This past holiday season was a prime season for people to do cookie exchanges, where several people get together and trade cookies so that each person receives a bag of everyone else's cookies.  This does mean that a baker needs to make at least 6 cookies for each person expected to go.  In my case, it was expected that we would have 15 people visiting, so we needed 90 cookies, a little over 8 dozen.

The crux of the problem though, was not only did these cookies need to be gluten free, since it's a gluten free group, but I knew that some people had dairy allergies, egg allergies and soy allergies, so I altered a gluten free recipe to fit this scenario.  Unfortunately, while I avoided soy based shortening, I did hit a spot since the shortening was palm oil, and palm oil is considered a tree nut.   At least though, no one in the group had a tree nut allergy.

My first batch didn't turn out so well.  Instead of rolling dough into balls, I sliced them off a log to try making a sort of biscuit cookie.  The shape didn't turn out too well, and the cooking didn't work quite right.  The second batch, created after some consulting, was much better.  The dough was chilled in log form, 2" in diameter, and 1/4" slices were cut and rolled into balls which were then rolled in a spiced sugar and then flattened into a cookie form.

This wasn't a complete loss at least, since my consultant took the first batch back to a second baker, who doesn't always do gluten free, and used it to create a crust that did quite well for cheesecake.

The recipe was modified from a gluten free recipe from serious eats for the use in a cookie exchange where there are other allergies, including gluten.

Equipment: mixer, measuring equipment, oven, parchment paper or plastic wrap, baking sheet, heavy flat bottomed glass.
Cookie Recipe

• 8.5 ounces (2 cups) brown rice flour
• 2 3/4 ounces (1/2 cup) sweet rice flour
• 2 ounces (1/2 cup) tapioca starch
• 1 tablespoon ground ginger
• 1 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon ground clove
• 1/4 teaspoon xanthan gum
• 5 ounces (10 tablespoons) Spectrum brand Palm Oil Shortening
• 6.3 ounces (3/4 cup packed) dark brown sugar
• 1/4 cup Libby's Pumpkin (plain canned pumpkin)
• 3 tablespoons molasses 
• 1/2 Tablespoon water if needed

It appears that despite all the mishaps, the pumpkin ale turned out pretty well.  After the taste tests it was decided that I'd bring the keg home for Thanksgiving.  It wasn't touched until most people went home, especially because most of the family doesn't drink.  For the members of the family that did, it was a decent drinking beer, and when the family poker game turned into a drinking game, it depleted very quickly.  All 5 gallons were done in by under 7 people in a span of 5-7 hours.

Because of this, I've decided to try to make another batch, or rather, a double batch which is sitting in carboys.  I do not know if it will be anywhere near done by the time Christmas rolls around though.  I started this on Sunday, 4 days ago.  I expect that it will take until at least Sunday the 11th to ferment, then I will add the settling ingredients and it will settle, outside in a shed where it's 40 or so degrees.  I don't know if it will be clear by the 18th or not, but between then and the 22nd I'll taste test to see where it is. If there's a chance, then I will keg it and bring one home.  I expect that I will have about 14 gallons, or 3 soda kegs worth.  I just hope I have enough kegs.

I also started a cranberry mead using 18 pounds of honey and 6 pounds of cranberries.  We'll see how that ferments and comes out.  I'll eventually be moving that into one of the carboys from the bucket it's in.   I used a bucket because I'd need the wide mouth due to the cranberries.  I hope that one of the carboys will be ready by the time I need to rack the mead, otherwise I'll have to stick it outside to keep it cold, or worse, spend even more money on a 3rd carboy.

For quite some time, sous vide has been a rising item in the consumer items for home cooks.  Most of us are used to cooking at a high temperature for a short amount of time.  Grilling a steak for a few minutes, or quickly cooking some burgers, putting a pork loin into the oven for half an hour, or stirfrying thinly sliced meat and vegetables for just a scant few minutes.  Our lowest temperature and longest time tends to be using a slow cooker for 8 hours.

The difference with sous vide is that not only is the temperature much lower, ranging around 135=145, but that the time to cook is much longer.  A cut of meat that normally cooks for 45-60 minutes in the oven will take 12-48 hours.  Why so long? The low, constant temperature will slowly cook the cut of meat, and will not bring the temperature above this, so the end result is that the cut will not be cooked over this temperature.  Great for cooking something to rare or medium rare, without being too raw on the inside and not too cooked on the outside.

There are a number of resources out there, and I'm not used to this enough to do a full explanation, however, I will explain the parts I'm using and the ingredients I've used used.

I hooked up my handy crock pot and filled it with warm water, then plugged it into a temperature control device that had cost me 75 dollars new, and that I use for a number of items including:  Making yogurt, incubating koji and now, using as a low temperature cooker.  The temperature control device consists of a thermometer probe and a unit that plugs into the wall.  The heating device, in this case the slow cooker, plugs into the temperature control unit, and the thermometer probe is set into the water.  I set the device to cut the power when the temperature reaches 140 degrees, and to start heating as soon as the temperature drops below 135.  

While the water was heating up, I've sliced up a single carrot, a small onion and added it into a ziploc freezer bag along with a small splash of cheap, but drinkable, wine.  Actually it was a Kroger special Pinot Noir.  Unfortunately, I didn't have any other wines to use at the time.  I seasoned a beef sirloin roast with garlic salt and freshly ground black pepper.  The particular cut (which I'll have to check which kind it is in detail), is a fairly solid slab of meat, with little to no marbling or connective tissue which would normally render out fat and flavor into the meat.  Because of this, I had decided to use the vegetables and wine, even at the risk of this becoming more like a stew.

I will be letting this cook over the next two days, and finish it up on a grill, or on my cast iron pan, in order to brown the outside of this small 3 pound piece of lean meat.

Ideally, what will happen tomorrow night, will be slicing some veggies (the remainder of the carrots, onion, garlic and a parsnip) and putting that into the hot water to slow cook, finishing it the next day in the oven.  Unlike meat, I'm of the opinion that root vegetables really need to be cooked at a higher temperature than meat.  Usually around the 185 degree range.  I'm not sure what heating the vegetables up to 140 will do for me

Haven't managed to do anything notworthy on the gluten free side of things lately, plus it's tax season (extensions) which means even less time to do anything.

The mead is still slowly fermenting away at 60 degree's, it's optimal temperature for the particular yeast, and it's still bubbling happily away.

A few weeks back, I also started a sorghum process that was similar to creating sake:  Innoculating steamed grains, and using the enzymes created to convert other steamed grain to sugar.  This process did not happen at all like I had hoped, so instead, I've been trying it like the full sake process.

I had hoped that the Koji creation process would produce enougn enzymes that it could convert more starch to sugar if introduced to a higher water temperature than sake sees.  This was not the case.  Perhaps I may need to innoculate large quantities of grain to do this (all the grain I'm trying to convert for example), as well as crush them into small enough pieces that water at a certain temperature would convert the starches to sugar.
For now, I had added some yeast, 1118EC I believe, a champagne yeast, just to see what would happen.  After all, there were no hop flavorings involved.

After several weeks, I have not yet strained the liquid away from the grain, and really need to.

The mead is still kicking away at 60 degrees, still fermenting, still smelling quite sweet, but soon I'll need to move it out of the temperature chamber.  I recently purchased some beer taps (faucets and shanks) and wish to add these to the freezer that was converted into a refridgerator suitable for kegs.

I've recently (last week) went to the Rennisannce festival and have suffered no ill effects.  It has been quite pleasant, however the only items I can eat are salads and turkey legs.  There is little else that I can really have.

It has been some time since I posted.  Haven't been doing too much other than trying to organize my life up and going up north to Traverse City with family.  I didn't manage to search for any gluten free tidbits in the area since my parents and their friends (who really kinda have the place) decided to cook the entire time.  There were quite a few wineries though.

Once I got back, I decided to finally start on my mead.  I had cleared out my top loading fridge so that the sake could sit in there for a while, so I knew I had room to put in the plastic carboy of mead.

I looked at my materials and calculations and unfortunately got confused.  I had planned on a 5 gallon batch, but the container was a 6 gallon batch.  At 5 gallons, 15 pounds of honey was expected to give me a 15% ABV, at 6 gallons, 15 pounds was only going to give under 13%.  Which I somehow thought was going to be too low for a mead.  Thus, I decided to add an additional 3 pounds of honey.  However, I only had one more 5 pound container.   I thought to myself,  "Well, 20 pounds of honey and 6 gallons of water makes 3.33 pounds per gallon.  Still good."  So I put in 20 pounds into the carboy.

The astute person will have already realized what I've missed.  Indeed, I found out after I poured 20 pounds of honey into the carboy and started filling jugs and adding water, did I realize that I was using half gallon jugs per 5 pounds of honey, and that I didn't account for the volume honey would take up.  Somehow, I thought that 20 pounds of honey would dissolve in water, as if it were a dry sugar product.  Yet I knew from baking, that when using honey as a sweetner, a person had to use less liquid because of the fluidity of the honey.

This means that I had 2 gallons of honey, and only room for 4 gallons of water.  Indeed, when I took the measurement, I found that I had a gravity of about 1.130.  Not necessarily a bad thing, however, the yeast I was using was Lalvin's D-47.  A yeast that would tolerate up to 14% abv, and is used for dry white wines (whose style I was aiming for.).

At this point, I have been letting the mead ferment, using some nutrient additions to feed the yeast, however I have to consider 3 options after the fermentation has completed.  Assuming that the yeast will cease it's activity exactly at 14% abv (which is unlikely, since it varies) which happens to be a gravity of 1.020

1)  Leave the mead as a sweet mead.  However, the residual sugar would be around 10% per a graph I found here.  If I were to do this, then I'll have to find the appropriate acid blend to bring the acidity up to balance the sweetness.  Sweet reislings (and even semi-dry but probably not dry since it is dry) have their sweetness balanced out by the natural tannins and acids in the grape.

2)  Use a different yeast to continue fermentation until the mead is dry, however this further means that the aging time will be pushed to 2 years, since this would give a higher alcohol content of 18.5, and this would likely strip away much of the varietal characteristics of the honey.

3)  Dilute the mead with water and continue fermentation.  I could potentially split the batch into two separate containers and add just a single gallon of water to each, and let fermentation restart and finish to give me the 14% (or less if I decide to add more water)

I'm not exactly sure why I keep aiming for the 14% other than the yeast limit is 14 percent, and that my calculator showed that 3 pounds of honey and one full gallon of water (or 15 pounds honey, 5 gallons water) would ferment dry at 14% abv.  I somehow forget that it's certainly possible to aim for a 10% abv, and many times, is what I would prefer.  Many dry reislings for example, hover around the 10-12% range (with 3% residual sugar), and sweet reislings down at 8% (with 8% residual sugar).

Perhaps next time I'll try a batch at 1 pound of honey topped off with water to equal a gallon, which (when fermented completely dry) will give me an estimated abv of 6% equal to a beer.
Or 2 pounds of honey topped off with water to equal a gallon to make a 12.5% mead.

One pound of honey takes up 0.1 gallons of space, so the 1 pound of honey is .9gallons of water, the 2 pound of honey is .8 gallons of water.  Thus the ever increasing %.  Which leads me to 3 pounds of honey and .7 gallons of water would actually give a dry mead of 20.94.  Which likely halts earlier than that at around 16-18% and leaves a bit of residual sugar.

And although I've waited a week to post this, today 8/6 is national mead day!

It has been some time!  I was trying to craft a post about my summer drinks, but it appears I have too many and need to pare them down.  However,  lets put that on hold for today.  Last week, I went on a family trip to Cape Cod and we located a great gluten free seafood place.  Unfortunately, my keyboard of this laptop broke on the trip and remains broken, until the replacement part comes in.  As you may imagine, writing without the use of several of your keys, including the space bar, is very difficult.

The place was the Chatham Fish Market / Chatham Fish and Lobster company, surrounded by beautifully landscaped residences.  The Fish Market was the section of the building to purchase fresh seafood, however the food area was more like a small diner. Two glass cases with a selection of precooked foods, including gluten free cheesecake, gluten free asparagus risotto, and what I thought was the best, gluten free crabcakes.  Crabcakes are a mix of crab, breadcrumbs, spices and seasoning and a binder like mayonaise, formed into patties, coated in breadcrumbs, and fried.  Delicious, but because they were cold in the coolers, I picked up two to bring to the place I was staying.

Why?  Because I was after the fried foods.  All the fried foods there are gluten free.  Fish&Chips, Fried Clams, Fried Shrimp, onion rings, yum.  They seem to use a cornflour coating that fries up nice and crisp.  However, I doubt they would stay crisp for the two hour trip.  They were worth getting.  Crisp and hot, with tartar sauce.  I'd have preferred cocktail sauce for the clams, and a horseradish mayo for the rings.

I'd consider frying, but it's not quite worth the effort for one person.  Especially because it means that there is quite a bit of cleanup after.