I would point out the fallacies in your article, but you know them already. Otherwise, you wouldn't say things like:

"The final proof is reversal of symptoms on a gluten-free diet." "Though no test for celiac disease is definitive..."

"celiac disease has been difficult to identify, especially because its symptoms vary widely"

The final impression I am left with is that you have absolute trust in doctors to know what is best for you, and a distrust of anyone who pays attention to how they feel. If that is the case, I hope you have some really good Doctors, Kate. I've taught chemistry to too many pre-med students to share your confidence.

Elwood City

MultiGrain Bread

2007-04-24T14:36:00.000-06:00

I have been eating the most wonderful bread lately. Several months ago Riley brought home a bread maker, and reminded me that we had a Sorghum flour bread machine recipe. This has become our standard bread recipe, but recently I have been doing some modifications that I wanted to tell you about.

First off, as I mentioned in my GF on a budget post, I have been using white rice flour instead of brown. It has been working just fine. Then I wrote a post on flours, and realized that I had been neglecting Millet flour just because the bag I had was purple. When I first started baking wheat bread years ago, Riley wanted me to make Great Harvest Multi-grain bread, and the recipe I worked out had Millet seeds in it. It was time to try putting more Millet back into my life. Sorry I have no pictures for you. It's either post this way, or no blogging.

The other day I hadn't had time to heat up my lunch before running down to the corner to wait for a ride. I got hungry waiting, so I pulled out the bread I had been intending to toast and ate it dry and plain. Oh, it was so good! When was the last time you ate plain day old bread and enjoyed it? If you don't know, you really ought to try this.

2 eggs
1 2/3 cup water
3 T oil
2 tsp vinegar
1 1/2 cup sorghum flour
1 1/2 cup white rice flour
1/2 cup Millet flour
2 1/2 tsp Xanthan gum
1 1/2 tsp salt
3 T sugar
2 1/4 tsp yeast
2 Tbsp Millet seeds

(The recipe as I originally made it omits the Millet seeds and flour, and calls for 2 cups sorghum flour instead of 1 1/2.)

Mix the wet things, mix the dry things, and then mix them together in your bread machine. If you don't have a bread machine, try it anyway in the oven and let me know how it goes.

One key I have come to appreciate it making sure the dough is mixed enough. My machine doesn't have a GF bread cycle, so if I don't turn it off, it gets half risen and starts mixing again. As a consequence, I always let the dough mix and then turn it off until I am ready to start the Bake cycle. In the past, I let it get fully mixed, but didn't let it mix until the dough was smooth. You really want smooth dough to get the best bread texture.

T'eff

2007-04-20T05:23:00.001-06:00

In my recent post about flour types I mentioned -- somewhat tongue-in-cheek -- that I had never tried Teff because no one had ever given me any. A generous reader decided to change that, and used Amazon.com's wishlist to send me both some Teff flour and some Clear Jel. I haven't had the chance yet to experiment with the Jel, but I have made a couple of things with Teff that I wanted to report on.

Part of the challenge here is that while I am a chemist, I am not a food or flavorings chemist. Part of what that means is that I don't know the standard vocabulary for describing taste. Odorant and Flavouring Chemists tend to have defined words like Musky, Fresh, and Green that mean specific things. I haven't been initiated into that world, but likely neither have any of you, so I guess we are even. My point is, I described both amaranth and buckwheat as tasting bitter and they obviously don't taste the same. Teff and whole wheat don't taste the same either, but they share a certain je ne sais quoi that I don't have the vocabulary to describe. In the future if I want something to have a more whole grain type flavour, Teff seems like the flour I would want to include.

The day after the Teff arrived, The Maestro decided he wanted pancakes. I decided to try my standard pancake recipe with 1/3 Teff flour in place of my standard sorghum/tapioca mix. Upon mixing, the batter was dark -- almost like a chocolate shake. The difference in taste, compared to my previous pancakes, remided me most of the difference between using all-purpose wheat flour or whole wheat. Teff isn't bitter, or nutty (a sometimes too-common flavour word). The word that comes to mind is dusky, like twilight. I don't know if that will have any resonance with you or not, but I haven't been able to come up with a better word. They seemed like a wholesome whole wheat GF pancake. Really good.

Yesterday we needed some muffins, and I didn't have a lot of time to scout out ingredients. So, I ended up making chocolate chip muffins and I again used 1/3 Teff in place of some of my usual sorghum/tapioca/rice mixture. They didn't turn out bad, but they didn't turn out as well as the pancakes. You might think, based on my description of the pancakes, that there might be something somewhat incongruent about chocolate chips and a whole-wheat-y Teff muffin. You would be right. Chocolate Chip muffins are a dessert type treat. Whole Wheat muffins are more of a wholesome solid breakfast item, so the combination wasn't so well matched. I think Raisins or some other fruit would go better.

I'm not sure if I would ever use more than 50% Teff flour in something. You might decide to do that you would like more Teff. I think that too much Teff would give a dark, almost dusty flavour. It certainly wouldn't be like using too much amaranth, though. The effect on texture seems similar to using sorghum, so again, I don't see anything prohibitive of using more Teff than I have yet. It just has a dusky basal flavour, so I think it needs something with higher fresh flavour notes to balance it out. But I'm not a flavourings chemist, and I might just be making that up.

Re: Flours

2007-04-09T14:52:00.001-06:00

One problem I have found in following Gluten Free recipes is that I like my baked goods to taste the way I think they should, and not necessarily the way someone else thinks they should. I wanted to be able to develop my own recipes rather than sifting through the thousands of muffin recipes on the internets trying to find one that I liked. To develop recipes, you need to know what you are working with, and I didn't. I've learned a bunch about flours since then.

When taking up Gluten-Free baking, you probably need a starch, and you definitely need a flour or two. With so many kinds to choose from, I felt like I needed to know what each was good for. Otherwise I would just be following a list someone else gave me. That is OK, as long as THAT person knew why they were using the flours they were using. It took me a long while to be convinced that anyone else knew what they were doing, either. My conclusion is that some do know, and some don't. Do I know what I am talking about? Some, and some not. Here is what I have learned about GF flours, mostly from trying the out to see what they did.

First off, there are three main divisions among gluten free flours. There are the grain flours, which are really divided into rice flours and all the other grains, and bean flours. For years, rice flours were all that celiacs could use, and sometimes I think they get included in recipes for historical reasons. On the other hand, they are often give good structure. The other grains are much newer to the scene, and are often a good addition. The bean flours are soft and nutritious, so they give you baked goods that have both of those qualities. They also taste like beans, so watch out when you use them.

The Rice Flours

White Rice -- Thanks to Chang's Oriental Market, this is the cheapest flour I have found. Put it with some Tapioca Starch, and you can save some yourself some coin. Of course, you have to spend that coin on some supplementa vitamins, but there you go. White rice flour is made from rice that has had the nutrient rich bran removed prior to grinding, and it is essentially filler. I haven't done a nutrient comparison on rice flours, so I can't extensively comment on the damage that does. I do know that you might end up with beriberi if you just eat white rice.

Aside from cost, the main advantage of using white rice flour is that it acts kind of like the rebar that you find in concrete. Rice is a hard flour, and is good at holding things up – not holding it together, you need binding agents for that. If your muffin or whatever is too soft and baking it longer doesn't help, add more rice flour. If you use too much rice flour, though, what you end up with has a texture that screams "Gluten Free!"

The other advantage rice has is that it doesn't add any flavour. Depending on the circumstance this can be a real negative, but it doesn't take too many slices of bread that taste like beans before you think that being tasteless can have its place.

Brown Rice – This is better for you, and provides even better structure than white rice flour. When I get my grinder, I'm switching back. I use 1/3 rice flour in my muffins, for sturdiness.

Sweet Rice – Also called Glutinous Rice flour (Note the i instead of the e in there). I think they call it that because it comes from sticky rice. I haven't baked much with Sweet Rice flour, because my impression is that it doesn't hold things up as well as I am counting on my rice flour to do. It does work really well at making gravy, though.

The Other Grains

Sorghum – If you don't know yet the advantages of sorghum flour, you must not actually be reading my blog. It has a good mild flavour. It is a good colour. It is good for you. It is soft, so you don't get that "Gluten Free!" texture that rice flour gives you. I've also seen sorghum flour help a little old lady cross a busy street with her groceries.

As a sorghum muffin ages, it doesn't really go stale unless you have too much corn starch in it, but the flavour does change over a few days. I think that there is some enzymatic process that breaks down some protein or other that is activated by baking. I do like to keep my muffins in the freezer, not to keep them from going stale, but to keep the flavour from evolving into something more bitter.

Millet – The only millet flour I have used is Finger Millet flour, from the Indian Store. It's purple. I am sure that there are other kinds of millet flour available, but I haven't really looked. The millet that I use as a couscous substitute isn't purple, for example. When I get a flour mill, I will try that out. I suspect that it might have some of the same advantages sorghum does, but I kind of dead-ended with the color purple.

T'eff – I have never tried teff. I don't have a good source that doesn't cost 5 x as much as other flours.

Update 4/20/2007: A reader sent me some Teff, which I now know that I like. Adding 1/3 Teff seems to make things taste more whole grain-y, like using wheat flour instead of all-purpose flour. I wonder if using too much would be too much, if you will, but you might consider trying it. A more detailed story can be found here.
Amaranth – Like teff, amaranth is expensive. Unlike teff, someone gave me some once so I could try it. Amaranth is quite bitter and nasty tasting, but in a good way. Think lemon zest or tonic water, and you get the idea. You wouldn't want to use more than ¼ amaranth flour in anything and even that might be too much. In the right amount, it can really add depth of flavour. I like it. I also like Tonic water, so some people think I'm crazy.

Another advantage to using amaranth is that it seems to bind things together, like Xanthan gum or Kudzu does. I don't know how it does this, but if you use some amaranth, you can leave the Xanthan out without everything crumbling to dust.

BuckWheat – Like amaranth, buckwheat flour can be quite bitter, but some people like it is small doses. I would sometimes make buckwheat pancakes with ¼ buckwheat to all-purpose flour, back in the old days. If you use too much buckwheat, the batter is kind of gluey and hard to work with. I wonder now if has the same kind of binding activity that amaranth has. This is something to check out.

Oats – I have seen links to GF oats that didn't cost too much. I remember them being about $2.50/lb, which isn't bad. They were just $20/lb to ship here. The deal is that some strains of oats have gluten-like proteins, and some strains don't. Sheltie Girl uses oats all the time, so she would be the one to ask about its properties instead of me.

Bean Flours

My experience with bean flours is generally that they make your bread taste like beans. They are soft, and give a good texture. The first loaf I ever made that actually rose had garfava flour in it, but the kids didn't like it. The beany flavour fades somewhat with baking, so you really want to avoid under-cooking things. Just keep in mind that it won't ever go completely away.

People who like bean flours tout its high protein content as so much better than rice flour

Garfava – This is a trade name, like Kleenex or Xerox. If you get if from another company, it is called Garbanzo/Fava, or Chickpea/Fava, because it is a 1:1 mix of the two flours. It makes a good soft bread in one of the Gluten Free Gourmet's flour mixes, but it still tastes like beans.

Chickpea – This was how I learned that Chickpea/Fava doesn't mean chickpea or Fava. I made a cake with just chickpea flour, and it didn't go well at all.

Soy Flour – My little sister says that every chocolate chip cookie ought to have soy flour in it, for the nutty taste. Hildegard can't eat very much soy, so I haven't spent more time experimenting without soy flour than I have with it.

Soy Powder – Sometimes it is tough to distinguish soy flour from soy powder, because the terminology isn't standardized. The essential difference, as I understand it is that soy flour is ground soy beans. Soy powder is made from ground, cooked and dried soybeans. The pre-cooking really reduces the beany flavour. Whenever I am looking at a recipe that calls for soy flour, I use soy powder instead.

Update 4/20/2007
Lentil Flour – I found some of this in my freezer the other day. I don't remember how it tasted at all.

Starches

2007-03-29T15:27:00.000-06:00

One of the things that I had to confront when I started baking gluten free was the issue of starch. Almost every recipe calls for at least one starch, sometimes more than one. All starches are not created equal, or are they? What makes potato starch good for one recipe when this other recipe calls for tapioca? What is the author trying to accomplish when they use all three? These are questions that I had to have answers for.

First, a note on the difference between starch and flour. Flour is what you get when you take a seed and grind it up. It has all the parts of the seed, each torn into little pieces. Starch is only the carbohydrate component. Starches are long chains of sugars linked together in a way that humans can digest them, unlike cellulose, which is sugars hooked together in a way that some bacteria can digest. The difference has to do with the orientation of the linking bond in relation to the sugar ring, and I'll leave it at that for now.

There are two main ways a polymer chain can be put together: branched (amylopectin) and unbranched (amylose). Amylose is the starch that causes things to go stale. As a baked item cools, the starches settle down into a solid or semi-solid form. This is why you should wait for your bread to cool before you eat it, so you can cut it without mashing the hot starches that are still somewhat liquid. Because it doesn't have the branches on the polymer chain, amylose gets REALLY solid, and actually forms crystals with water sequestered in the middle. This causes bread to feel dry, and crumble apart when you try to eat it. This also explains how you can un-stale bread in the microwave. Re-heating causes the water to shake its way out of the amylose crystals, and turns things soft again.

One way in which starches differ is the percentage of stale-inducing amylose. Wheat starch has 26-31 %. I assume that it depends on the strain you are using. Among the big three GF starches, corn is highest (28%), then potato (23%), and tapioca last (17%). Since I switched to tapioca starch, I have had much less problem with things going stale.

Starches also differ in the temperature they start to gel or go soft, how much they swell when they absorb water, and how much water they absorb. I was only able to find a comparison on water absorption between wheat starch and potato starch. Wheat binds 89.1% its weight in water, and potato starch binds 102% its own weight. I don't know about corn starch or tapioca, but I assume they are much less, based on baking results. When I went through a phase when I baked everything with potato starch, everything I made was really moist.

Starches also have varying levels of purity. In the Bette Hagman Library, Tapioca Starch is listed as 99% carbohydrate, with corn and potato much lower. I don't have the numbers with me. Less purity will lead to more flavor, which you may or may not want.

That is starch in general, as I understand it. Specifically, there are a few more things to say about each starch.

Potato Starch -- Potato retains the most moisture after baking. I have found that I have to use less of it compared to other starches and reduce the amount of xanthan gum I use by half. Otherwise, things end up soggy. 3:1 sorghum/potato starch instead of 2:1 as with corn or tapioca. Potato starch also seems to be the most flavourful, which may be what you are looking for in some cases. It makes things a little more savoury, I shall say.

Corn Starch -- I'll give it this - it is widely available and cheap. Other than that, I haven't found anything to recommend its use. It causes things to stale the fastest. It has what Riley calls "that corn starch flavor". It is sometimes included on lists of common allergens. It often gets left off also, so I don't know about that; I'm not an allergist. But, it does give my son a rash on his bum. My personal feeling is that we only use corn starch out of habit. It is left over from the days when rice flour and corn starch were the only things available for gluten free baking.

Tapioca Starch -- Ah, the king of starch. With the lowest percentage amylose, and the highest percentage carbohydrate content, tapioca wins on both the severity of staling, and the clarity of flavour. It is also the cheapest, thanks the Chang's Oriental Market. Unless I am looking for a baked good that reminds me a little of stew, tapioca is the starch of choise. I typically use it in a sorghum/tapioca ratio of 2:1.

I guess this is the point at which I should clear up a nomenclature issue I am sometimes asked. Tapioca starch and Tapioca flour are really the same thing. It comes from Cassava root, from which the starch is extracted. The starch solution can be dripped onto a hot plate to give tapioca pearls, or processed to give a fine powder. Since it isn't a ground seed, calling it flour is really a misnomer.

So, that is what I have learned about starch in the last year, and that is where I will leave it. If anyone knows something I have over looked, please let me know. And can no one come to the defence of corn starch with a rational explanation of its benefits over tapioca or potato, even in limited situations? I invite you to refute me.

Casein Free on a Budget

2007-03-26T15:16:00.000-06:00

In a follow-up to the last post, here are my tips for eliminating dairy. A much shorter list, I know...

1. I don't go for purified Ghee, or 1005 pure hydrogenated vegetable oil. I use Fleishmann's Unsalted Margarine. Higher supply means lower cost.

2. Most importantly, I don't use milk. I don't substitute with soy milk, or rice milk, or Ensure powder. It seems like every recipe I see calls for milk of some kind. I just use water, and everything turns out fine.

That's it. Margarine from the Grocery Store, and Water.

Gluten Free on a Budget

2007-03-24T15:41:00.000-06:00

In the past year, I've had to do a lot of thinking about how to bake gluten-free on a budget. Cooking gluten-free is one thing. You make a lot of vegetables and soups, and you use starch to thinken sauces instead of flour. With meat, you can be careful about what you sprinkle on and marinate with. But baking? There is really no way to avoid spending money on things you wouldn't otherwise buy. Some of the gluten-free flours can be pretty expensive, too. Then there are the recipes that call for four flours and three starches, plus some kind of binding agent. It can get complicated and expensive pretty fast if you aren't careful.

So here are the best tips I have come up with in the past year.

1. Pay your taxes. The cheapest way I know of to keep costs down when going gluten-free is to make enough money to pay taxes. Buying gluten-free flours and Pamela's Ultimate Baking mix can actually help you get your tax money back! The thing is, when you have a medical condition that requires you to spend money, that money is tax deductible, at least in the United States. (I assume there is a similar deal in Canada, but I guess I'll find that out next year.) All you need is a note from your Doctor and a list of what you bought. Then you compare the cost of what you are using to the cost of wheat flour, and you have your tax deduction. So, for brown rice flour that costs $3.49/lb when wheat flour is $0.79/lb, you get a $2.70/lb tax deduction. This works out well for people who pay taxes. Those of us in the starving student income bracket already get all our tax money back and no additional deduction is going to change how much money we have to spend on food. What else can we do to keep baking costs down?

2. Check your sources. I try to avoid natural foods stores whenever I can. The natural foods section in the grocery store near me charges more than $4/lb for tapioca starch. The Asian Grocery downtown charges $0.79/lb. They also sell white rice and sweet rice flour at the same price. They are all coming from Thailand where they don't process much wheat, so they are celiac-safe, even for really sensitive people. Check your cultural groceries to see if they have ingredients you could be getting cheaper. The Thai sources have been safe for us, but the Jowar flour from the Indian store had some cross-contamination.

3. Make good choices. Once you are getting the best price you can find, usually by going to an asian or Indian Grocery, you have to decide what flours you are going to bake with. I recently learned how to use brown rice flour to my advantage and I was consistently pleased with the results. Unfortunately, I can't consistently spend $3.49/lb on flour and bake enough muffins to keep the Maestro in snacks for pre-school. I had to make a compromise and switch to white rice flour. I'm not as happy with either the nutritional content or the texture of the muffins I end up with, but I'm not going as far into debt to bake them. I typically use a sorghum/tapioca mix, or a sorghum/tapioca/white rice mix in my baking. I'm pretty satisfied with the cost of the tapioca and sorghum, but I wish I had a cheaper source of brown rice flour.

4. Stick with the tried and true. There are lots of recipes that call for a wide variety of ingredients. I just don't make them. If there is a recipe that calls for Amaranth flour, potato starch, chick-pea flour, or something else I don't have, I just make something else. I can't afford to tie up capital in 15 different ingredients. Sometimes this requires more experimentation to come up with a version I am happy with, but I have felt pretty successful with the flour mixes I have settled on. If you want to settle on a pototo starch/chick-pea mix, be my guest. Just settle on it, and don't stray from that if you want to keep your costs down. Otherwise you'll end up with 3/4 of a bag of Millet flour (or something, or several somethings) you never use for anything else.

5. Decide what is worth spending more money on. Of the binding agents I have seen, xanthan gum is the most expensive. Guar gum seems to run about half the price, but you have to use four times as much because it isn't as effective. Kuzu Starch also works well and is less expensive than either xanthan or guar gum. It is not nearly as convenient to use, however. What is that worth to you? You have to decide.

6. Sometimes you have to spend money to save money. Brown rice is $0.99/lb where we live. If we had a grinder, we could make our own brown rice flour for much less that Arrowhead Mills sells it. At $2.50/lb savings, it would only take 40 lbs of flour to pay off a $100 mill. Luckily for me, the government has been saving some of my money for me (see item 1). When they give it back to me, one of the things we plan to do is get a good mill. Any suggestions on what model we should get? I know some of you have mills already.

There were a couple of posts about the economics of being gluten-free, and cooking in general, recently. Mike, at the Gluten Free Blog had this to say about budgets. Shauna had this to say about the economics of food.

Does anyone else have any good strategies for keeping costs down?

GF Day

2007-03-20T10:59:00.001-06:00

Today is the one year anniversary of the Maestro's blood test for Celiac Disease. One year ago today, we fed him purposely fed him gluten for the last time, before taking him in for the test. It later turned out to be negative, which gives us hope that someday he can have gluten again, but no time soon.

The reason for all of this is something called Sensory Integration Disfunction. I've talked about this before here and here, and I won't go into it again today. Sometimes I have felt like going Gluten and Casein free has completely "cured" him, but this past weekend seems to show otherwise. Having me gone for a week and a half, then coming home, his pre-school teacher missing two days last week so that he had to combine with a class of strangers, the missed sleep arising from the switch to Daylight Savings Time, these things are possible factors that led to the Maestro having a TERRIBLE weekend. Whatever it was, it wasn't pretty. Biting, yelling, shoving, it was a real mess. He hasn't been eating anything new that we know about. I asked him if he had been sharing food at school and he told me that whenever anyone offers him food, he tells them that he doesn't eat wheat.

I started this blog as a vehicle to help myself figure out how to bake. I think I have done that now. What is this blog for, now? How many people who read this come here looking for recipes? Not too many, I think. When my family loses my muffin recipe they come back to find it again, but other than that, you can find recipes for gluten free Rissoto easier on other gluten free foodie blogs, of which there are many.

So this is where I want to go from here. Rather than recipes, which I'm not very good at anyway, I want to talk about processes. I want to talk about ingredients. I want to talk about how to bake, rather than what to bake. What do you think? Is that what you want to read here? Any topics you want to read about, particularly?

I'm Back (Urd Und Himmel Pie)

2007-03-19T09:38:00.001-06:00

I recently returned from a long bout of job interviews. I am pleased to report two things: First, that I successfully ate restaurant food for 11 days without getting a major dose of gluten. I did get halfway through a prime rib sandwich (without bread) before starting to suspect that it might have a thin layer of gravy. I ended up with a headache that afternoon, which is my primary response to eating gluten, so I should have asked about "sauce". Live and learn, I guess. I came home sick of omelets, and five pound heavier than when I left, but without major problems.

Second and most important, a few days after getting back I got a phone call from the Chemistry department head at Home Town College, the last place I visited. They have offered me a faculty position, to start in August. This job is almost a perfect match with what I was looking for, and I get to move close to family for the first time in almost ten years. The Maestro is excited to live close to cousins, and Riley is now is major moving mode. Everything we own gets the scrutiny of "Do we want this thing enough to pay to move it accross the continent?" Of course we like having the things we have, but if we have to pay for them a second time, which is essentially what moving is, do we still want them? Hildr is just happy to have her Dad back.

Of course, now I need to finish the thesis, so the Boss will let me go, and HTC will give me the job they want to. Time to get to work!

The day after I got home, Riley and the kids all took multi-hour naps while I made dinner for them and Hildegard. You'd think they hadn't slept well without me, or something.

After all the omelets for Breakfast, and Hamburgers with no bun that I was forced to eat in the 7 airports I visited, I had a craving for an Urd und Himmel Pie, Sausage with Apples (Himmel) and Potatoes (Urd). I couldn't find any potatoes, so I went with a saute of three apples, a pound of turkey sausage and large onion. I whisked up two eggs with a splash or two of Tabasco and garlic to hold it together.

For the crust, I doubled the basic recipe I had at Pumpkin Fest, except that I tried the sorghum/tapioca/rice mix that I use for muffins instead of the sorghum/tapioca. Then I pre-mixed the xanthan gum with the water, and cut it into the flour mix before adding the shortening. Weird I know, but I was able to transfer it onto the pie without breaking it this time. I rolled it out between sheets of wax paper, and basically picked it up like a frisbee when I was done. I don't know if it was the rice flour, or the xantham glop (boy does that turn to glue) but it didn't crack. In the picture, you can see the threads of xanthan-water complex marbelling the unbaked crust. Next time I need to try the flour mix with rice, and adding the xanthan gum as a solid to see which change made the difference this time. (Either that, or I rolled it out thicker this time.)

Oh, I just had a delicious thought. HTC is in prime Rhubarb growing country. Oh the pies we can have!

Harold!

2007-02-21T12:47:00.000-07:00

I feel like I have been neglecting this space. I'm currently prepping for a round of Job interviews, and haven't had much time for experimental baking, and less still for blogging about it. I still read plenty of blogs, including chemical blogs, and recently came accross something interesting.

In addition to this Gluten-Free baking blog, I am part of the chemical blog world. Recently, Eximer at Carbon-Based Curiosities linked to a post about skunky beer by Khymos who linked to a post by Harold McGee. Skunkiness arises from a photochemical reaction, which I already knew, courtesy of a seminar on campus a couple of years ago. Then, the big news sunk in. What?! Not that Harold McGee, surely! Actually, it is that Harold McGee, and he does indeed have a blog.

I just thought you should know.

Travel Food and Eating Out Gluten Free

2007-02-08T10:32:00.001-07:00

As some of you know, this year I am applying for academic job positions, and have recently been offered an inteview at THE ONE JOB at Home Town University (HTU). I have started arranging travel plans and the issue of eating out has come up. I know I (or someone at HTU) can call ahead to a restaurant to discuss the GF issue, and I have a list of local restaurants from the local Celiac Association. I have a few questions that I would like your input on, as more seasoned GF travellers.

I know that Thai food is often safe, and mentioned that to my host. She seems to be extrapolating from there. Is Indian as safe as Thai? I am sure they have more wheat is India than in Thailand. She seems interested in Vietnamese. Have any of you eaten Vietnamese? Are there any other types of cuisine I could recommend?

When you eat at an American place, you want to avoid pre-marinated meats. Are there any types of dishes that you feel safer ordering than others?

What do you like to eat for Breakfast when you have to go out? The only thing I have thought of is Hash Browns and Bacon. Sausage isn't generally trustworthy, I think.

Last time I travelled, I was flying to my parents house for a visit, so I brought my own food, and made some while I was there. This time, I am being hosted and will be eating out almost exclusively for several days. I would love any suggestions.

Seed Sorghum

2007-01-31T15:44:00.001-07:00

Does anyone know where you can order Whole grain Sorghum? GF for life said they could, but didn't say where.

Coffee Cake

2007-01-29T12:33:00.000-07:00

Here is the coffee cake I made for the Maestro's second day of school after Christmas break ended. The first day he had chocolate chip pancakes, which is not the way to enjoy a good chocolate chip, in my opinion. I have only made this once, and though it was a little dry, especially the topping. I had mine with Milk, but Riley loved it and is still talking about it. If I had to do it over again, I would add more shortening, I think.

2 1/2 c GF flour (2:1 Sorghum flour/Tapioca flour)
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon
2 cups brown sugar
1 tsp xanthan gum

cut in 1/2 cup shortening
reserve 1/2 c mixture for topping

into the rest add:
2 beaten eggs
3/4 c milk

The recipe said to divide the batter between 2 8 or 9 inch round cake pans, but I went with one 8 inch square pan. Sprinkle the remaining dry topping over it, and bake in preheated 350 oven for 35 to 40 minutes.
Adapted from the All New Purity Cookbook (A Complete Book of Canadian Cooking)

Vanilla Cupcakes

2007-01-27T23:15:00.000-07:00

Here are the vanilla cupcakes the Maestro wanted for his birthday party. When I got ready to take the picture, Hildr wanted me to include her green fish.

The Maestro has needed cupcakes to take to birthday parties he had been invited to previously, but he has always asked for dark chocolate. For those I used an Amy Perry chocolate cake recipe, baked in muffin tins. Vanilla, now that poses a new challenge. Vanilla cupcakes are supposed to be white. Anyone who made Shauna's artisan bread recipe knows that sorghum-based baked goods don't always turn out white. My most recent muffin recipe uses some brown rice flour for firmness, which while not exactly dark, isn't white either. So, enter white rice flour into the equation...

As my starting point, I used the everyday cupcakes recipe from Better Homes and Gardens.

1/2 c shortening
1 3/4 c all purpose flour
1 c sugar
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 egg
3/4 c milk
1 tsp vanilla
Bake at 375° F for 20 minutes

As I said, I wanted a light color, and some firmness, so I used my 2:1 sorghum flour/tapioca mix, and combined it 2:1 with white rice flour. When I got the oven heated up, I found that I didn't have any eggs, and the dietician neighbor wasn't home, so I substituted a heaping Tablespoon of soy flour and a Tablespoon of water for the egg. I suspect that the actual egg substitute is supposed to be a heaping teaspoon of soy flour, but I couldn't remember so I decided to err on the side of over-kill.

Also, these need to be casein free, so no milk. I've decided recently to use water instead of soy milk in my baking. We don't always haev the same kind of soy milk and 8th Continent Vanilla gives very different results than Great Harvest Plain. Hildegard can't have soy, and water is cheaper than Rice Milk by a long shot. So water it is. It turns out that everything turns out fine. Riley took a Food Science class as an undergrad, and I think it was there that she was told that the main reason to use milk instead of water was to increase the protein content of your food. Sorghum has high protein anyway (better than quinoa, even) so the lack of milk isn't a problem.

This is what I ended up with:

1/2 c shortening
1 3/4 c GF mix*
1 tsp Xanthan gum
1 c sugar
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 heaping Tbsp soy flour + 1 Tbsp water (instead of 1 egg )
3/4 c milk
1 tsp vanilla
*flour mix was 2:1 sorghum flour/tapioca starch, mixed 2:1 with white rice flour)

They tasted very good, especially with Pilsbury "Cream Cheese" (actally no dairy in it) frosting. They didn't raise very high, but the Maestro didn't care. I think that next time I would add more liquid. White rice flour seems to absorb some of the water, and the few times I've used it, the batter turns out very thick.

The Maestro had a great day. Here is a parting shot of him enjoying his favorite birthday gift, a plastic saxophone from the dollar store. His collection of real woodwind instruments is sorely lacking, so he enjoys toy instruments when he can get them.

Things I've found

2007-01-25T14:46:00.000-07:00

After a bit of a blogging hiatus, I am back. I have been following everyone else's posts, and have a few gems that I want to point out, for anyone who missed them.

The prize from the last month has to go to Shauna for her Artisan Bread. Bread is the GF Holy Grail, and this is a wonderful entry. The Maestro didn't like it, but he is four. I think this bread is the sort of thing you could give as a gift. As someone in the comments noted, it is salty, but it gives it that "soft Pretzel" aura.

Shauna also has some Muffins that I appreciated, as they are similar to those I make. Shauna appears to have fallen in love with sorghum flour also, and I appreciate having an ally. This is a good recipe to try out to see how the ratio of starch and brown vs. white rice flour changes things.

Aside from an over reliance on baking mixes that I can't afford (I still need a post on that topic), Karina has some great Baking Tips that even experienced bakers should look at.

I did merit a Shout out at Simply Recipes, though only a brief one.

A post I always appreciate is the semi-Weekly roundup by Gluten Free by the Bay. It is great for helping you find a great recipe you might have missed.

I have a bit of backlog of recipes to post. Coming soon, Birthday cupcakes, Coffee Cake, and our special Christmas Breakfast...

A Year in Review

2007-01-23T15:06:00.001-07:00

This week is the Maestro's fourth birthday. In many ways he is the same boy now that he was a year ago. He still loves music as much as he did then. He still loves cats. He still loves to play little tricks with a sly little grin.

This week-end we were listening to Bach's Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 2, the sixth part. We had currently have two versions of it, one by Yo-Yo Ma, and one played by Edgar Myer on the Bass. As we listened to each version over and over, the deep growling of Myer's Bass, and the fast-fast phrases of Yo-Yo's cello caused him to rock back and forth, shaking his head like a teenager at a rock concert. He was sitting in a cardboard box; it was a Kitty-box. As the music crescendoed, he began to sway, wider and wider until the box fell over and spilled him onto the floor. Lying on his side, he would laugh, look over at me and say "Do you see how into music I am?" Then, we'd do it again.

The present he was most excited for this year was a plastic toy saxophone we found at the dollar store. As a two-year-old he decided that he wanted to be a conductor, and he has never wavered from that decision. A conductor needs to know all the instruments, and the Maestro loves to collect and create instruments of every kind. He has gone to bed now listening to the story of Tubby the Tuba. His new saxophone is lying there beside him.

In many other ways, the past year has been a year of incredible change and growth. In some ways I hardly recognize him as the same boy that drove me to tears a year ago. Last year, his birthday was a rare treasure, a day of calm, a day of composure, and everyone enjoyed playing together. I remember because it was such a sharp contrast from the days immediately before and after. It is hard to describe the many ways the Maestro made life a challenge. He moved compulsively-spinning in circles and jumping off the couch repeatedly. He was determined to win any battle, even when there was no battle to be won. He woke-up grumpy, and stayed that way for hours.

This isn't to say that he wasn't often fun. He took delight in the most amazing things, and loved to play. We just didn't have any way of predicting or controlling when things would go well, and when things would go so very wrong. He didn't have yet the curls that now adorn his head, but he reminded me strongly of the poem my parents quoted to me:

There once was a boy with curl in the middle of his fore'ead.

When he was good, he was very very good,

And when he was bad, he was horrid.

By his third birthday, we had learned about a condition the Maestro has called Sensory Integration Dysfunction, or DSI. It is a condition in which sensory input is not processed efficiently. Some senses are too strong, like his hearing. Others, like input from his muscles and joints, are not strong enough. Loud noises drove him crazy, and he continually felt the need to run in circles and jump off the furniture so the shock of landing would register.

Knowing about DSI gave us lots of new things to try, and a new vocabulary to discuss his specific challenges and how to approach them. One night, as Riley was reading about sensory issues, she came across some information that has changed our lives. Many of the symptoms of DSI are also found in Autistic children. Researchers (a generic title for "They say" people, who in this case have a name – Knivsberg, a researcher at the University of Oslo, Norway) have discovered a link between incompletely digested food proteins and many of the symptoms of autism. Specifically, peptide fragments of gluten and casein activate opioid receptors in the brain, and cause such things as poor habituation, social indifference, repetitive behaviour and varying analgesia. Removing gluten from the diet, as well as any dairy, can cause a marked improvement in these and many other symptoms, many of which are actually symptoms of DSI, not of autism itself

After reading some of the primary literature on the subject, (not everything that you read on the internets turns out to be true, after all) we decided to give this diet a try. What followed were three days of complete chaos as the Maestro adjusted to his chaning body chemistry. It seemed to us like someone going through withdrawal from narcotics. I knew that something was changing, but what exactly was it?

By the fourth day, he leveled out to a more calm, more consistent version of himself — gradually becoming less grumpy, less prone to running into walls and people, more able to sit still, more able to calm himself when things go wrong. He is now more loving and playful with his little sister. He tolerates loud sounds much better than he used to, though he still prefers low registers and major keys. The Maestro did go back on gluten for a time, early in the spring. We wanted to have him tested for celiac disease, which requires that you be eating gluten. While eating bread and wheat crackers, all his sensory problems came back again, like they had never left. His blood test came out negative, so there is hope that someday he will be able to eat gluten again. When we will decide that it is worth the risk, I have no idea. Maybe never. We're all so much happier than we were then.

Some might look at how he has changed in the past year, now that his worst days are on par with what where some of his best days a year ago, and think that the changes are because he is now a year older. I know differently. I was there when we took him off gluten and casein, and I was there when we put him back on gluten for the celiac test. If this was a case of a boy simply growing up, he wouldn't have had the steep curve in February and March as we made our first steps in the GFCF world. This has not been a linear change.

In the past few months, his fine motor skill development has taken off. He discovered that he can draw, colour and cut out any musical instrument he wants, and glue it to cardboard. Never before has he had the ability to sit long enough to draw, or the patience to reconcile the drawing he wants to make with the one he can.

My immediate family all have problems with wheat in some way or another. My Mom had told me many times I would probably have more energy if I didn't eat wheat, but how do you just not eat wheat? It is everywhere, in everything. When the Maestro went off gluten, I did too, and it has made a big difference in my health. I need less sleep and I have fewer headaches than I did before. I've been accidentally "glutened" a couple of times since I gave it up, and instead of becoming less sensitive to gluten, I appear to have become more sensative than I used to be. A chocolate bar with crispy rice bits knocked me down for three days, and a turkey injected with "vegetable protein solution" gave me a killer headache and sent me to bed. I don't want to go back, either. For the foreseeable future, the Maestro and I are on this road together.

So what do we eat? Well, for one thing, I have had to learn to bake all over again. I discovered sorghum flour after just enough baking disasters to be able to appreciate how amazing it really is. There are few enough people who bake with sorghum flour that I have had to figure out for myself how to use it, and I started this blog, chronicling what I have learned. At this point, I think I can bake almost anything with sorghum that you can with wheat.

Bread is still tricky, and I haven't tried donuts yet, but the Maestro has never felt deprived because he can't eat the same food as everyone else. In fact, I think he kind of likes being able to have exactly what he wants, everytime. When they have cupcakes at preschool, he is the only one who gets to decide ahead of time whether he wants his with so much chocolate that it is black, or if he wants it to be vanilla. If you give him something to eat, he looks at it, looks at you and asks, "Is this wheat? Is it sorghum?" Since we started, he has rarely been tempted to eat wheat.

What changes in the next year? We will see. We should move this summer, with many changes associated with that. We don't know where we will go, or who we will find there, so it is hard to predict what is going to happen. I'll let you know in a year…

"Made in a Facility that..."

2006-12-28T05:45:00.001-07:00

Well, I have an unfortunate update on sorghum flour front. We invited celiac faculty member and his family over for Pizza, and Riley went to the Indian Grocery to get more Jowar. She came home with a stack of flour, took a closer look at the bag and saw the following:

"Made in a Facility that processes Peanuts, Tree Nuts, Soy, Milk and Wheat."

How long has that been there? Was it always there? My best guess is that I saw it when I started baking, and thought that it was close enough for now. In the beginning, we were trying a lot of things, and weren't sure what we would end up using. We still needed to find substitutes for bouillon, barbeque sauce and things like that. So I put "Made in a facility that..." below "Food Starch - Modified" on the priority list of things to worry about. I guess the warning was there the whole time and I never revisited the issue. I have felt so much better not eating wheat that I stopped thinking about Jowar potentially being a problem. And the Maestro is sooo much better than he had been...

This wouldn't be a problem, really, if it wasn't for Hildegard. I warned her that my flour wasn't certified gluten-free before she ever ate anything I baked, but I know that if she had looked at the package, she would not have chosen to eat any of it. Riley stewed for about a week before bringing me the phone and asking me to tell her that we'd been slowly poisoning her for the last semester. Hildegard actually had a pretty good laugh about it. I guess the time she sat down and ate six muffins, she felt a little funny, and she has occasionally gotten a small rash. So it's not exactly "No Harm, No Foul", but we didn't almost kill her.

I can't give up Sorghum Flour, though, even if I have to give up the Indian Version of it. Sorghum flour doesn't taste like beans. It has more flavour than rice and less than Millet. It is a pale yellow, and silky smooth. It is a good weight when I mix it with some tapioca starch. It has comparable protein to Quinoa. It is everything I have wanted it to be, including inexpensive, except certified gluten-free. I know Bob's Red Mill sells it, but I can't afford that. More on that point in another post coming soon.

I emailed Twin Valley Mills, in Nebraska, to order some of theirs. They sell it in a couple of sizes, and I think with shipping it comes out to 15 cents a pound more than what I am paying now. For you it may be less, and they only process sorghum there. This was just before Christmas, and they haven't gotten back to me yet.

Anyway, I left Riley stuck in the narrative with another full celiac coming over for pizza, and possibly contaminated flour. She called me at work and I found this recipe by Carol Fenster, Ph.D. that calls for Brown rice and Tapioca, both of which we had. This recipe won't work for Hildegard because it uses yeast as a flavoring. I'm pretty sure that's the only reason to have it in there, because there isn't enough sugar to feed that much yeast, and she doesn't call for any rise time. We ran out of Tapioca starch and used some corn starch for half of that, and I am not sure if we had gelatin or not.

We were really pleased with how it turned out. It was a great crispy flat crust, just what Riley likes in a crust of that type. The kids couldn't or didn't chew it, so we still need the soft crust I was working on, but it got us through the crisis at hand. I'm not sure what six people she served that to, but I would plan on being able to share that much dough between the two of you.

Wheat-Free and Gluten-Free Pizza Crust recipe

1 tablespoon gluten-free dry yeast
2/3 cup brown rice flour or bean flour
1/2 cup tapioca flour
2 tablespoons dry milk powder or non-dairy milk powder*
2 teaspoons xanthan gum
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon unflavored gelatin powder
1 teaspoon Italian herb seasoning
2/3 cup warm water (105 degrees F)
1/2 teaspoon sugar or 1/4 teaspoon honey
1 teaspoon olive oil
1 teaspoon cider vinegar
Cooking spray

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.

In medium bowl using regular beaters (not dough hooks), blend the yeast, flours, dry milk powder, xanthan gum, salt, gelatin powder, and Italian herb seasoning on low speed. Add warm water, sugar (or honey), olive oil, and vinegar. Beat on high speed for 3 minutes. (If the mixer bounces around the bowl, the dough is too stiff. Add water if necessary, one tablespoon at a time, until dough does not resist beaters.) The dough will resemble soft bread dough. (You may also mix in bread machine on dough setting.)

Put mixture into 12-inch pizza pan or on baking sheet (for thin, crispy crust), 11 x 7-inch pan (for deep dish version) that has been coated with cooking spray. Liberally sprinkle rice flour onto dough, then press dough into pan, continuing to sprinkle dough with flour to prevent sticking to your hands. Make edges thicker to contain the toppings. Bake the pizza crust for 10 minutes. Remove from oven. Spread pizza crust with your favorite sauce and toppings. Bake for another 20-25 minutes or until top is nicely browned.

Serves 6.

Riley's Amaranth Muffins

2006-12-13T15:02:00.000-07:00

Hildegard is flying home for the holidays today. Last night she and Riley went to a middle school Jazz concert with the Maestro, while Hildr and I stayed home to read stories about Fish. Before they left, Riley made some muffins with some Amaranth flour that Hildegard had ground.

This is our first experience with Amaranth. Reports have indicated that it is bitter, and requires a goodly amount of sugar. Why would anyone use a bitter flour, I wondered. It turns out that the best way is to use a little bit. This flour was ground fairly course, so it gave a bit of a crunch, like corn meal would. Riley used 1 and 1/4 c the standard 2:1 Sorghum Flour/Tapioca starch, adn 1/4 c Amaranth flour. Not very much. That is enough to provide a considerable flavour and texture without overwhelming either.

Saying something is "Nutty" is a bit over done, so I won't say that Amaranth has a Nutty flavour. I'll say it is dark and husky, and leave it to you to figure out what that means. The texture was quite firm, without being tough. Overall, the effect on texture appears to be similar to brown rice flour, but more so. I think a bit of amaranth is what my pizza crust needs.

Either that, or it was the extra egg, but I don't think so. She started with a different recipe than the one I usually use, and the extra egg appears to be the only difference aside from the changed flour mix. I will have to check this...

Whatever the reason, The Maestro ate 3 and a 1/2 of these for Breakfast this morning.

Riley's Amaranth Muffins

1 1/4 cup 2:1 Sorghum flour/Tapioca Starch
1/4 cup Amaranth Flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp xanthan fum
3 tsp baking powder
1/4 cup sugar
3 Tbsp oil
3 eggs
3/4 cup rice milk
1/4 tsp vanilla

GF Pizza Crust and Hamburger Buns Beta

2006-12-11T09:56:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: Riley made these and wasn't watching the oven closely and it got up to 500 degrees after she put the pizza crust it. It turned out the best ever. Apparently, the key to getting a chewy crust with some bite to it is to bake it fast and hot.

We were planning on having a Celiac Pizza Party tonight. Hildegard knows another celiac in the music department, who was jealous when we had pizza the other night. Then there is the little girl in the Maestro’s pre-school class gets rides with Riley every other week. Her Dad has Celiac disease, and is a scientist here. He also teaches flute, and the Mom is a Double-Bass player. So, there are a lot of intersecting lines that all lead to pizza. Unfortunately, the other girl from the music department is in The City today, the Mom has a cold, and the Scientist Dad is teaching a yoga class until after bed-time. So much for the party.

On a side note, the floutist yoga scientist dad has run some biological assays, (ELISA, I think) that verified that Gulten antibodies react with the gluten-like protein in SOME strains of oats, and not others. That is why the literature on oats tends to be contradictory; they don’t specify what strain they are using and some are yes and some are no.

The lack of party today didn’t stop me from getting ready for it over the week-end. Last time Hildegard brought a crust mix that was very good, but too “crisp” for Hildr and the Maestro. We needed some softer crust, more similar to my favorite, Papa John’s. As I mentioned last week, I had an idea for gluten free pizza crust and hamburger buns that I wanted to try out, based on the yeast-free bread recipe I had come up with for Hildegard. The pizza party is the perfect time to give it a shot.

The recipe is what I used before, except that Hildegard isn’t good on Soy, so I used Rice milk, and took out the soy flour.

Yeast Free Bread

1 ¾ c 2:1 Jowar/Tapioca Flour Mix
¼ c Additional Tapioca Flour
2 ½ tsp baking powder
¾ tsp salt
1 tsp xanthan gum
2 tsp sugar, (or 1 tsp stevia, if making for Hildegard)
2 eggs
1 c milk or rice milk
1/3 c vegetable oil

I’ll give away the ending before you look at all the pictures. I need some brown rice flour in the mix, I think, to firm up the final product.

It turned out pretty runny, like pudding. I like pudding. Pouring it into an oiled cookie sheet and spreading with a spoon gave the following pan cake looking thing:

Cooking it provided this:

The bottom is a little light. I was looking for a softer crust, but this is a little too soft for my tastes.

Pouring the batter onto a sheet (like cow pies) gave the following:

which baked into these:

The inside texture looks good to me, but like the pizza crust, they are still too soft. You know the floppiness of a pancake? These are kind of like that. Floppy, like if you aren’t holding them well enough, the bottom half of the bun is going to sag down. Tasty, yes, but not exactly what I am looking for.

They also didn’t come out symmetrically rounded on top. I was looking for something with C(infinite) symmetry, and these look more like fried eggs from the side.

I cooked this crust in a frying pan with more oil, and sprayed the top lightly with oil. This is closer. Notice that it browned a little better, and the bottom is definitely crisper.

The bottom view:

What do I need to do? Well, they need to be more firm after baking, and a little crustier. What I will try next is to try the addition of some brown rice flour. That improved the structure of my muffins considerably. I’ll keep you posted.

GF Hamburger Buns

2006-11-30T08:53:00.001-07:00

I was planning on having the house to myself tonight. Riley was going to take the Maestro and Hildr to Nearby Competing University (NCU) today to visit some friends of ours who got a job there last year. We are under a winter storm advisory, so she is not going until Saturday, if plans hold.

Right now it is raining, and the temperature 36 F, and steadily dropping. They could have left early this morning and tried to outrun the ice, but Riley grew up in the Southwest, and doesn't drive peacefully in the precipitation. By the time she got there, she'd have been so worn out from the tension of driving safe that she probably wouldn't have been driving safe. And that doesn't even include time for having to stop at a MacDonald's play place (where the Maestro can't eat any food) so they can run.

We're supposed to get ice by this afternoon, followed by up to six inches of snow by the end of tomorrow. Hopefully, things will be cleared by Saturday, and they can go then.

I mention all of this here because I was going to make GF Hamburger Buns tonight, using the GF yeast free pizza crust recipe I talked about earlier. Because the Maestro is GFCF, and can't eat cheese, I was going to make a big batch of dough, and have pizza tomorrow without him.

We'll see how this weekend goes. Hopefully, I can get those done next week.

Needless to say, our short-sleeved yard work of last week is done, and I didn't ride my bike to work this mroning.

Pumpkin-Fest Soup

2006-11-20T09:27:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was out 9^th annual Pumpkin-Fest, the first to appear in a gluten and casein free format. It seems like every year we have the same debate at our house regarding the scope of Pumpkin-Fest. Do we invite everyone, or do we only invite a few people? If we only invite a few people, who gets left off the list? If we invite everyone, how are we possibly going to manage hosting such a gathering? Who is going to get everything ready? Who is going to stress about getting everything ready? Why are we doing this, really?

It took us longer than usual to get these questions settled this year, partly because people got sick, partly because I've been taking extra time with work to get together job applications. Usually, we hold Pumpkin-Fest two weeks ago.

Really, it turns out that the problem with Pumpkin-Fest appears to be the feelings of those who were important enough to us to be invited in the past, but not important enough to us to be invited this year. Riley worries about people having their feelings hurt when they realize that Pumpkin-Fest came and went without them hearing from us. I tend to think that by definition, the feelings of people who aren't important enough to us to be invited aren't important enough to worry about. That sounds harsher than I intend it, but close enough that I'll clarify instead of deleting that sentence and starting over.

Many of our closest friends have moved since the last Pumpkin-Fest. Hildegard blew into town on the west wind, and became part of the family. Of the people who have been to Pumpkin-Fest in the past, there was really only one family who has ever given me the impression that it was important to them. So, this year, it was Hildegard and that one family. The family who thinks that the Gluten-free thing is in my head weren't invited. The family who didn't eat any pumpkin foods at last year's event weren't invited either, though they are quite dear to Riley. You disregard the Pumpkin-Fest, the Pumpkin-Fest rolls on without you. Tidal waves don't ask forgiveness. There was one family who came late last year that I could have invited, if there had been room on Riley's stress meter, but there wasn't. The Maestro would rather have a late Halloween party with them anyway.

Riley decided that she wanted to serve hotdogs and chips this year. The Family who was coming has a son the Maestro's age, and one who is about eight. In the past, kids haven't been the most open to a meal centered on gourd-fruits, and having another option kids are guaranteed to eat makes it easier for Riley to relax. In the past, quite a few parents have fed their kids prior to arrival, which we wanted to minimize. We used Ball Park regular hot dogs, which claim to be GFCF.

Because this year was a smaller event, we only made one main dish, a killer pumpkin soup, with wild rice and apple topping. Topping for a soup, you ask? Yes. And it is Awe-some. When Riley and I were dating, we considered buying a Leek, and a lady at the store dissuaded us, because "Those are Nasty!" The majority of the flavor from the soup comes from the leek, so I swear she must be wrong. We definitely need to investigate this vegetable more closely. Having ancestors from Wales, I feel a special kinship to leeks, I think.

We ended up not having any almonds, so I used pecans instead. Our pumpkin was smaller than the recipe needed, and Riley didn't come home with parsnips, so we added a whole sweet potato to make up for some vegetable volume. We are casein-free at this house, so we used Fleischman's unsalted margarine instead of butter. This is the second time we have served this soup, to rave-reviews each time. It's one of those soups that can convince people who think they don't like pumpkin that a pumpkin soup is great after all. I think that we could put whatever vegetable we want in it without deviating from the overall intention of the soup too much. The dominant flavor is the leek, and while I am not suggesting that sweet potato tastes like parsnip or pumpkin, altering the vegetable composition is going to have a subtle effect on the background flavors.

Oh, and we like double topping, so you should make lots of that. I haven't doubled the quantities in the recipe below.

Pumpkin Soup with Wild Rice and Apples

Soup

2 Tbsp Slivered Almonds

3 Tbsp unsalted butter

1 onion, diced

1 leek, white part only, sliced

1 pumpkin, seeded, peeled, cut, 4 cups

1 large turnip, peeled, sliced

2 carrots, peeled and sliced

1 large parsnip, peeled and sliced

2 ¼ tsp salt

¼ tsp ground pepper

3 ½-4 cups chicken stock

2 sprigs thyme

Topping

1/3 cup wild rice

1 apple, cored and sliced

2 scallions, sliced

pinch of cayenne pepper

1. Brown almonds in frying pan. Chop and set aside.

2. Melt 2 Tbsp butter in a large stock pot and sauté onions until soft. Add leek and cook 5 minutes. Add remaining vegetables (pumpkin, turnip, carrots, parsnip), 2 tsp salt and pepper. Cook unit vegetables are soft.

3. Add stock and thyme. Bring to boil and simmer until vegetables are tender, about 30 minutes.

4. Allow soup to cool slightly, transfer half to blender, and puree. Return to stock pot.

5. Cook wild rice with ½ tsp salt. Wild rice takes about an hour.

6. Heat remaining butter in large frying pan. Add apple and cook until soft. Add scallions, remaining salt and cayenne. Cook unit scallions are soft, about 1 minute. Add rice and reserved nuts.

7. Ladle soup into bowls, and garnish with wild rice and apples.

Pumpkin-Fest Dessert Pie

2006-11-20T09:25:00.000-07:00

For dessert, we ended up going for pumpkin pie. Traditionally, we don't have pumpkin pie at Pumpkin-Fest, but with this year's guest list, it seemed like a good time to try out a gluten-free pie crust without anyone being disappointed if it didn't turn out. Hildegard said that she has a recipe that uses potato flour (not starch) that is OK, but not great. I used the shortening crust recipe from "The Pie and Pastry Bible" by Rose Levy Berenbaum, substituting 2:1 Jowar/Tapioca Flour for the pastry flour, because that is the basic mix I am using for everything these days. I also added 1 ½ tsp Xanthan gum, because another Jowar crust recipe I have used that much. I'm not sure what effect the Xanthan gum has on a pie crust, because you don't really add enough water to get the helixes stretching out, like you would in a muffin batter. This is something to investigate further.

I got it to roll-out fine, but it cracked when I tried to pick it up to put it in the pie plate. Hildegard, who is the only person I know personally who has ever tried gluten-free pie crust, said that you just have to pat it into the pie plate. It really only had two big cracks, so it was mostly a uniform thickness. I'm not sure whether patting it into the pie plate gets you a better crust than that, but it would save time rolling out a crust that is going to break anyway. I'm thinking about adding an egg, which was anathema to me in the pre-gluten-free days, but might be appropriate now.

I filled the pie with pumpkin custard for which I'm sure you have plenty of recipes already, so you don't need mine. The only modifications were that I used rice milk instead of cow's milk, about 2/3 equivalents for real maple syrup instead of the sugar, and added an extra egg.

When I cut the pie, a bit of the crust broke off. I handed it to Hildegard, who popped it into her mouth. With wide eyes, she said "That tastes so good that I feel like I am going to be sick eating it!" Compliments sound different coming from celiacs, don't they? I was really pleased. Riley had eaten my Pastry flour/Butter crust before, so thiis was not going to be near that, in taste or texture, so Hildegard's reaction was the one I most cared to see.

Compared to my wheat flour crusts from the old days, it was a little crunchier, without being tough, and it wasn't as flaky. The Crisco wasn't as cold as it should have been when I mixed it up, so I would have been surprised if it had turned out very flaky, anyway. And, as mentioned, it wasn't as malleable when rolled out. This wasn't a really discerning crowd, as far as pie crust goes, but it satisfied the wheat-eaters, who didn't have any comment on it.

Hildegard is taking a pie to her brother's for regular American Thanksgiving this week, and asked me to teach her to make this crust. I'll try using colder shortening, and maybe a second crust with egg, so see if that makes it more malleable. Perhaps if I mix the Xanthan gum with the egg first, and add it in a separate step from the shortening? Any suggestions are welcome.

Pie Crust

9 Tbsp Shortening

1 ½ c 2:1 Jowar/Tapioca Mix

½ tsp salt

1 ½ tsp Xanthan Gum

6Tbsp water (or more)

Sweet Rice flour for dusting.

1. Mix flour mixture with salt and Xanthan Gum.

2. With pastry blender, cut in shortening until chunks are pea-sized. Drizzle in water 1 Tbsp at a time until dough starts to clump together.

3. Cool in refrigerator.

4. Roll out, carefully, dusting surface with sweet rice flour to prevent it sticking to the rolling-pin.

5. Carefully peal crust off the pastry board with a spatula. Transfer to 9 inch pie plate.

6. Mash dough pieces from what used to be a rolled-out crust into pie plate.

7. Pour in pie filling, and bake until set.

Sturdy Muffins

2006-11-20T09:23:00.000-07:00

A problem that I have had with muffins is having them go soggy before I am ready for them to. The addition of some rice flour seems to fix that right up. I am using 2:1 Jowar/Tapioca flour as my go to flour these days, so I typically mix that 2:1 with brown rice flour, or divide it roughly along those lines. In the following recipe, which started with 1 2/3 cup flour, I went with 1:0.66, just to make the math easier.

Sturdy Apricot-spice Muffins

1 c 2:1 Jowar/Tapioca Flour Mix

½ c Brown Rice Flour

¼ c Soy Flour

¼ c sugar

2 ½ tsp baking powder

¾ tsp salt

1 tsp xanthan gum

½ tsp cinnamon

¼ tsp nutmeg

dash cloves

2 eggs

1 c milk or soy milk

1/3 c vegetable oil

2 tsp vanilla extract

(optional)

½ c chopped apricots

¼ chopped nuts

UPDATE: I accidently had baking powder listed twice. The second one should have been xanthan gum

Pumpkin Muffins

2006-11-20T09:22:00.000-07:00

Here is my new recipe for GF pumpkin muffins. These end up a lot like cupcakes, actually, so I thought they would work well as a sugar-free version, for Hildegard. To make that conversion, I simply left out the sugar, and put in a little stevia. The secret here is that there is a lot of wet fruity matter, in the form of pumpkin to make up the texture.

Cory's Pumpkin Muffins (adapted)

1 ½ c sugar

1 c pumpkin

½ c oil

½ c water

2 eggs

1 c Jowar/Tapioca Flour Mix

2/3 c Brown Rice Flour

1 tsp baking soda

½ tsp baking powder

¾ tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

½ tsp nutmeg

¼ tsp cloves

Hildegard's Perfect Sugar Free Pumpkin Muffins

<s>1 ½ c sugar</s>

2 tsp Stevia powder

1 c pumpkin

½ c oil

½ c water

2 eggs

1 c Jowar/Tapioca Flour Mix

2/3 c Brown Rice Flour

1 tsp baking soda

½ tsp baking powder

¾ tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

½ tsp nutmeg

¼ tsp cloves

Pizza Crust and Hamburger Buns

2006-11-20T09:19:00.001-07:00

I've perfected the yeast free bread recipe I had high hopes for. I've used it so far to make pizza crust, mashing it down into a cast iron frying pan before baking, and for hamburger buns, dolloping some left-over pizza crust into another pan, and not mashing it down as much. I need to try some large scale hamburger bun production, but the first one went well. This recipe doesn't brown very well, so watch for that. I haven't tried this as a loaf, but it is pretty soft, so I don't expect it to hold up in a tall form.

Yeast Free Bread

1 ½ c 2:1 Jowar/Tapioca Flour Mix

¼ c Soy Flour

¼ c Additional Tapioca Flour

2 ½ tsp baking powder

¾ tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

2 tsp sugar, (or 1 tsp stevia, if making for Hildegard)

2 eggs

1 c milk or soy milk

1/3 c vegetable oil

Look! I'm a lead balloon!

2006-11-07T10:03:00.000-07:00

As some of you know, I have three blogs: a work blog, a food blog, and a cello lesson blog. I usually keep these three separate, because foodies don't usually care so much about the problems of academia, academics tend to eat what they want, and my three-year-old's music has little to do with what I am baking or working on at school. This post is going on both my work blog and my food blog because it deals with both, plus some of my academic friends might have this problem. What the heck, I guess I'll put it on the cello blog too, just for kicks.

I feel like crap.

I don't have celiac disease. I don't have celiac disease, officially. I don't have celiac disease the way so many of you have it. I thought. Perhaps I am wrong.

My son, the Maestro, has sensory-integration disfunction, sensory-processing disorder, or a bunch of other names for something that means he is really touchy about a number of things. Sound is an easy example to explain. He can't handle noise, but he loves music. He would be the kid upstairs drumming and singing into the karaoke machine. Anyone else's noise drives him up the wall, or at least makes him want to slam himself against the wall. I think music is an ordered form of controlled noise like auditory methadone. He doesn't like dissonance, perhaps because it feels disordered to him, and "hurts his feelings".

Earlier this year, we found some literature on the link between autism and certain proteins, including gluten. Sensory Integration Disfunction is present it a lot of autism cases, so after consultation with SciFinder, we decided to give it a try. We took the Maestro off gluten and casein, and it has made a huge difference in his ability to control his reactions to sensory input.

I live pretty far from the rest of my family, and have missed most of them going off wheat. My Mom doesn't eat wheat, and all of my siblings either don't eat it, or have kids who don't or shouldn't. My Mom had told me several times that I should give it a try, but how do you "try" going off wheat? It is everywhere, in everything.

So, suddenly I have a kid who needs to eat something else. Sorghum, or Jowar, flour is a good substitute, if you can learn how to handle it, hence the Gluten-free blog. So I gave it a try myself, and felt a lot better. I hadn't really felt sick, but I was tired a lot. I fell asleep in a lot of group meetings and seminars. I went off wheat, and I stopped being tired all the time. That was good enough for me, I was going wheat-free for good.

We're pretty strict with the Maestro's diet. We watch out for modified food starch and barley malt and dextrose for him. I have always had a problem with oats, and now wheat. I haven't been concerned about traces of gluten in what I ate, however. The rest of my family claims that they feel OK eating spelt, oats and rye, so it must just be a wheat issue with us.

I have always had an iron stomach. I throw up every 10 years or so. If Riley or the kids get the stomach flu and are turning themselves inside out all over the house, I tend to feel a little queasy, but no more than that. I can't be a celiac. The Maestro and my little sister Rai both had the blood tests, which came out negative. It's not celiac disease in my family.

Yesterday, I didn't bring enough lunch to work, and got hungry in the afternoon. So I went to the store on the corner and bought a snack. Hmmm. Nestle's Crunch (with Caramel). Tasty.

About ten minutes later, I was sitting at my computer when my brain did a little flip-flop in my skull. My head hurts. My back hurts. I feel weak and trembly. My head, where it doesn't hurt, feels kind of like a lead balloon --heavy and hollow at the same time.

Crunch contains crisped rice (rice flour, sugar, barley malt, traces of wheat gluten). All the celiac bloggers are saying "Why did you eat that?!! That's so stupid! Of course you are going to feel like crap!" Um, I don't have celiac disease, I am just wheat sensitive? Um, I guess not. If I don't have celiac disease, officially, I guess I need to eat like I do. And no, I am not about to start eating in order to do the gluten challenge sufficient for an endoscopy, so don't even suggest it. The blood test would come out negative, just like for the rest of my family, so that isn't likely to be any more helpful.

I had hoped I would feel better when I woke up this morning, but I don't. Oh, and my iron stomach feels a little queasy this morning.

Did you know that one in between 100 and 133 people have celiac disease, depending on where you get your statistics. This ranks it up with hyper-tension with numbers. That is the statistic for people who don't know they have it. You may be that one person who has celiac disease and doesn't know it. Head-aches? Tired or sick a lot? Digestive problems that no one can explain? Weird persistent rashes? Joint problems? Some subset of those? It's worth looking into. A whole generation of doctors didn't study anything about it in medical school, so you basically have to tell them about it. If you think you have it, you should get tested for it before going off gluten, if you care about an official diagnosis. Gee, this would have been a good post for celiac awareness month, wouldn't it?

It may be you. Because it sure isn't me. I don't have celiac disease. I'm just wheat sensitive, right?

Oh, I feel like crap.

Look, I'm a lead balloon!

2006-11-07T07:40:00.000-07:00

I feel like crap.

I don't have celiac disease. I don't have celiac disease, officially. I don't have celiac disease the way so many of you have it. I thought. Perhaps I am wrong.

My son, the Maestro, has sensory-integration disfunction, sensory-processing disorder, or a bunch of other names for something that means he is really touchy about a number of things. Sound is an easy example to explain. He can't handle noise, but he loves music. He would be the kid upstairs drumming and singing into the karaoke machine. Anyone else's noise drives him up the wall, or at least makes him want to slam himself against the wall. I think music is an ordered form of controlled noise like auditory methadone. He doesn't like dissonance, perhaps because it feels disordered to him, and "hurts his feelings".

Earlier this year, we found some literature on the link between autism and certain proteins, including gluten. Sensory Integration Disfunction is present it a lot of autism cases, so after consultation with SciFinder, we decided to give it a try. We took the Maestro off gluten and casein, and it has made a huge difference in his ability to control his reactions to sensory input.

I live pretty far from the rest of my family, and have missed most of them going off wheat. My Mom doesn't eat wheat, and all of my siblings either don't eat it, or have kids who don't or shouldn't. My Mom had told me several times that I should give it a try, but how do you "try" going off wheat? It is everywhere, in everything.

So, suddenly I have a kid who needs to eat something else. Sorghum, or Jowar, flour is a good substitute, if you can learn how to handle it, hence the Gluten-free blog. So I gave it a try myself, and felt a lot better. I hadn't really felt sick, but I was tired a lot. I fell asleep in a lot of group meetings and seminars. I went off wheat, and I stopped being tired all the time. That was good enough for me, I was going wheat-free for good.

We're pretty strict with the Maestro's diet. We watch out for modified food starch and barley malt and dextrose for him. I have always had a problem with oats, and now wheat. I haven't been concerned about traces of gluten in what I ate, however. The rest of my family claims that they feel OK eating spelt, oats and rye, so it must just be a wheat issue with us.

I have always had an iron stomach. I throw up every 10 years or so. If Riley or the kids get the stomach flu and are turning themselves inside out all over the house, I tend to feel a little queasy, but no more than that. I can't be a celiac. The Maestro and my little sister Rai both had the blood tests, which came out negative. It's not celiac disease in my family.

Yesterday, I didn't bring enough lunch to work, and got hungry in the afternoon. So I went to the store on the corner and bought a snack. Hmmm. Nestle's Crunch (with Caramel). Tasty.

About ten minutes later, I was sitting at my computer when my brain did a little flip-flop in my skull. My head hurts. My back hurts. I feel weak and trembly. My head, where it doesn't hurt, feels kind of like a lead balloon --heavy and hollow at the same time.

Crunch contains crisped rice (rice flour, sugar, barley malt, traces of wheat gluten). All the celiac bloggers are saying "Why did you eat that?!! That's so stupid! Of course you are going to feel like crap!" Um, I don't have celiac disease, I am just wheat sensitive? Um, I guess not. If I don't have celiac disease, officially, I guess I need to eat like I do. And no, I am not about to start eating in order to do the gluten challenge sufficient for an endoscopy, so don't even suggest it. The blood test would come out negative, just like for the rest of my family, so that isn't likely to be any more helpful.

I had hoped I would feel better when I woke up this morning, but I don't. Oh, and my iron stomach feels a little queasy this morning.

Did you know that one in between 100 and 133 people have celiac disease, depending on where you get your statistics. This ranks it up with hyper-tension with numbers. That is the statistic for people who don't know they have it. You may be that one person who has celiac disease and doesn't know it. Head-aches? Tired or sick a lot? Digestive problems that no one can explain? Weird persistent rashes? Joint problems? Some subset of those? It's worth looking into. A whole generation of doctors didn't study anything about it in medical school, so you basically have to tell them about it. If you think you have it, you should get tested for it before going off gluten, if you care about an official diagnosis. Gee, this would have been a good post for celiac awareness month, wouldn't it?

It may be you. Because it sure isn't me. I don't have celiac disease. I'm just wheat sensitive, right?

Oh, I feel like crap.

Omnivore's Dilemma

2006-11-02T13:32:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, Brenden, at Something in Season reviewed The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Micheal Pollan. I had heard an interview with Pollan on NPR so I was interested in another view of his book. Slate's Daily Podcast from yesterday is a long discussion of the book by some literary critics. These critics are not Foodies and don't even seem aware of the term, calling Foodi-ism "Yuppy sensibilities."

They make some good points, and you might be interested in their take on the topic. Their main beef is that he describes the problem so well, and gets too enamoured with living on a farm and killing your own chickens, that he doesn't offer any solutions for the rest of us. I remember that in the NPR interview he said that he offers no solution because he doesn't really know of one.

It sounds to me like he needs to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and on a ride to Bozeman instead of moving to a farm, but I haven't read the book. Unfortunately, I haven't had the time I would like to devote to foodi-ism lately. We even had to postpone PumpkinFest this year, until I am done with academic job applications.

Bread Vairations

2006-10-27T14:20:00.000-06:00

I have been playing with my bread machine recipe a bit. It turns out that any deviation I can think of ruins the loaf. Somehow, 2c Jowar to 1.5 c Brown rice flour is the magic ratio.

I have tried some white rice instead of brown, some potato starch, more Jowar with less brown rice, and molasses instead of sugar. Nothing I have tried has led to a loaf even close to the original recipe. Magic, I tell you.

I've been working on job applications a lot the past couple of weeks. When my bread doesn't rise, I have to slice it really thin, and eat it anyway if I want any bread because I've had no time to make things over. I feel bad about not getting Muffins made for Hildegard more often, but not much I can to about that.

Cresting over my shoulder

2006-10-19T15:25:00.001-06:00

My office hour is about to start. We'll see if anyone comes today, or if I get this post finished today.

We've had a good summer and fall, puke-wise. The Maestro traditionally goes on a food-strike whenever he gets a cold, because the mucus ends up in his stomach, and anything else that goes in makes him throw up. I blame Riley's genes for this. I think that not eating wheat has helped him. He's only had one cold since the spring, that I remember, and he didn't throw up with it.

Hildr has a cold right now. Tuesday night, she wouldn't eat any dinner, and just wanted to lay with her head on my shoulder. About 1:30 in the morning, I was laying in bed, listening to her softly gagging in the other room. I wasn't worried, because she has always insisted on sleeping on her stomach, much to the horror of pediatricians everywhere. (Riley is now upset that I have shared this with the world.) Soon, however, she fully woke up and started to cry. I didn't think that she would go back to sleep without some soymilk, because she didn't eat any dinner; and low-blood sugar does that to my kids. Riley blames my genes for this. So I got up, helped her drain a sippy-cup, and she fell asleep in my arms.

As I was slowly lowering her back into her crib, it happened. Hack! Puking down into her bed understandably woke her up, and she was upset. It was dark, so I didn't know how much had come up, and how much was on her, or anything. I started down the hall to the bathroom, but only made it into the hallway before round two started. I stepped back into her bedroom, on the spot just between the hallway carpet and the area rug. Once I was over linoleum, I just stood there as the waves of sticky soymilk vomit crested over my right shoulder and cascaded down my back and onto the floor. Once, twice, three times a lady.

It turned out that Hildr was relatively clean, and Riley took her to bed while I cleaned everything up. This is not among my favorite reasons to need a shower at 1:30 in the morning.

I made it back to bed to find that Hildr had developed Twitchy-leg syndrome, and wouldn't stop kicking me. This will not do. I started to take her back to her bed and made it almost to the door when I discovered that her stomach wasn't empty yet. Oops. Luckily, the dirty laundry basket was handy and she was pointed mostly away from me.

I decided that I could sleep better on the couch.

I also haven't been able to do much baking this week. Good news that my first job application will hopefully go out tomorrow afternoon.

Stevia Muffins 2.0

2006-10-12T10:04:00.000-06:00

An interesting this happened the other day. I am still working on sugar-free muffins for Hildegard, and ended up with banana bread instead. I’m calling it banana bread, but that suggests a loaf with a texture similar to muffins, with spices, and perhaps walnuts. That is not what I made. What I made was more like bread “rolls” that rose, and split on the top. They had a crust, and a soft inside. They just tasted like banana, with a slight licorice aftertaste.

My initial attempt at sugar free muffins had a texture more like Swiss cheese. I thought that this might be improved with the change to Tapioca starch instead of potato starch and Jowar flour. I was out of soy milk and used the last trace of soy powder early in the recipe, so I added ¼ cup sweet rice flour in an attempt to simulate rice milk. I was also out of vanilla

1 ½ c 2:1 Sorghum flour/Tapioca Starch
¼ c Soy flour
3 tsp Stevia powder
¼ c Tapioca Starch
¼ c Sweet Rice Flour
2 ½ tsp Baking Powder
¾ tsp salt
1 tsp Xanthan gum
2 eggs
1 c water
1/3 c vegetable oil
1 mashed banana

The interesting thing about this weird banana “bread” is that it has the same texture as wheat bread, and is made yeast free. Can I duplicate the texture without the banana? A Jowar based, yeast-free, bread recipe would be very attractive to some people. I have a few things to work out first. How did the banana affect it? Can I get it into a loaf? A bread machine?

Hildegard didn’t tell me how great the muffins were, though.

Cereal Bars

2006-10-12T09:09:00.000-06:00

I found a good review of gluten free cereal bars, courtesy of the celiac chicks. If you are interested in prepackaged snacky goodness, I recommend you check it out.

Muffin Mess

2006-10-10T08:27:00.000-06:00

I have come to a sad realization about my muffins. They don’t freeze well. Using potato starch means that I need to use less Xanthan gum, otherwise they retain too much moisture and come out mushy.

Reducing the amount of Xanthan gum causes them to fall apart when they are frozen. They still make good mush with sugar and milk on them, but as far as frozen muffins go they are completely unacceptable. I am sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.

I can look into some tapioca flour; that worked well in the waffles. I can try some kuzu starch instead of Xanthan gum. I have recently been alerted to some benefits of using some rice flour in with Jowar or Sorghum flour for improving structural integrity. I’ll post an update when I have a (partially) acceptable solution figured out.

Pumpkin Fest

2006-10-08T21:16:00.001-06:00

HisHH

On the morning of All Saint's Day (Nov. 1^st), 1998, I walked into the kitchen of my single-guy-apartment to see four large carved pumpkins sitting on the table. They were the result of a Halloween activity the previous night, with a group of friends who had no use for Jack-O-Lanterns in November. What to do? Typically, a carved pumpkin at a single-guy-apartment complex will sit until ill-use and old age take their toll. The alternative is to toss the pumpkin in a dumpster before any tolls are taken. To do either seemed wasteful, especially considering the gargantuan proportions of these magnificent gourds. The beginnings of an idea started to collect, slowly taking shape in the un-swept corners of my just-out-of-bed brain. Could I do something with these pumpkins that no single guy had ever done? Could I find some way of using these pumpkins of which no bachelor had ever dreamed? Could I… eat them?

By mid-afternoon, I'd made a pumpkin soup, pumpkin muffins, and a couple of pies (my first pies, with commercial crust). I asked my new girlfriend, Riley, to help me host, then invited some friends. I enjoyed all the food, which is fortunate, because I spent the next week eating pumpkin. As it turns out, when you do something that no bachelor has ever done, no one really believes the food will be edible, and they all eat before they come. So, the first ever Pumpkin-Fest was born, with minimal fanfare.

Many things have changed over the years. Perhaps the most important is that people are now expected to come hungry. Another change is the ban on commercial pumpkin-pie, instituted after our third year. People were initially asked to come and bring a pumpkin dish, and we ended up with more store-bought pies than anyone enjoyed. We now ask that people come. If you would enjoy bringing a pumpkin dish, we are excited to enjoy it with you. Over the years we have had pumpkin games, T-shirts, soups, breads, fudge, etc. Beginning with the fourth annual Pumpkin-Fest, we have enjoyed celebrating in the Midwest, where harvest season is more real than imagined.

We are a mixed household. Canadian Thanksgiving occurs the second Monday in October, and is traditionally marked in the United States by the lack of mail delivery. American Thanksgiving is the end of November, and is not noticeable in Canada, because harvest season ended months before. Pumpkin-Fest falls at the midpoint of these two and is our own unique holiday. It was born out of appreciation for the bounty of both harvest season and left-over Jack-O-Lantern season. It is a celebration of friendship and all that it means to us.

This year is our first Gluten- and Casein-free Pumpkin Fest. As many of you who are familiar with GF cooking know, there are many recipes using Pumpkin that are naturally Gluten-Free. Pumpkin Pie, if we served it, would have to be modified, and the pumpkin breads and cakes will be different this year. Most of the soups and stews that have formed the main-stays of the Main-dish portion of the meal can be served without significant modification. Really, the issue this year will be desert.

I suppose you would call this a meme. I'm pretty new to the food blog world, so you all should consider yourself tagged to participate. What is your favourite GF pumpkin dessert? I am especially interested in "Something In Season" contributing, as this seems something totally in your bailiwick, and " Wheatless Bay", as a fellow displaced Canadian. I am happy to have a link to something old, from your archives, if you have archives. I would prefer recipes that don't call for mixes, as I am a poor student, with no money for the finer mixes in life. I work mainly with Jowar, but am more than willing to use more traditional flours for this special occasion.

Splenda is no Honey

2006-10-05T15:30:00.000-06:00

I have been updating my computer so that a reference program I need will work with the new version. (Endnote. If you have to write a big paper, it's indispensible) While waiting, I started scanning Chemistry blogs, and found this post, about splenda. It's worth looking at if you think splenda is a good idea. It isn't a good idea, in case you wondered.

Two Notes

2006-10-05T10:20:00.000-06:00

I’m cleaning my desk and came across a paper with some notes on it. I need to post this so I don’t lose it again. If blogger has it, I know where I can find it again.

From the Gluten-Free Goddess , Karina writes that simulating a baking mix, she uses:
2 cups of flour
1 scant tsp baking powder
½ scant tsp baking soda
¼ scant tsp xanthan gum

From Glutan-a-Go-Go, Sheltie Girl uses Kuzu starch instead of xanthan gum.
1 ½ tsp in 1 Tbsp water for a cookie recipe
1 tsp in melted butter in sweet potato bread.

Best Thing Since Sliced Bread

2006-10-03T19:39:00.001-06:00

I have felt like I had a handle on a number of baked goods. I routinely make muffins and waffles. I successfully did a read-off conversion of brownies. I don't feel like I have a good handle on bread. I have never pretended that I do. Most loaves I have made have turned out flat. I usually make "rolls" in muffin tins, and they work well. I think it has something to do the surface area to side support ratio or muffins compared to loaves.

I have made a good loaf using Bette Hagmann's four bean flour. The shape turned out, but it tasted like beans. I don't like my bread to taste like beans. I want something that tastes like Jowar.

Riley came home from a friend's house the other day with a bread machine. I wasn't terribly excited, because if I don't feel like I can make regular loaves, how do I adapt a muffin to the bread machine? Blah. Riley pointed out that I had a recipe for bread machine that I had forgotten about.

Bread Machine Bread Recipe
- By Jill Miller

2 eggs
1 1/2 tsp egg replacer mixed with 2 T water
1 2/3 cup water
3 T oil
2 1/4 tsp yeast
2 tsp vinegar
2 cups sorghum flour
1 1/2 cup brown rice flour
2 1/2 tsp Xanthan gum
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup dry milk powder
3 T sugar

Combine egg replacer and eggs. Mix water with vinegar and oil. Sift all dry ingredients together. Put all liquids in bread machine. Set machine on short cycle, start and mix in dry ingredients. Bake. Cool prior to slicing.

I don't have any egg replacer, so I left that out, and I didn't use any dry milk powder. The dough was a lot thicker than the rolls I usually make. I think that helps retain the gases. The loaf pan has a similar surface area to side support ratio to a muffin. I think that those two together made the difference because it turned out absolutely great. The Maestro loved it, because he has missed having slices of bread that you can toast. The texture was wonderful, it rose, and it tasted like Jowar instead of beans. Perfect

I wondered what effect the brown rice flour has, because as you know, I typically use Jowar with a variety of starches. I made a loaf of bread with one cup rice flour with a half cup potato starch. It didn't rise as high, so I think that the rice flour is key, somehow.

PS. Yes, that is a Miracle Blade III All-Purpose Slicer. Thanks, Chef Tony!

stevia = swiss cheese muffins

2006-09-28T11:10:00.000-06:00

I finally made some muffins last night using Stevia. Hildegard brought over a bottle of bulk NuNaturals Stevia diluted with Maltodextrin. I didn’t have a handle on how much to use because of the Maltodextrin, so I tried it out first sprinkled over a bowl of puffed Millet. It does taste sweet, but not so sweet that I will need to be afraid of using too much. It also has some licorice-like aftertaste. Looking at the structure, I don’t think this comes from the steviosides, so another source of purified steviosides may be aftertaste-free, but this is pure speculation on my part.

I used my standard muffin recipe with 1 cup chopped frozen apricots. After mixing it with 2 tsp Stevia powder, it looked a little wet. I added 2 Tbsp flour mix to compensate for the missing volume of sugar.

They rose quite a lot, and browned nicely. Cutting one open revealed a texture similar to swiss cheese -- Big bubble holes unevenly distributed, and a hard crust. Actually, they are more bread-like in texture than some bread I have made. This bears more investigation later, I think.

It turns out that they aren’t sweet enough for my taste, but Hildegard might like them. She says that she likes things not so sweet. For me, I can still taste the baking soda, so I say make them sweeter. The licorice aftertaste is faintly noticable. I like licorice though…

1 ½ c (9:2 Sorghum flour/Potato Starch)

¼ c Soy flour

2 tsp NuNaturals Stevia powder + 2 Tbsp flour mix

2 ½ tsp Baking Powder

¾ tsp salt

½ tsp Xanthan gum

2 eggs

1 c milk or soy milk

1/3 c vegetable oil

2 tsp vanilla extract

1 c chopped apricots

I think that flour isn’t the right volume subsitute to use. Karina suggested chopped coconut, but sugar dissolves, so I was thinking something less solid. I think that next time I will try some tapioca starch. I think that this will help them be more chewy and less crusty. Hopefully, the longer chain starch in the tapioca will also contribute to holding the developing gases from collecting in large pockets as they rise in the oven. I’ll let you know when I get time for a re-trial.

Hildr's Chewy Morning Waffles

2006-09-27T08:47:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I got to take Hildr in for her 15 month check-up, and they gave her three shots. She was very sad about this, as you might imagine, but we made it through without the kicking and fighting that the Maestro would have done. Like him, however, she had to pull off the bandages immediately after the nurse left. She didn’t stop whimpering until she had them off and thrown in the trash. I think throwing them away was cathartic.

She was pretty cheerful all day, but didn’t sleep well. She woke up early this morning with a low fever and wanted to lay in bed with us. She has been doing this a lot lately. Whoever gets her out of her crib is instructed firmly to take her back to bed, and if one of us gets up before she is ready, she lets us know that we aren’t dismissed yet. She likes to roll around meowing like a cat, and hide under the blankets.

Because she woke up early, I got to make waffles. Hildegard gave us some waffles the other day, and Riley realized that she likes her waffles more chewy than I had been making them. I started out using a 2:1 Jowar:Cornstarch. Then I switched to 3:1 Jowar:Potato starch and dropped to half the Xanthan Gum, which made them more crispy, and got rid of the corn flavour the Riley didn’t like. To make them more chewy, I thought I could finally try the jowar/Tapioca mix I’d wanted to investigate. I started with 2:1 and they turned out great. Riley thinks that this is just how she likes her waffles, for now anyway…

Hildr’s Chewy Morning Waffles

2 eggs (separated)
¼ cup corn oil
1 ½ cup milk
2 T sugar
½ t salt
1 ¾ cup sorghum/starch mix*
4 t baking powder
1 t Xanthan gum

* 2:1 Jowar (Sorghum flour)/Tapioca Starch

Oh, one other note. I think our waffle baker is dying after about ten years of service. I think that might have something to do with how long they take to cook. I reduced the soy milk to 1 ½ cups from 1 ¾ cups in previous versions. I think this helps compensate.

First Take Brownies

2006-09-24T14:49:00.001-06:00

Well, I have done it. I have gotten to the point that I can take a regular wheat-based recipe, and bake something gluten-free without any problems. I suppose that to be fair, I should mention that I made brownies, which have slightly different requirements for texture and leavening than most baked goods. But nonetheless, I used my Jowar/potato starch mix in place of wheat flour, and threw in a ¼ tsp of baking soda and they came out perfect. I guess they aren’t exactly perfect; they are a little crumbly, but they tasted just like they should, and have the density they should, and the conversion of chocolate squares to cocoa took more effort than the conversion to gluten free. THIS is what I have been trying to do with this process.

I thought about taking a picture, but I decided that you all know what a brownie is supposed to look like. Picture that, and you have what I made. It was thick and brown, and moist in the middle.

First Take Brownies

½ c shortening
1 c sugar
2 eggs
2 squares melted chocolate (or 6 Tbsp cocoa, with 2 additional tsp shortening)
½ tsp vanilla
1 cup 3:1 Jowar:Potato starch mix
¼ tsp salt
¼ tsp Xanathan Gum, or whatever

Cream together the shortening and sugar, add the eggs, then the other things. Mix and bake like you would other brownies. They take longer to bake than I remember. The recipe called for 25 to 30 minutes, and I think I took them out after 35, but my oven is a little weird.

Stevia

2006-09-18T16:08:00.000-06:00

Stevia has been on my mind the past week. A friend of mine from Washington asked me about it. The Maestro's Cello Teacher, who is Celiac, also can't eat sugar. Then the Karina, the Gluten-Free Godess, did a run down of sugar alternatives.

The figure ab0ve is a list of the so-called steviosides, a collection of very sweet natural products isolated from the leaves of the stevia tree. They are purportedly 100 times sweeter than sucrose, which is table sugar. If you can make out the structure above, (I know that it's a little small) you can see that glucose (glc) and Rhamose (rham) is linked to a steroid-like carbon skeleton, which is called steviol. It is essentially a natural example of the same principle that gave us olestra (which is totally synthetic). If you stick some sugars onto some large frame, it still tastes sweet to the tongue, but it isn't metabolized.

Scientific Literature I have looked at indicates that it is generally excreted completely unmetabolized. Being unmetabolized, it purportedly has no effect on blood sugar, nor any effect on candida. There is some indication than it has a mild lowering effect on blood pressure, and also some signs that it is beneficial for diabetics. In a test-tube, intestinal flora have been able to cleave the sugars off the steroid-like framework. This framework, steviol, has been shown to be a carcinogen. No studies have shown that this cleavage occurs in the body. That is to say that studies have shown that the cleavage is not observed, not that the studies haven't been done. Granted, you can find haters that will argue that stevia is going to kill you, but that doesn't appear to be supported by the review I read.

How does it bake? Well, I haven't tried it in any baking yet. Reports are that it is stable past 200 Celcius, which not all artificial sweeteners are. Sweet, and stable. Because it IS so sweet, you have to reduce the amount you use considerably. Depending on what form you buy it in, the conversion will change. I found a good conversion table . I come from a Herbally goodness type background, and I can say that the liquid extracts DO taste like licorice when I brushed by teeth with it as a kid. The purer steviosides taste less that way. I'm looking at getting some to try out this week.

Kudzu Powder

2006-09-14T12:48:00.000-06:00

I was just looking at Gluten A Go Go, http://glutenagogo.blogspot.com/, and had a question. Hopefully Sheltie Girl will look at my blog, as I did at hers, on Shauna's mention. I am on blogger beta, and can't leave a comment to ask her directly. If anyone on blogger alpha can ask her for me, that would be great.

She doesn't like the taste of xanthan gum, so she mixes a number of things, including Kudzu Powder. What is up with this? I'm not sure I can taste xanthan gum, but maybe I just think that it's part of what Jowar tastes like. How are your experiments going? What ratios have you found that work? How does it compare to xanthan gum? Please, share some more details... The chemist in me is dying to know.

Tropical Pineapple Muffins

2006-09-14T10:18:00.000-06:00

I made some muffins for the Maestro's Cello Teacher, using pineapple, nuts and coconut. This is an extension of the Banana Nut recipe. She loved them, but I thought they were a little bland. I only used a 1/2 cup of crushed pineapple ina double recipe. Next time I plan to use more pineapple, and subsutitute some pineapple juice for some of the soy milk.

1 ½ c (9:2 Sorghum flour/Potato Starch)
¼ c Soy flour
¼ c Sugar
2 ½ tsp Baking Powder
¾ tsp salt
½ tsp Xanthan gum
2 eggs
1 c milk or soy milk (or use some pineapple juice)
1/3 c vegetable oil
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 ripe banana
¼ c sliced almonds
¼ c coconut
¼ c crushed pineapple (use more, or include some banana)

Most other food bloggers include pictures of their fare. I've not done that to this point, mostly because I am focusing on the method and the ingredients. I realized this morning, looking at the gluten free goddess blog, that people like pictures. I'll try to include more. I often find that I am taking muffins out of the oven as I am getting ready to run for the bus to work, and I still have sorghum flour dusting everything. While I am gone, Riley puts them in the freezer for optimal storage, and there never is a good time to take a picture. I'm sure no one else can relate to this, though.

GlutenEase

2006-09-14T09:00:00.001-06:00

http://www.enzymedica.com/glutenease.php

Has anyone heard of this stuff before? It makes me curious, but I remain fairly skeptical

Blog Day

2006-09-13T11:56:00.000-06:00

I subscribe to several blogs using bloglines. This morning I had an update for Gluten Free Girl, http://glutenfreegirl.blogspot.com/ . It said that it was posted Aug 31, so either my bloglines is working really slow, or she got busy and posted later than she had intended. It seems like she has a lot going on right now, so I am guessing the later. School started, right?

Anyway, this is relevant here because she mentioned me. She is a rock-star in the gluten-free blogging world, so we might have more visitors today. So, if you are here on Shauna's recommendation, welcome!

I explain what I am doing in the archives, but if you are new here, it is essentially this. I want to bake foods that taste like the "real thing". I want to do this as cheaply as possible. I'm a science grad student, and don't have a lot of money to buy baking mixes and pre-made foods. Jowar flour, from the Indian grocery, is the cheapest grain flour other than corn starch that I have found. It is the right colour, and has a mild flavour. It is even good for you, comparable to quinoa. So, it's perfect for what I want.

The problem is, there aren't many recipes using it that don't also add lots of other things that I don't want to get into. It doesn't need them. So, I have to develop my own recipes. Like Shauna said, you must create what you wish you could experience. I'm currently interested in the effects of tapioca starch, but grad school hasn't given me much time in the test kitchen lately.

I'm the chemist, so I experiment with the baking, and my wife does most of the other cooking while I am at school.

Feel free to share any tips you have.

--Elwood City

Tapioca Starch

2006-09-06T13:57:00.000-06:00

I have to balance making snacks for the Maestro to take to pre-school, and keeping the test kitchen running. Now that I have a workable formulation for potato starch, I'm interested in Tapioca Starch, the purest of flavours. According the the esteemed Ms. Hagman, Tapioca starch imparts "chew". What does that mean, exactly? I had a waffle made with a high proportion of tapioca starch, and it was very chewy. That was a long time ago, though. How does the moisture -retaining properties compare to potato (moist, like extra xanthan) and corn (hygroscopic and quick staling)?

If anyone has any ideas, let me know.

Also, if anyone has any ideas for cheap and easy things to put in muffins, give me a shout. I think the Maestro is getting tired of banana.

Banana Nut Muffins

2006-09-02T15:48:00.000-06:00

Sorghum Blueberry Muffins

1 ½ c 3:1 Sorghum flour/Corn Starch
¼ c Soy flour
¼ c Sugar
2 ½ tsp Baking Powder
¾ tsp salt
1 tsp Xanthan gum
2 eggs
1 c milk or soy milk
1/3 c vegetable oil
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 c blueberries (rinsed and drained)

I used this recipe, took out the blueberries, added one ripe banana, and a half cup of walnut chunks. To convert it to potato instead of corn, I used 3: 2/3 (9:2) ratio of Jowar to potato starch, and only ½ tsp of Xanthan gum.

Banana-Nut Muffins (Potato Starch)

1 ½ c (9:2 Sorghum flour/Potato Starch)
¼ c Soy flour
¼ c Sugar
2 ½ tsp Baking Powder
¾ tsp salt
½ tsp Xanthan gum
2 eggs
1 c milk or soy milk
1/3 c vegetable oil
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 ripe banana
½ cup walnuts

As far as mixing, the only important thing is to make sure that it is mixed very well. I typically mix everything, prepare the muffin tins, and mix it again.

Potato Starch, Final Edition

2006-09-01T09:23:00.000-06:00

I have found the answer to the question of converting corn starch to potato starch. It goes thus,

Use 2/3 equivalents of Potato Starch, compared to Corn Starch, and cut the Xanthan Gum in half.

This doesn't give you exactly the same product, but they are close. The Potato version is crustier, and doesn't appear to be as hygroscopic. The taste is different too, but you can decide which you like bette.

I think it has to do with the water absorbance, which is greater for Potato, and also the size, which is much bigger. (See previous posts) Because it is longer and holds more water, the starch polymer fills some of the role that Xanthan Gum plays. One equivalent of both Starch and Xanthan Gum gives very mushy, wet muffins or pancakes. The waffles stick and tear in half because they are too soft in the middle.

Soon, I'll post my perfect potato based Banana-Nut Muffins that the Maestro took to his first day of preschool.

Potato Problems

2006-08-28T09:16:00.000-06:00

I haven't posted here for a while, in part because I am having trouble with potato starch, and I usually like to have something definite before I post. I have "Food Chemistry" by Belitz and Grosch right now. It's not really a Food Science book; it's a Food Chemistry book, so aptly named, I guess.
Anyway, here are some facts about starch that I am trying to put in some usable context. The book is due tomorrow…

Size (um) Swelling (95) Gel Temp (C). %amylose
Wheat 2-38 21 53-65 26-31
Corn 5-25 24 62-70 28
Sorghum 4-24 22 69-75 21-34
Potato 15-100 n/a 58-66 23
Tapioca 5-35 n/a 52-64 17

Wheat Potato
Start of Gel 56.5 60
End of Gel 62 68
Swell (80) (%) 7.15 62.30
Water binding (%) 89.1 102.00

I have a few thoughts about these numbers, but I have some more thinking to do before I try to draw any conclusions.

I am also considering moving over to blogger. The problem is moving, leaving, or ignoring the archives…

Welcome to Google

2006-08-18T09:14:00.000-06:00

I did a google search for Elwood City Blues this morning. We finally are public! Searching for Elwood City Blog gets you here. So does "Baking with Jowar" and "Baking with Sorghum Flour". I must be cool to be searchable.

Sorghum Vs Quinoa

2006-08-14T09:12:00.000-06:00

Do you want the short story, or the long story? Several people have asked me what the nutritional content of Sorghum is. I have always had to answer that I thought it was pretty good, because it is related to millet, but that I don’t know for sure. Until now, that is. The short answer is that protein-wise, it is as good as or better than Quinoa, which is currently being touted in the media as a sort of super-grain for its protein content. That’s the short answer.

Do you want the long answer? OK. Here come a few numbers… One warning before you start, I didn’t count significant figures in any of the math that I did.

There are several amino acids that the Human body is not capable of producing, for which we depend upon our diet to supply. These are known as the Essential Amino Acids. I went to http://www.nutritiondata.com/ for these numbers, comparing whole Sorghum (S), All-purpose enriched wheat flour, bleached (W), and whole quinoa (Q). My unproven assumption in this comparison is that sorghum and quinoa are ground whole into flour, so the nutritional data of the whole grain and the flour are identical.

For the essential amino acids, in mg/cup:
Trp 238 (S), 159 (W), No data (Q)
Thr 664 (S), 351 (W), 780 (Q)
Ile 831 (S), 446 (W), 803 (Q)
Leu 2863 (S), 888 (W), 1336 (Q)
Lys 440 (S), 285 (W), 1248 (Q)
Met 324 (S), 229 (W), 445 (Q)
Cys 244 (S), 274 (W), No Data (Q)
Phe 1048 (S), 650 (W), 913 (Q)
Tyr 616 (S), 390 (W), 624 (Q)
Val 1077 (S), 510 (W), 1001 (Q)
His 472 (S), 288 (W), 534 (Q)

Total Protein in g/cup:
21.7 (S), 12.9 (W), 22.3 (Q)

Total Carbohydrates in g/cup:
143 (S), 95.4 (W), 117 (Q)

Total Fiber in g/cup:
12.1 (S), 3.4 (W), 10.0 (Q)

The Institute of Medicine’s Food and Nutrition Board has set targets for essential amino acid levels for an “ideal food”. These are, with the values for sorghum calculated, in mg/g total protein:
Trp 7 11.0 (S), 157%
Thr 27 30.6 (S), 113%
Ile 55 38.3 (S), 69.6%
Leu 25 132 (S), 528%
Lys 51 20.3 (S), 39.8%
Met+Cys 25 26.2 (S), 105%
Phe+Tyr 47 76.7 (S), 163%
Val 32 49.6 (S), 155%
His 18 21.8 (S), 121%

So Sorghum is deficient in Ile and Lys. We make up for it in total protein content, compared to Quinoa, in Leu,
Ala, Glu, and Pro, of which only Leu is essential.

Nutritiondata.com lists 999 foods that you can include in your diet that have a higher Lys/Leu ratio, to compensate for the Lysine you are missing eating Sorghum. This list is headed by turkey and mushrooms, and includes pretty much any meat or cheese, burdock root, and oranges. I thought that was great, because of course everyone loves burdock root, and oranges are a great way to supplement your protein intake. Actually, a mushroom-turkey melt on bread made with Jowar would be perfect.

I didn’t look up foods high is Isoleucine, and nutritiondata.com didn’t suggest any, because Ile is not the “limiting” amino acid.

Compared to all-purpose enriched wheat flour, bleached, sorghum is by far the champ protein-wise. It even has one-and-a-half times as much Lys, which is supposedly the big deficiency that sorghum has. It appears to be less of a problem with wheat, because the targets for “ideal foods” are set by ratio with the total protein, which is also lower for wheat.

The only area that sorghum appears to have a significant lack is in the area of minerals. Enriched wheat flour is, of course, enriched. As a result, it is chock full of minerals that don’t really belong there. Quinoa appears to be naturally high in all minerals, and is OK on most vitamins. Sorghum has good levels of only of iron, potassium, and phosphorus. It is also good in thiamine, riboflavin, and niacin. It is missing manganese, zinc, copper and selenium. So, keep taking your multi-vitamin with minerals, but don’t worry so much about amino acid levels.

One final note for any non-chemists who may read this, who may also care to know and who don’t already, (I realize that the intersection of those three demographics may be vanishingly small) the abbreviations for amino acids mentioned above are:
Trp tryptophan
Thr threonine
Ile Isoleucine
Leu leucine
Lys lysine
Met methionine
Cys cystine
Phe phenylalanine
Tyr tyrosine
Val valine
His histidine
Ala alanine
Glu glutamate
Pro proline

3:1, not 2:0.66

2006-08-11T09:11:00.000-06:00

I did the math finally. 2:0.66 is the same as 3:1. I guess I just like to make things more complicated.

Another entry in the potato starch data set. We made pancakes this morning, for the second time. I thought they were too flat last time, so I added another tsp of baking powder, for a total of 3. It solved the problem, but tasted a little bitter. Not too bad though. I’m a little over-analytical on flavor issues. It makes me wonder, though, if I need more starch in the mix.

I think it’s time to do the experiment of using 2:1 Jowar/potato starch, to see if they end up lighter. To compare apples to apples, I need to see how they turn out that way. I think that pancakes are a good model system. They are thin enough that texture and issues of “light” and “heavy” have a greater effect, proportionally, than in muffins. Controlling the variables is harder with waffles, because I can’t really watch them bake. Changes in flavour will be harder to observe in Brownies. So Pancakes seem like they have the lowest signal-to-noise ratio.

The only problem is that the Maestro doesn’t really like pancakes. I had a big stack of pancakes, and he chose to eat the last frozen waffle for breakfast.

Good Results Optional

2006-08-10T09:10:00.000-06:00

I just realized that I left in the "Xanthan gum (optional)" line from waffle recipe I started with. I think that means "If you don't care if your waffles are any good, feel free to save a bunch of money by leaving this part out."

Waffle Stew

2006-08-10T09:07:00.000-06:00

We made waffles last night, using potato starch. Fabulous. With corn starch, I have always had trouble keeping them crisp. I had to bake them longer than the waffle baker recommends, and even then, they tended to go limp while waiting to be eaten. No one likes a limp waffle, do they? Well, Hildr does, I guess.

What I observed with the muffins seems to hold true—crustier, less prone to going soggy, and tastes more like stew. Did I mention that Riley likes the taste of potato starch better than corn starch? It’s not blatant, regardless of how much you like hash, especially if you put maple syrup on them instead of ketchup. Here is the recipe.

2 eggs (separated)
1/4 cup corn oil
1 3/4 cup milk
2 T sugar
1/2 t salt
1 3/4 cup sorghum/starch mix*
4 t baking powder
1 t Xanthan gum (optional)

So far it passes with 2:1 Jowar/Corn Starch, and now with 2:0.66, or 2 to 2/3 Jowar/Potato Starch. One tip, though, don’t use1/4 cup soy milk and 1 ¾ cup oil.

Here I Go Again On My Own...

2006-08-07T09:06:00.000-06:00

I realized something last night. I was in the mood for a treat, so I decided to make some brownies. I’ve made some gluten-free brownies before, but they were based on mashed black beans, not any sort of gluten-free flours. They are pretty tasty, but a little too gooey, and we like brownies gooey, so that’s saying a lot. That and it appears to be impossible to completely mash up the black beans, resulting in what appears to be chocolate chips mixed in -- somewhat bean-y chocolate chips, but chocolate chips. They bother Riley.

So I wanted to make some brownies using Jowar. I have a recipe from Dr. Fenster that I got off the internet several months ago, but have never tried. The batter was VERY thick, and the result was something that definitely tasted like brownies – not very good brownies. They were too cakey, salty, and dry. They might have seemed better if I’d been a celiac since the early 1970’s, and had forgotten what a real brownie tastes like, but my memory of good brownies was pretty fresh, and slightly offended.

I opened up my Purity Flour cookbook to look at an authentic brownie recipe and found that the flour, sugar and cocoa ratio was mostly the same. The recipe for the Fenster Special had twice the salt, a ½ tsp of baking powder that the Purity version didn’t (gosh, would that make it too cakey?) and one less egg.

It appears likely that my problems with the gluten-free recipe arose from deviations in the amounts of the non-gluten-free ingredients. What I mean is, the problem wasn’t the amount of xanthan gum; it wasn’t the amount or type of starch in the flour blend. It wasn’t a problem with any of the special adjustments you have to make when you are getting rid of the wheat flour. It was extra baking powder and not enough egg, which are problems that come from starting with a not very good recipe in the first place.

So why do I start with a gluten-free recipe at all? I often end up having to figure out what to change to make it into something I like anyway. Why don’t I just start with a wheat-based recipe that I am sure that I like, add what seems like the right amount of xanthan gum, and use a Jowar/starch mix in place of the flour. I don’t really trust that the amount of xanthan gum or the starch type/ratio in most of the internet gluten-free recipes are based on anything more that guesswork anyway, so starting with a wheat-based recipe doesn’t put me any further behind. Then I don’t have to go back and take out the baking powder that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

So from now on, when I need to make something I haven’t tried before, I am going to start with a regular, wheat-based recipe. At least then I know what I’m starting with.

Hildr Hits the Trail

2006-08-06T09:05:00.000-06:00

One of the things that the Maestro and I used to do in the evenings--before he gave up naps and started having to start to bed immediately after dinner--was to go for walks to the gas station. There is a small gas station, with a big air compressor that he likes, about a half mile up the four-lane road we live on. It took Riley several weeks to get used to the idea of him walking on the sidewalk next to the road, but he was not about to go on the road where he might get “smushed”. The main point was what he could find on the sidewalk or in people’s yards anyway. It was kind of an Elwood City nature walk.

Last night Hildr and I went for our first walk to the gas station. She’s thirteen months old, so she only made it about a quarter-mile, but I thought that was a good start. Since we didn’t make it, it may not seem like it was really a walk to the gas station, but it was of a type with what the Maestro and I used to do.

He was in bed, and Hildr and I were playing fetch in the living room when she went over to the front door and started pulling on the knob. I helped her into one of her ten favourite pairs of shoes, and we went out to the front yard. After looking at the flowers by the front step, she headed off across the lawn and up the sidewalk. We walked together, sometimes holding hands, sometimes not. She would stop to look at, and knock the fuzz off, the neighbour’s dandelions that were going to seed. She would try to sneak up people’s driveways, and make sure I noticed the motorcycles roaring past or the birds flying by.

We weren’t really going anywhere, and we weren’t really looking at anything. We were going exploring, and looking at everything. Before I realized it, we were half-way to the Maestro’s gas station, and Hildr needed to be picked up and carried home, just like the Maestro used to. When we got home, she was ready to snuggle into my arms, with one arm hooked around my neck, and quietly fall asleep.

Potato Starch II

2006-08-04T09:04:00.000-06:00

I had time recently to do a couple of more potato starch experiments. The first was a batch of banana-chocolate chip muffins. Unfortunately, I added too much banana, and it was useless as a data point. They were pretty good banana bread pudding though, with a little soy milk on them.

This morning I made some pancakes using 2:2/3 mix Jowar:potato starch. The result was similar to the first muffin experiment. They were chewier, and the flavour was slightly different. Riley said that she liked the flavour better than tasting like cornstarch. One thing I noticed this time was that they didn’t brown as quickly. The may explain the crust on the muffins. If the cook longer before they “look done” they would be crustier, wouldn’t they? The crust may be a function of being more chewy, but it may be a baking/frying process issue. I’ll let you know if I resolve that.

The next question, now that I feel like I have repeatable results, is to see if the texture changes are due to potato vs. corn starch, or a results are due to 1 equivalent vs. 2/3 equivalents.

Kellogg's Sugar Guy

2006-08-01T09:03:00.000-06:00

I had the opportunity to talk to a scientist from Kellogg on Saturday. He was explicit in his disclaimer that he was not here as a representative of Kellogg; his views were his own. He was here to give a talk at our annual “Careers in Chemistry” Symposium. His point was that in order to find a right job for you, you need to know yourself, and how you work with others and that sort of thing.

After his talk, I had the chance to talk to him. He is Kellogg’s “Sugar Guy” so I asked him about Starch. I was hoping that he could tell me what different effect each starch would have in a recipe, or how I could learn such things aside from having a test kitchen. He said, essentially, that the starches behave differently in different situations, and that he couldn’t tell me without knowing the temperature and water concentration. He suggested that really having a test kitchen is the best way to figure things out. That, and getting a good Food Science textbook.

Given his choice, he said he would use tapioca starch, because it has the clearest of flavours. I guess I will need to set up my test kitchen to investigate the effect of texture.

Two Types of Closure

2006-07-27T13:27:00.000-06:00

We finally have some closure to the paint, paint, everywhere story. Earlier this week Riley came running into the bedroom early yelling "We forgot to take the Chair!" She had arranged with a friend who uses a different trash collector that we do to have the paint covered chair hauled to the dump. The truck was coming, and we hadn't taken the chair over. I stumbled up and into the wreckroom to help her load it into the car. To pick it up, I had to shift the jogging stroller than was leaning against the wall; it promptly rolled over my toe and ripped my big-toemail in half. I hurt like blazes all day, until I glued it back together with the crazy glue that I usually use on the Maestro's dollar-store-instruments. Now it's only tender. Closure.

The Muffin in My Head

2006-07-26T13:26:00.000-06:00

We have a number of reasons to suggest that The Maestro should not eat corn. My family has a history of problems with corn, for one. I have been having such good success with 2:1 Jowar/Corn-Starch that I was pretty upset about it, at first. I am fine with corn, thankfully, but I have been looking into the question of starch amounts and sources, to try to get away from corn for The Maestro.

The first question I had was why Amy Perry used 3:1 Jowar/Corn-Starch in her muffin recipe, but 2:1 in everything else. When I was home, my Mom made some muffins and used a 2:1 mix. They tasted mostly the same, but were much lighter, closer to cupcakes than the muffins I was used to making. The experts say that if you use a gluten-free flour straight, the finished product is too heavy. Apparently, the starch lightens it up. Ms. Perry wanted heavier muffins.

Question four was why corn starch? I looked around for cornstarch replacements, and found that most web-sites said that you could substitute potato starch for corn straight across. A few sites, that looked like they took their food chemistry a little more seriously said to use 2/3 equivalents of potato starch for the corn starch.

I tried it out in some muffins, using a mix with 3 cups Jowar, and 2/3 cup Potato starch. I didn’t have any corn-based muffins to do a side-by-side comparison, but the texture seemed pretty much the same. It’s indistinguishable from the muffin in my head, anyway.

As for taste, it isn’t exactly the same. I’m not sure how to describe it, but it’s a tad more… savory. I think savory might be the right word. It’s not unpleasant, but it’ll take some getting used to, and I won’t be able to pass it off to associates as the authentic product. It’s kind of like when I was a kid and drank goat milk instead of cow milk. Goat milk has a slightly different aftertaste than cow milk. I drank it all the time, so it tasted just like milk to me. My oldest sister couldn’t stand it.

I just ate another potato-based muffin. It turns out than when cooled, the texture isn’t the same. It baked more of a crust than the corn-based muffins did. I think that is keeping them from going soggy when kept in tightly sealed containers.

I need to spend more time thinking about this, though.

Baking Questions

2006-07-24T13:25:00.000-06:00

Early during my gluten-free baking journey, I identified a number of questions that I wanted answers to. I have made progress in answering some of these; others, I still have some work to do. Here are some remaining questions I am working on.

1. In a Amy Perry blueberry muffin recipe, from a Carol Fenster book I found, she used a 3:1 sorghum flour/corn starch ratio instead of the more common 2:1. I cannot argue with the results; they were fabulous, but it made me wonder why. I assume that she first tried the 2:1 and was not happy with the result. What is the property she was trying to avoid? To state it another way, in what way were the muffins improved by reducing the amount of starch?

2. Likewise, sometimes recipes use soy flour, and sometimes they don't. I understand this is on a case-by-case basis, but when you try a recipe without soy-flour, what do you observe that makes you think "this could be improved by adding some soy"?

3. Other than baking multiple cakes, is there a way to decide how much soy to add? 1/4 c soy to 1 3/4 c sorghum mix seems standard in the ratios I've seen, but why?
4. Other than being commonly available and cheap, are there any baking advantages of corn starch over potato or tapioca? The amount of carbohydrate is not equivalent among them, but most gluten-free bakers use a mixture of all three, I've assumed for the taste, whereas Amy Perry Recipes use only one.

5. In the past, I have used soy flour as a replacement for egg in dry baking-mix recipes. Now that I am using soy flour for soy flour in recipes that use also use egg for egg, what do you think about the prospects of using soy flour for both? This one is purely speculative, I expect.

Jowar Back-Story

2006-07-15T13:22:00.000-06:00

So, why Jowar flour, you ask. OK, maybe you didn’t ask. But you should have. When we first started looking for gluten-free foods, we discovered that there were about a million different mixtures of brown, white and sweet rice flour; corn, potato and tapioca starch; bean flour; lentil, soy, sorghum and millet flour that had been developed. Everyone claims that THEIR mixture has exactly the right of proteins and starches to magically enable you to substitute straight across for wheat flour in any recipe you want. I can’t try every mixture when a quick google search gives me more hits than hours I’ve been alive, and I had no idea how to pick. Looking closer revealed that half the recipes belong to Bette Hagman, so I started there. Um… bland? To give dear Bette some credit, the famed Bette Hagman’s mix that I found all over the internet was developed a long time ago, when the right shape and texture was a great improvement over the bricks that passed as bread. She has a number of other mixes now that apparently are better. But if the pioneering mix that started the gluten-free revolution doesn’t meet my requirements for taste and texture, I’m left with the original problem. What to use?

A co-worker who likes to cook Indian food suggested that I look at the Indian Grocery in town, because they have a lot of “different flours”. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for when I went, but I came home with flours made from millet, garbanzo, lentil, and sorghum. I put them in my bucket with my rice flours and waited for inspiration to hit.

The Millet flour made it into a “loaf” of bread that was one inch high, and purple. Not what I was looking for.

I found a Carol Fenster recipe for Pineapple-Upside-Down Cake that called for “Garbanzo/Fava bean or Sorghum flour”. I had just bought two of those, so I took a gamble and used the cake batter made with Garbanzo flour to top a rhubarb cobbler. I later learned two things that would have helped me. First, bean flours are REALLY nasty if they aren’t cooked enough. There were a few spots in the middle that were almost toxic. I suspect that the “cooked enough” point for the flour may be a little beyond what is good for the dish you are making, kind of like the safe cooking temperature for pork is past the point that gives you good pork. Second, Dr. Fenster didn’t mean Garbanzo OR Fava OR Sorghum. The mixture of Garbanzo and Fava is a common flour combination that you can buy from Authentic Foods under the trade name “Garfava”. So she meant Gabanzo AND Fava OR Sorghum. Even if I had baked my cobbler enough, it wouldn’t have tasted as she intended, not even taking the rhubarb into account. Dr. Fenster might hate rhubarb anyway. Who knows?

A couple of weeks later, I had occasion to make a cake for the Maestro. I tried a straight-up Pineapple-Upside-Down cake this time, using Sorghum flour. To my delight, it was moist, and delicious, and the right color. It used tofu, which I think is where the faint hint of unusual came from, but on the whole, if I didn’t know it didn’t use wheat flour, I wouldn’t have suspected. After several weeks of trying, I had my first indistinguishable result! That’s really what I am going for with all this, foods that are indistinguishable from the traditional gluten-containing product.

Sorghum Flour appeared to have all the qualities I was looking for. It was relatively inexpensive at the Indian Store, unlike Amaranth. It has a mild taste and color, unlike things like Millet or Rice. I combed the internet for recipes and discovered several by one Amy Perry, who uses it in a 2:1 combination with Cornstarch most of the time, and occasionally with some Soy flour. So I can use a “mix” of only two ingredients most of the time, rather than the four or six that a lot of people use.

I said that Sorghum flour is inexpensive at the Indian Store, where it goes by the name of Jowar. I have looked for cheaper sources, and found that I have the hook-up for the cheapest Jowar anywhere. If I lived somewhere bigger, it would cost more. You might look into ordering from Twin Valley Mills, www.twinvalleymills.com/, depending on your city size, location and East Indian concentration, it may be cheaper for you.

Ideally, I would have had this blog set up around the time of the purple millet bread, but I didn't. Hopefully some-day I will get everything caught up so you know everything I have learned. Until then, enjoy your pancakes.

Is Your Mama a Llama

2006-07-08T13:21:00.000-06:00

One of the bands that I grew up with was the Cowboy Junkies. After being together for about 10 years, they released a double album, called 200 More Miles. It was a compilation of live recordings, from 1984-1994. According to their website, 2006 is the bands 20th anniversary, which means that they or I can’t do math, or that they organized as a band twice. In any event, to celebrate their 20th birthday, their archivist has set up a website, http://www.4thellamas.com/. There are a number of purposes of this site, but one in particular that I am excited about is to make available to fans concert recordings.

I downloaded the first one yesterday, Sheridan Opera House in Telluride, Co, Feb 2, 2006. Can I say it is an amazing concert? I was particularly pleased with the 9+ minute version of Sweet Jane. This was the song that gave them national attention twice (two nations, two different times), and there is already a live version on 200 More Miles. I thought that after 20 years, it would be all played out. I am impressed that Margo and company can still find new directions to take this song after so long. The concert version of Cause Cheap is How I Feel is a lot more, um, vibrant than the studio version on Caution Horses.

So what is a Llama? I don’t know, which makes me think I’m not one. I suspect that if I had ever heard In the Time Before Llamas, I would have a better idea. My guess is that Llamas are the Cowboy Junkies version of Deadheads, people to followed the Grateful Dead around from concert to concert, or the Jamily, the Pearl Jam version.

Sorghum Pancake Recipe

2006-07-06T14:53:00.000-06:00

Here is the pancake recipe I promised. You mix the dry, then add the wet, like regular pancakes. I mixed these all together, then added jowar by the Tbsp until I got the consistency I like. I think I added 3 Tbsp. I like my pancakes rather flat, so you can add 3 tsp of baking powder if you like.

1-1/2 c 2/1 mix Jowar flour/Corn starch
1-2 Tbsp sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp xanthan gum
1 egg
1-3/4 c milk (soymilk)
2 Tsp veg.Oil

Welcome Home

2006-07-06T12:57:00.000-06:00

We just got back from an almost two week trip to my family of origin. It was a good trip, but exhuasting. On the outskirts of Elwood City there are a number of cornfields that non-locals have trouble appreciating the aesthetic of. I was driving last night through them, with the windows down, reveling in the cool night breeze. I was listening to Taj Mahal play a Lullaby in A-Major on the Banjo. It's good to be home.

Of course, not everyone feels that way. The Maestro has started waking up screaming several times a night, and keeps telling me he wants to go back to Nana's house. I keep hoping that he will settle down into a peaceful routine agian. He has always had trouble with change and new situations, and I think he is pretty stressed out from two weeks of not-home. Can a three-year-old get an ulser?

Hildr is happy wherever she is, if her Mom is nearby, anyway. She is especially happy now that her cousins have shown her what a grown-up girl can do. The days of feeding my baby small bites of things, to minimize the mess, are over. She wants the whole muffin now.

Amazon.com Review

2006-06-21T12:55:00.000-06:00

Here is an example of an incorrect use of xanthan gum, found on Amazon.com. Factual or not, I can't say. I've had xanthan gum dust on my hands, when my hands got wet. I can't even imagine having a spoonful in my mouth.

3 of 6 people found the following review helpful: Really thick stuff, May 8, 2006
Reviewer:

viktor_57 "viktor_57" (Fairview, Your Favorite State, USA) - See all my reviewsMy kid was upset when I got him an improvised Harry Potter broom for Christmas--O.K., it wasn't an officially licensed product, but since magic brooms are imaginary anyway, any stick with a bunch of straw at one end is as good as any other. But no--apparently a Corn Lobby Broom wasn't good enough for him. Anyway, he wouldn't talk to me for a month, which was good at first, but then got really annoying. For my kid's birthday I decided to get him something really special, so I got him this bag of xanthan gum. I even wrapped it up real nice with wrapping paper and ribbon. My kid opened his present and couldn't figure out what it was. "It's xanthan gum," I told him, "It's gum from outer space. From the planet Xanthan." My kid was busy staring at the label. "No it's not," he slowly replied, and then he began to read, "'Xanthan is made from the outer layer of a tiny, inactive bacterium called Xanthomonas campestris..." "From the planet Xanthan!" I interrupted. Since when did my kid learn to read? I grabbed the bag and opened it. "Here," I stuck a spoon into the white powder, "Try some. It's really good." My kid picked up the spoon and smelled the white powder. "Go on," I said, "you'll really like it!" He hesitated, and then stuck his tongue into the powder. I was starting to get impatient, so I grabbed the spoon from him, "Give it to me, you big chicken," and then I swallowed the powder. The stuff dissolved into a thick, slimy paste in my mouth, but I smiled as I chewed it, "Mmmmm... this is the tastiest xanthan gum in the whole universe!" My kid looked at me as if I were lying. "If you like it so much, then you can have it," he said. "Fine," I replied, "it's too good for you anyway." I figured a little reverse psychology would do the trick. My kid's expression didn't change. "Can I go now?" he asked. "Yeah, fine, get out here," I said. Now I'm stuck with half a pound of xanthan gum and I don't know anyone with wheat allergies or celiac disease I can give this stuff to. Stupid kid.

Xanthan Gum in Pancakes

2006-06-20T12:07:00.000-06:00

The intended purpose of this blog, when not distracted by the crazy things I let the Maestro do, is to share the process I am going through to bake Gluten and Casein-free. I mentioned that the Maestro has auditory-defensiveness, but I didn't say that he has a number of sensory issues, all related under the term Sensory-Integration Dysfunction (DSI), which is associated with, but distinct from ASD. With the Maestro, it appears to be related to diet, and going Gluten- and Casein-free has really helped.

Baking Gluten-free, as anyone who has tried it knows, not a simple thing. Complicated flour mixes abound, as well as the issue to what to use to give your food the gluten stretch. The answer to the last one is solved fairly well by a substance called xanthan gum. Xanthan gum is a complex carbohydrate isolated from bacterial cultures that forms a bi-molecular anti-parallel double helix. This gives your food some springiness, the same as gluten. I have collected a number of recipes that I like, that call for a specific amount of xanthan gum.
But what if you can’t find a recipe? I am trying to develop a pancake recipe based on Jowar flour, starting from the wheat flour recipe. One question I have long had, and haven’t found an answer to anywhere is how to decide how much xanthan gum to use. Sure, I’ve found guidelines, like 1 tsp/cup flour for breads, etc. but are pancakes a cake? If you want to adapt your recipe, you need to understand the effect that too much or too little xanthan gum will have both on the batter, and on the finished product.

Too little xanthan gum makes things crumbly. But how do you recognize too much? Carbohydrates have a lot of hydroxyl groups, which form hydrogen bonds to water. This results in carbohydrates being both hydroscopic, meaning they absorb water, and hygroscopic, meaning they pull water out of the air. This is why you are supposed to store xanthan gum in a closed container in a dry place. In your batter, part of the liquid you add will be absorbed by the xanthan gum. Proteins, like gluten, absorb some water, but to a much lesser extent than carbohydrates do. This is the reason that gluten-free recipes typically require more liquid than wheat-based recipes. If your batter is too thick, you might have too much xanthan gum, or you might need to add more water.

Whether you decide to water or reduce the xanthan gum depends on how the final product turns out. This morning, I added too much xanthan gum, and had to add a TONNE of water to get the consistency right. Because they had complex carbohydrate holding on to all this extra water, they never dried out in the middle, regardless of how long I cooked them. Riley described them as “eggy”. To me, they just never seemed done. Neither the Maestro nor Hildr would eat more than two bites. To get the final product to have a drier texture that is more cake-like, I need to reduce the bound water, by reducing the xanthan gum.

I’ll let you know when I get a winner Jowar pancake recipe.

Turning 30

2006-06-19T12:03:00.000-06:00

Thoughts on turning 30, which I did recently.

A quote from Garrison Keillor, courtesy of Slate Magazine: "I think that past the age of thirty there is no obligation to be clever at all," he once told the Paris Review. "Cleverness is a burden after that. You are supposed to settle down and be a good person, raise your children, and be good to your friends, which you may not have been back when you were clever."

Phew! Boy does that take the pressure off!