Gluten-Free Pasta: Fusilli

I inherited a pasta maker. Nobody died...at least they hadn't yet and I knock on wood they still haven't. So maybe "inherit" is not the right word, but like Greg "inherited" a slow-cooker, I, loosely, inherited a small pasta maker.

...and I've been on a gluten-free flour kick. So for my amazing mango salad a few weeks ago I used a gluten-free flour for the home-made pasta. It made all the difference in the world - the home-made, not necessarily the gluten-free. I do think the gluten-free part helped, though, because there's more chew, more texture, and less air to the denser flour, and I like that for a recipe where I want to feel full.

The recipe was easy...kind of. You just have to be careful about how much liquid and egg you use, since the different flours require different amounts of liquid than a standard high-gluten dough. I used my first gluten-free flour blend recipe, and decided to use two eggs instead of one in the actual pasta recipe to keep the dough together better.

Ingredients:
2 cups Gluten-Free Flour Blend
2 Eggs
1 tbsp Olive Oil
approximately 1/4 cup of water to start

My pasta maker comes with a handy little measuring thing. It's not really a cup, but it comes with a quasi-lid that doesn't really seal well, but you can use to shake the egg, oil and water together inside. It's kind of awful for kitchen contamination since small amounts of egg fly everywhere. It has these ambiguous lines on the outside. The lines themselves aren't ambiguous, but they say things like "Small Load" and "Regular Load" even though the instructions that came with the machine say you should only ever make one size of load. So I never know which lines to use and every time I mess up I forget to mark down which line I should have used. Insanity or forgetfulness? Forgetfulness, I hope.

If you don't have a pasta maker you can still make this by hand. Just combine the egg, oil, and water in a sealable jar and shake until they're combined. Then create a well in a big bowl of the 2 cups of flour and incorporate it, stirring in only one direction. Then knead for 4-7 minutes, until the dough is ready. I have no idea when the dough will be ready, since I only ever use the machine and I don't think the elastic bread dough trick will work. My advice is to google some home-made pasta recipes and see what they say. Also keep in mind that you'll have a tougher time with gluten-free flour since it doesn't like to stick together. Even with the pasta machine I had to play with the amount of water and flour (adding 1 tbsp at a time of either) until the mixture resembled small pea-sized crumbs. In fact it got to this point in the 4 minutes that the machine required, and I started extruding it through the pasta die (their words, not mine) until it wouldn't extrude anymore. Some dough twirled into fusilli more easily than others, but a lot of dough was left over. So I added some more flour to get it unstuck and kneaded again in the machine, and then extruded that too. All in all, it was one of my less painful pasta-making experiences. Maybe I'm learning? Intelligence or luck? Hmm...

The pasta gets boiled like any other fresh pasta - in a large pot of salted water until it rises to the surface. That means for about 3 or 4 minutes. Fusilli is pretty thin so it doesn't take much time at all. Then it gets drained, to stop the cooking process and keep it al dente. Half of the dough got boiled for the mango pasta salad, and half got frozen for easy fresh pasta at a later date. I have just today bought eight mangoes - four different kinds - from my fruit guy in Jean Talon (Leopoldo's) and will choose which ones will be good for the salad. I didn't buy any sweet yellow ones (Ataulfos) this time. I bought some Haitian, some Mexican pit-less (I think that was the translation - I have no idea how that's possible, and kind of hope I'm wrong. It could also mean seedless, but all mangoes are seedless except for the pits...maybe some time in the distant path mangoes had more seeds? I don't think so), some organic Hadens from who knows where in South America, and some $3 vine-ripened ones. I am SO excited. Normally you can only find two kinds in North America, and here were four. I forget the names of the other varietals, but one was more green and elongated. We shall see...

Anyway, if you're making your own pasta without a machine, there's no 'extrude' button, so you need to roll it out thin and slice it into the lengths you want. I recommend fettucine or tagliatelle (wider flat noodles) for first-timers, since everything usually ends up looking this way anyway. If the pasta's for yourself or an indiscriminating family or group of eaters, it doesn't matter if each piece is the same width or length. With the gluten-free pasta you're going to have a hard time transferring it from the floured kitchen counter you used to roll it out to the pot, so expect some strands to break. It'll taste great no matter what. Don't worry and don't lose heart. Also don't get so frustrated that you knock everything all over the floor and get flour everywhere. You'll just need to clean it up anyway. The nice thing about rolling it by hand is it doesn't really matter if it's the perfect consistency. It'll taste heavier or lighter, so it does make a difference, but again, it's just for yourself, so give it a try, and then you'll do it better next time. Or not. Or it could be perfect the first time.

Or just meet someone who wants to give you a pasta maker.

Good luck!

Adventures in Gluten-Free Bread

I decided it was about time to learn how to properly knead.

So I turned to YouTube. Several videos later I felt like the reason I've been such a bad kneader has been because my dough hasn't been great for kneading. It tears no matter what I make, which has mostly been different kinds of noodles and pasta. So I decided to make bread and really test myself. Maybe I'm not as incompetent as I thought? Gluten-free bread wasn't even a big consideration until I started doing some gluten-free baking (chocolate silk pie) and had to make a gluten-free flour blend for the pie dough. So I trekked all over Montreal looking for the strangest flours and starches:

Sorghum flour, white rice flour, sweet rice flour, brown rice flour, tapioca starch, potato starch, guar gum and xantham gum.

I had found two gluten-free flour blends that said they were all-purpose (which is a lie in the world of gluten-free) but decided to give them both a shot, one at a time, to see what worked. Here was the first one:

1 cup brown rice flour
1 1/4 cup white rice flour
1/4 cup potato starch flour
2/3 cup tapioca starch flour
3/4 sweet rice flour (also called glutinous rice flour, though there's no gluten in it. It's just made from sticky rice, who's grains tend to stick together. I am not a scientist, but I know it's celiac-safe)
1/3 cup cornstarch
2 tsp xantham or guar gum (I bought guar gum, as it's about $10 less a package!!!)

So you add all these things together and stick it in the fridge to keep until you're ready to bake a few days, a week, or a month or more later, since the brown rice needs to stay refrigerated (turns out that since brown rice is less processed, it still contains husk that will go bad if left at room temperature. You know, like regular food...not that the other flours or rices are bad, just that traditionally they are processed or polished or parboiled so that they last, which makes sense in warm places like India and Thailand where rice is eaten every day, and certainly not harvested as often).

After I got myself all pumped up to knead, though, I did some research on gluten-free breads. Turns out most G-F breads don't get kneaded at all. There's no gluten in the flour that needs to be worked - the whole point of kneading. Foiled again.

So looking through a million recipes online, I started to get a bit disappointed in G-F bread as a foodstuff. Either there were a ton of eggs in the recipe and sugar and oil and fat, or there was egg replacer and sugar and oil and fat. Nothing like the simple recipes for wheat breads of flour, salt, yeast and water. Then I found what I was looking for from Dan Lepard at the Guardian. His trick? Psyllium husk powder.

The original recipe can be found here, but I decided to use my own G-F flour blend (a risky gamble when it comes to G-F breads, to not stick to the recipe. It was very adolescent of me, but I think I got away with it). I didn't want to go buy psyllium husk powder, but I knew that was exactly what was in a common breakfast cereal, All Bran Buds. Not regular All Bran. Only the buds. Now if you're actually celiac you can't do the replacement below because the buds are not gluten-free. So go buy the husk powder.

Here's what I did:
350g plus 2 tbsp G-F Flour Blend (above)
2 tbsp All Bran Buds cereal
2 tsp instant yeast
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp cane sugar
2 tsp vinegar (I used white balsamic because I'm ridiculous and have that and not regular vinegar)
1 tbsp olive oil, plus a little extra to brush the top of the loaf
1/4 cup yogurt (I actually did use yogurt here, even though the probiotics would die in the baking process)
Generous 1 1/2 cups warm water

I wanted to soak the All Bran Buds in the water so they would break apart and spread throughout the loaf, but I didn't have time. I basically thought not doing this would wreck the recipe, but it still worked. Apparently the psyllium is what acts like gluten and keeps the loaf from falling apart like you may expect from a rice loaf. I don't know if the psyllium did its job, but for whatever reason, the loaf didn't fall apart. It actually turned out very loaf-like and not too dense like Gluten-Free anything tends to be.

Instructions:

Soften the All Brand buds in about 3 tbsp of the warm water for 30 minutes. They probably only need about 10, but you want to make sure they're really falling apart. If you're using psyllium husk powder, just add it to the dry ingredients below. You still need to use all the water in the recipe. If you don't have 30 minutes you shouldn't be making bread...I shouldn't have been making bread. So I'll start again: If you don't have 30 minutes, just add the All Bran Buds to the dry ingredients.

Put the Gluten-Free Flour, yeast, salt and sugar in a bowl.

In a second bowl whisk the liquid ingredients (minus the soaking liquid with the Brand Buds if using), then add the buds and water. Whisk again.

Now add the dry ingredients to the wet (in the bigger bowl) and mix the two really well for a minute, until they come together into a soft dough. Cover with a clean kitchen towel or plastic wrap and leave for an hour in a warm, draft-free place (like an oven with the light on, or my kitchen counter when it's 30 degrees outside) and let the dough rise.

Lightly oil a loaf pan and place dough evenly in pan. The original recipe says to shape it into a roll on a separate surface, but then when I had to transfer it later it kind of collapsed a little (I think because I'd applied plastic wrap directly to the surface of the dough. The original recipe doesn't say to cover, but I know that most bread recipes need the dough covered and draft-less to rise. Was I wrong? Bread-making people out there, please help me), so I think you can just let it rise in the loaf pan. If you want to make rolls, lightly oil a baking sheet and shape the dough into rolls directly on the sheet. Then cover the sheet or loaf pan again with a clean kitchen towel or plastic wrap and then rise for an hour and a half. The dough should almost double in size. Mine didn't quite double, but it kind of bubbled and oozed, which I took as a good sign that something was happening. Oozing is probably better than nothing, I figured. At least my yeast was working.

Preheat the oven to 475 Fahrenheit. Mr. Lepard says you need an oven this hot because the bread doesn't have spring. I believe him, even though I don't understand this statement. Yes, I know what spring is, but what does a hot oven have to do with it?

Brush the top of the loaf with a little olive oil (it makes for a nice crust. I happened to have some melted butter left over from making baklava, so I brushed with that instead. Well, Earth Balance, not butter. Sorry purists, but it's gluten-free bread. The concept of "pure" was never a part of this recipe).

Bake for 50 minutes in a loaf pan or 25 minutes for rolls. When you take the pan out of the oven remove the bread immediately from it and place on a wire rack. Cover the loaf or rolls with a clean cloth. This apparently helps keep the bread soft. I guess it keeps the liquid from evaporating with the heat, kind of like a pot lid keeps the heat in.

You know what? This was one of the most successful breads I've ever made. Definitely the most successful gluten-free...I will not say how many gluten-free loaves I've made.

It even came out with that nice crack in the top that means it's baked to the right point. It didn't taste like rice, or too grainy. It was a little sweet from the All Bran, sugar and vinegar, but not too much so, and there were a few different tastes and textures in every mouthful. Cutting into the loaf once it cooled was easy, but it was wonderfully soft and moist yet annoyingly messy when it was warm. The buds gave a speckled pattern that was pretty fun, too.

All in all, I'm very happy, and with my next Gluten-Free Flour blend with sorghum I'll have to give this recipe a second shot. Coming soon.