Category Archives: Food and Cooking

Eclairs I Have Known–trying a gluten-free eclair recipe

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I judge a pastry shop by the quality of its eclairs. Supermarket bakeries and other chains tend to fill their eclairs with the same sort of stuff that they put in filled doughnuts–either some sort of pastry “creme” or processed vanilla pudding. I’ve also had eclairs that were filled with a rather glue-y sort of custard.
When my family lived in Tunis, long ago, the local patisserie had very good eclairs, although strangely enough, I don’t remember what the filling was like. I remember that I usually chose an eclair over the other pastries, and I remember that they had two kinds–one was chocolate on top and one was some other flavor. I’m not sure I ever knew what flavor it was. Memory suggests either maple or mocha, and since maple doesn’t really seem likely, I’m going with mocha. I do remember that there were lovely rosettes of something like stiff, flavored whipped cream on top.
Now I’m lucky enough to live near a co-op with a good bakery (see The Hows and Whys of My Mini-baguettes). Their eclairs aren’t nearly as elegant as those I had in Tunis. They are rather irregular in shape and smeared in chocolate (ganache, I think.) But they are generously filled with a heavenly vanilla pastry cream that goes wonderfully with the ganache on top. With eclairs like that less than ten minutes away, why make my own?
The answer is–to get a gluten-free eclair that the whole family can enjoy.

The recipe I used is from the Faithfully Gluten-free website. The same pate choux recipe is used for cream puffs and eclairs. I made the cream puffs last week and filled them with whipped cream. They turned out pretty well, though I took them out a bit early because they were golden and maybe they could have used a bit longer in the oven. They re-crisped well the next day (the unfilled ones) after ten minutes in the oven, as per instructions.
The recipe calls for white rice flour and sweet rice flour. Whole Foods usually has white rice flour. The sweet white rice flour can be hard to find. I ordered sweet rice flour over the internet for a different recipe, but I think I’ve seen it in a store since then. Xanthan gum is available now in a lot of stores, usually in the baking area.
The procedure for the gluten-free pate choux is almost exactly like that for regular pate choux. The water and butter (sometimes also sugar and salt) are brought to a boil and the flour mixture is stirred in. Be prepared–you are stirring it till it resembles playdough, which means it takes arm strength to stir. Since I am still having trouble with my right shoulder (frozen, though no longer aching), my husband did the stirring.
This recipe didn’t get quite as playdough-like as the regular flour version, and there seemed to be quite a lot of liquid butter oozing out onto the bottom of the pot. I wonder whether the recipe would work with slightly less butter? Or is it just that rice flour doesn’t hold onto butter as well as regular flour? (I have read something to that effect.)
Once you reach playdough (or something thick and well-combined), the stuff goes in the standing mixer for yet more beating. First a bit just to cool it off slightly, then with the eggs, one at a time. The recipe notes that “the dough will look like it breaks apart, but keep mixing it until it comes back together again.”
And so it does.  I like recipes that tell you what to look for.

On my last trip to Michael’s, I got a 6B piping tip and some 16″ disposable piping bags. I was think about cookies more than eclairs, and possibly I should have gotten an even larger tip. Again, I had to get my husband’s help as the dough was stiff to pipe. I would have gotten a round tip, but they didn’t have one in that size, so I ended up with interestingly ridged eclairs.
The ridges were less pronounced after baking.
Again, I think I took them out a bit early. I also did not pierce them and cool them in the oven. It didn’t seem like it made much difference with the cream puffs, where I cooled some in the oven and some on the rack, but maybe I should try that again.
For filling, I made Dangerously Easy Microwave Vanilla Custard. I may not have cooked it quite long enough, as it was a bit liquid even after I speed-cooled some of it. Or it may be that my recipe, while fine for bowls of custard, needs a more thickener in order to be used as a filling. It tasted good, anyway.
Since it was getting late and we wanted to actually eat the eclairs that day, we just smeared Nutella on top rather than mess around with chocolate ganache or some other interesting topping. I should have taken the photo before biting into mine.
Messy, but good.
Till next post.

The Hows and Why of My Mini-baguettes–making French bread just because…

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Recently I’ve been inspired to make bread.

Usually the only bread I make is sandwich bread. We have a Zojirushi bread machine, and I love it. Bread is easy to make, tasty–the only disadvantage compared to store bread is having to slice it. Like Jacob Two-Two, I seem unable to cut a slice of bread that isn’t “a foot thick on one end and thin as a sheet of paper on the other.”

I think what happened is that I watched one too many episodes of The Great British Baking Show. This led to a couple of failed attempts at ciabatta. I blame this partly on the jar of yeast, partly on our oven’s inaccurate temperature readings and… well, the rest is mine. But making the ciabatta reminded me of the class my husband and I took, years ago, in bread-making.

We had actually signed up because I was interested in using different kinds of flour in my bread-machine sandwich breads, but the class turned out to be focused instead on mixing, raising, shaping, and baking types of French bread  (and also some sourdough.) It was a good class, and when I saw that one of our instructors had written a book with all her bread-making knowledge (she was studying bread in graduate school), I naturally bought the book. Bread Science, by Emily Buehler.

The book.

Here I must admit that I have only read parts of it so far. She goes into extensive detail about how bread works. I was interested to learn that the bubbles of gas in the dough are created by mixing–yeast can only enlarge the bubbles, not create new ones. I picked the book up again this week and re-read the sections about mixing, raising, shaping, etc. Then I tried to make the basic bread recipe, which uses a poolish.

A poolish, as we learned in that long-ago class, is a kind of preferment. As in “pre-ferment”. As in, something you make before you actually mix the dough and start the first rise. You take some of the flour, some of the water, and a pinch of the yeast and let the mixture rise overnight, basically. Then you mix that in with the rest of the flour, water, yeast, and salt. The point is to increase the flavor.

The poolish, before it increased in volume.

See the scale in the photo? I love my scale for all sorts of baking. Also, it can read in either grams or ounces. Very handy if you are trying to follow a British recipe, or a very precise American recipe.

I remember that the dough we mixed in class was on the sticky side, but my first run-through turned out incredibly wet dough. I reread the recipe and saw that she had warned that less water is needed in humid weather. Hmm, summer in the South… but then, air conditioning… but still at least 50% humidity… For the second batch, I reduced the amount of water and got a dough that was sticky but manageable.

The dough, before the first rise (I think).

Then two rises, a “pre-shape”, and finally, time to make baguettes. Or in this case, given that I was making a half-batch and had only a regular size cookie sheet, two mini-baguettes.

The mini-baguettes before proofing.

I did not bake them on my pizza stone, nor did I do anything much toward creating steam in the oven. I was still pretty pleased with the way they tasted and their shape. Maybe next time I’ll work on creating a better crust.

The finished bread.

So that’s the “how” of my recent bread-making. The other question is “Why?” Why go to all this trouble when I am fortunate enough to live very near a co-op that has an excellent bakery? (Note: this is where we took the bread class in the first place.)

As I said earlier, I don’t normally make bread apart from easy sandwich bread in the bread machine. I have good reason to make that–supermarket sandwich bread doesn’t taste nearly as good, and while I can get good sandwich bread at the co-op, I have more options if I make it at home. That’s a bit like sewing my own grocery bag or mini-backpack, where I am customizing it according to my own needs and preferences. But when I make French bread, I’m not trying to create something different and personalized–I’m trying to make it as French-bread-like as I can.

So why make French bread?

The answer has to be–to see if I can. Or, because it’s an interesting challenge. Apparently it falls into that category of things which I do just because it is fun to exercise one’s skills. (Crossword puzzles, for instance, or rudimentary juggling.) I suppose if I then got creative with the shaping (braids, crowns, bread alligators) then it would turn into an expression of creativity as well.

So what is the point of this whole post, besides a chance to show off photos of my lovely mini-baguettes? Just that it is a lot of fun to take on a challenge, to exercise skills (must try the ciabatta again), even when it isn’t also an expression of individual creativity.

So go forth and exercise some skills. And eat French bread.

Till next post.

The Many Mysterious Mints

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Calling mints “mysterious” is a bit of an alliterative exaggeration. There isn’t much mysterious about mints, unless it’s the fact that such plain green leaves can provide such marvelous scents–scents that vary from pepperminty to perfume-y.

Peppermint plants with weeds in background
Peppermint
 It’s not surprising that I like mints. I like fragrant plants and I like plants that are easy to grow. Mints are both. Mints are also easy to propagate, so one plant can become several via cuttings and the extras can be passed along to friends. Even if you don’t take cuttings, a flourishing mint will spread and become more plants. In fact, the usual warning that comes with mint is “Plant it in a container or it will take over your garden.”

That’s true enough. I planted mint, both spearmint and peppermint, in a shady area by the deck where other plants didn’t want to grow. While the mint beds have had their ups and downs, sometimes flourishing and sometimes not, it is certainly true that whenever they are doing well, I have to keep pulling mint out of the adjacent “lawn”. Those stems move sneakily just beneath the surface, it seems, and suddenly peppermint pops up a foot away from its designated bed.

Spearmint plants with weeds including fern
Spearmint

The front of the house used to be an area of gardening desperation–gravelly soil on top of solid clay, shade, and lots of very hungry deer. I planted ferns and a groundcover (Lamium, which is also in the mint family though not a Mentha) and bergamot mint (a.k.a orange mint, not monarda/beebalm). As neighboring trees were taken down, providing a bit more light to our front yard, the mints flourished. (Apparently deer don’t care for bergamot-flavored leaves.) In fact, they are flourishing so much that the groundcover needs to be chopped back at least a couple of times a season, and the bergamot mint is trying to spread into the “lawn”.

Bergamot mint with stiltgrass in the background
Bergamot (orange) mint
I have four different mints now–peppermint, spearmint, apple mint and bergamot mint. Technically I think I bought two varieties of peppermint (chocolate mint smells like plain peppermint to me) and two varieties of spearmint that may have differed in leaf size (one was “Kentucky Colonel” and the other might just have been generic spearmint), but I can’t distinguish them any more. If I could only have two kinds of mint, I would choose peppermint and spearmint. What delicious smells!

The bergamot mint has more rounded leaves than either the peppermint or spearmint. It smells… like bergamot! Most people recognize the scent as “Earl Grey tea,” which is not surprising since Earl Grey is tea flavored with (actual) bergamot. Also in the front yard I have a small planting of apple mint that has survived despite being nearly choked out by stilt-grass. (Most of my garden is choked with stilt-grass this year.) Apple mint reminds me a lot of spearmint as far as its scent and color, but the leaves are slightly fuzzy. Maybe that’s where the name comes from, since it doesn’t smell like apples. The leaves have the pale green, fuzzy look of young apple foliage.

Flowering apple mint surrounded by stilt grass
Apple mint
There are other mints out there. I don’t grow pennyroyal. I love its name, but I once had a plant and the smell reminded me very pungently of a flea collar. 

I’ve tried to grow Corsican mint, but I can’t seem to keep it alive for long. I keep buying it, because it looks like the most adorable tiny-leafed, mossy groundcover, but with a strong minty smell. I would love to have pathways made of Corsican mint. The problem seems to be keeping it consistently moist and not letting taller plants shade it out. Maybe someday.

I saw on-line that there is a plant called “banana mint.” Does it really smell like bananas? I’m going to have to order one soon and find out.

So what do I use all this minty goodness for?

Surprisingly little. When I was a kid, I would have loved to have had access to all that fresh mint for potpourri and goodness knows what other mad concoctions. I would have filled sachets with the dried leaves. I would have strewn my room with it, and maybe tried packing some in oil as an attempt at enfleurage.

As an adult, I have a few recipes that call for mint (spearmint), and a couple of times my daughter and I tried distilling peppermint oil using a pot, a small glass bowl, an upside-down lid and some ice. We did produce minty water with a slight sheen of oil on it. Mostly, though, I just rub the mint leaves as I pass by and remark on how good it smells.

I do like sweet tea with a hint of mint in it. For some reason, it’s easier to make with dried peppermint. Fresh leaves seem to give a sort of green flavor to tea. It could be a matter of method–maybe fresh leaves need to steep in much cooler water. Spearmint also adds a nice hint of mint.

Methods of making sweet iced tea vary and people can be quite passionate about their own method. Here’s mine, for tea with a hint of mint.


Sweet Tea with a Hint of Mint

Put 4 cups of boiling water in a glass measuring cup with 2 iced tea bags (or 4 regular size) and steep for five minutes. Add a peppermint tea bag for the last minute, or steep longer for more flavor. 
 Mix in sugar (between 1/2 cup and 1 cup, depending on preferred sweetness) while tea is hot. Fill a 2-quart plastic pitcher more than halfway with (fresh) ice cubes. Pour sweetened tea over ice and stir well. Add more ice if necessary to bring to 2 quarts. Serve.