Category Archives: Gluten-Free

As hinted at the end of my post about roasted garbanzo beans, I’ve embarked on using my roasting-toasting methods to make my own corn nuts.

First, I tried hominy.

Look, it’s even friends with garbanzo beans!

I used the same methods as garbanzo beans, but the hominy shrunk a crazy amount when toasted. What came out tastes corn-nutty, and looks like itty bitty baby corn nuts.

Seriously, these came out seriously small. Though I guess if you like feeling like a giant, you could use hominy for your corn-nutting needs. And on a side note, I don’t know that the term “corn-nutting needs” has ever been written before.

What to do? Well, if you’re me, you ask Dr. Google. And he’ll tell you that there are a couple of varieties of giant corn out there, and one of those varieties is what corn nuts are made from. So then, if you’re me, you ask Scott (who’s already going to Costco that day, and it’s just a little further to the local Hispanic supermarket) to go on a giant corn scouting mission. Then, if you’re me, you’re delighted at the bounty of giant corn he brings home.

Both bagged and canned! What a bonanza!

I decided to start with the bagged stuff. First off, just like with dry garbanzo beans, you have to soak them. I left my giant corn soaking for 24 hours, but I hear rumors that the people at Planters soak their giant corn for three days. Maybe I’ll try that next time, when I have more patience.

After the soaking comes the rinsing and drying — give them a good swirl in a colander, then pat them with paper towels. They don’t have to be bone-dry, just not soaking wet.

Then, just like the garbanzos, I tossed them with about three tablespoons of coconut oil. I then spread them on my non-stick foil-lined cookie sheet, and salted them.

I put on a glove, so I could thoroughly coat the kernels with oil. I’m also trying to make my way through this box of size-small gloves, because they’re a little TOO small. My hands always feel like sausage.

ANYhoo, spread them out on your non-stick surface, so they’re in a single layer. Again, set your oven to 375°.

This time, I timed my stir-and-mix sessions a bit differently. I started by letting them go for 20 minutes. Stir/mix. Then I set the timer for 15 minutes. Stir/mix. Then I went for 10 minutes. Still 45 minutes total, just divvied up oddly. It didn’t really make much difference, that I could tell.

Once they’re golden brown, put them on paper towels to get rid of the extra oil. Salt them more while they’re hot and oily, if you want more salt.

So how are they? Well, they’re very corn-nut-like. The flavor is a bit different from the packaged stuff, but it’s still really good. And the coconut oil gives them almost a movie-theater-popcorn vibe. There’s definitely more tinkering to be done — longer soaking of the dry corn, trying out the canned corn, maybe different cooking temperatures. But this first attempt is quite satisfactory.

Also, there was hardly any shrinkage. Unlike the hominy. And did you know that the back of the 2012 pennies was so pretty?

I made more roasted garbanzo beans (or chickpeas, for those so inclined) the other day, and they continue to be delicious. And so very easy, as well! Here’s a little more detail.

You can either use dry or canned garbanzo beans. This time, I used:

Ooh, I guess for some there’s the third option of “chick peas”.

If you’re using dry garbanzos, soak them in water overnight. Done? Good. Now you’re at the same step as if you’d opened up a can. Then move on to step two:

Rinse those mothers! No matter which kind. But especially the canned kind, because (just like beans) the water they’re packed in is slimy and foamy. (Scott is right, I should totally write catalog copy. Because I can’t stop myself from using words like slimy and foamy.)

Then, add my favorite two roasting friends:

Oh my goodness, I love cooking with coconut oil so much. Not only is it packed with healthy fat, and it has an incredibly high smoke point so it doesn’t go rancid in the heat (like most vegetable and seed oils do), but it also tastes really, really good.

Salt, likewise: delicious, and good for you.

Pat your garbanzo beans dry-ish with paper towels, then toss with … oh, I’ll say three tablespoons of coconut oil. Spread them out on a non-stick cookie sheet (or, if you’re like me, a gnarly mangled baking sheet lined with non-stick foil). Then salt them up.

Put them in a 375° oven and set your timer for 15 minutes. When it goes off, stir everything around. Another 15 minutes, another stir around. One more 15-minute session will probably do it — my garbanzos are golden brown and delicious after about 45 minutes total.

They shrink a bit when roasted, but not as much as I thought they would.

Throw them onto some paper towels, or a brown paper bag — something to soak up the extra oil. Now’s the time to taste one, and hit them with extra salt if you like, while they’re still a little oily so the salt will stick.

They’re tasty, and crunchy, and relatively good for you.

Next up: if I can do this with garbanzo beans, can I use the same method to make corn nuts?

(Hint: you bet your bottom dollar I can!)

This was a surprisingly hard recipe to put together, only because there weren’t all that many recipes to reference on the internet. Half of the chocolate chip cookie recipes that mentioned coconut didn’t use actual coconut — they used coconut oil, or coconut flour (I admit, one of them was mine).

Then you get into the gluten-free world, and my permanent frustration with recipes there: the bulk of them are either dairy-free or totally vegan. That doesn’t fly with me — like Paula Deen, I’m big on butter.

So for this one, I had to use mostly recipes involving wheat flour, then use my old friend science to cobble together a recipe.

Fortunately, I have lots of friends in the baking box who can help. I have the baking box because this apartment doesn’t have all that much kitchen shelf space, so those are full of everyday staples. I think I like the baking box better, anyway — one quick glance and I can see what I have and what I don’t. For dry goods, anyway.

Bear in mind, this recipe is NOT low-carb. In fact, for giggles, I used actual sugar. And the sweetened coconut flakes you get at the grocery store, instead of the unsweetened dry stuff from the Whole Foods. I’ll tell you right off the bat (spoiler alert): these came out a tad bit too sweet. At least for me. Maybe it’s because I’m not used to sweet stuff anymore. Anyhoo, onward!

Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 stick (1/2 cup) butter, softened
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup sugar (probably could have skipped this)
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup + 3 Tbsp coconut flour*
1/4 cup tapioca flour (also known as tapioca starch)
1/4 cup almond meal (also known as almond flour)
1/2 cup sweetened coconut flakes
3/4 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips**

* I added the extra 3 Tbsp coconut flour at the end, since the batter still seemed a bit wet. This may be due to the Florida humidity. Your mileage may vary.

** I started with a heaping 1/2 cup, then threw a few more in. It’s chocolate, go nuts.

Cream the butter and sugar. Beat in the eggs. Add the vanilla, salt, and baking soda. Add the flours one at a time, mixing thoroughly each time.

Bake at 375° for 14-18 minutes.

I could have used my Bob’s Red Mill Gluten-Free Baking Mix on this one, but I felt like cobbling. The coconut flour is one of my favorite foundations, but use too much and it sucks up all the liquid. The tapioca flour adds a springy stretchiness that non-wheat flours lack (it’s used to make the amazing cheesy rolls they serve at the Brazilian steakhouse). And almond meal is always welcome for flavor and texture.

Besides being a little too sweet for me (but probably just right for normal people), these are pretty darned good. The coconut adds a chewiness, and coconut flavor is always welcome in my mouth. Unless it’s mixed with pineapple in a pina colada, but that’s neither here nor there.

Overall, I’ll give them an 8 out of 10. Good texture, good flavor, and next time I think I’ll just cut out the regular sugar.

Now that I have this sweetened coconut, it may be time to make some macaroons. Once these cookies are gone, that is. Which should be soon.

Last time at the grocery store, they didn’t have the Ancient Harvest gluten-free pasta. I checked both Target and Publix, and all either place had was this same purple bag of elbows from Tinkyáda. Usually, the 8-ounce box from Ancient Harvest runs about $3 or $3.50. But this 16-ounce bag of Tinkyáda was a mere $3.99.

Plus, they made a HUGE deal about the good texture. Not mushy. Al dente. Okay, Tinkyáda. We get it.

I was a little leery about the cooking time, for starters. I mean, the Ancient Harvest stuff was just right after 8 minutes in boiling water. But this stuff?

Seriously, 16-17 minutes? Not only does that seem like a really specific amount of time, but it seems like a really long time. And in case you’re wondering, the “Easy and energy-saving method” (which is clearly Easy with a capital E) is printed on the front of the bag. Bring water to a boil, insert pasta, cover and turn off the heat. Wait 20 minutes, then drain. Not so much with a time savings.

Oh, and if you think this packaging reads like Engrish, check out the Tinkyáda website. It’s not quite Dr. Bronner-grade weird, but it’s certainly unusual. The design takes me back to the late ’90s, and the writing doesn’t seem to be from a native English speaker. Though the stuff is made in Ontario, Canada, which I always thought was less French than Quebec. Hm, je ne sais quoi.

Anyway, with vows of such non-mushitude …

Promised by two happy bunnies holding a … gigantic grain of rice?

I had to try it out. I weighed out a 2-ounce serving, got water heating up in my little single-serve saucepan, and got my Tinkyáda on.

Once the elbows hit the water, I had 16 minutes to figure out how to dress the stuff. But really, when presented with elbows, there’s only one logical choice.

That’s right, neon orange. Sorry, marinara and alfredo. Maybe some other time.

(Side note: did you grow up calling it “macaroni and cheese” or “Kraft dinner”? I’d never heard “Kraft dinner” until the Barenaked Ladies discussed it in a song. Maybe that’s a Canadian thing. For some reason, it also makes me think of the battle of “Lik-M-Aid” vs. “Fun Dip”.)

(Oh, and that oven mitt in the background? The groovy orangey yellowy one with even groovier blue innards? I made that.)

Onward. I tested the pasta at 10 minutes and again at 12, and I actually pulled it and strained it at 12. I do like mine with a little bite, and I think the 12-14 zone will be just right. Melted some butter, threw in some cream (yeah, I know you’re supposed to use milk, but I don’t have milk in the house). Then I added the neon orange cheese powder. What I don’t get is how the container encourages me to shake and sprinkle the cheese on stuff, then says the serving size is 2 teaspoons. That would take a LOT of shaking. Anyhoo, I just screwed the cap off and shoved my teaspoon down in there. And I went with 3 teaspoons, because that’s how I roll.

This is really why I should invest in a non-clear bowl for food display purposes. It feels like the mac-n-cheese is hovering over a dish towel. I mean, I guess I could have put the food on one of my white plates, but only a monster would eat mac-n-cheese out of anything other than a bowl (or the pot it was cooked in).

So, how did it taste? CHEEEZY GOOD. And none of the vague rice flavor like the De Boles rice pasta had when I tried it. The pasta itself was mostly flavorless, which for me is a good thing.

As for the texture, it was indeed al dente and not mushy. Maybe one or two more minutes would be even better — I’ll have to play around with the cook time. So good on flavor, texture, and price — 50¢ per serving is a price that the other guys can only match when they’re on sale. I give the Tinkyáda brown rice elbows a solid 9 out of 10 and will certainly use the rest in a variety of tasty ways.

Unless I end up making 8 servings of neon orange.

We had a discussion about banana bread at work the other day. Mainly it centered on the concept that you can replace the eggs in a banana bread recipe with applesauce. My point was that you’re taking the ONE ingredient in the whole thing that isn’t sugar, and replacing it with more sugar. Bleah.

But since then, I was jonesing for banana bread. So this is what I came up with.

2 ripe bananas, mashed
1/2 stick butter (1/4 cup), softened
1/2 cup coconut flour
1/4 cup almond flour
1/3 cup Splenda
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/8 tsp xanthan gum
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs

Mix the bejeezus out of it all, then put it into cupcake papers. This made 8 muffins; you could double the recipe for either 16 muffins or a loaf. Bake at 350° for 35 minutes (muffins) or 1 hour (loaf) or until a toothpick comes out clean.

These came out great. I described them to Scott as “like so much Aperture Science cake — delicious and moist.”

They’re not low-carb (How could they be, with bananas?) but they’re moderate carb:

Per muffin (8)
calories: 150
fat: 10g
carb: 13g
– fiber: 4g
protein: 4g

Now I’m trying to come up with other fruit/vegetable matter that could be a good muffin base, since these had the squishy moistness that’s missing in so many gluten-free baked goods. Scott suggested avocado, which … hmm. Seems a bit weird. Certainly canned pumpkin with some pumpkin pie spice might work. What other lower-carb fruits or veggies could be made into muffin or loaf form?

I’m still working on perfecting a recipe. It’s getting better all the time! Chewiness is hard to achieve with gluten-free baking, but these cookies came pretty close.

These aren’t low-carb cookies per se, but they’re lower carb than normal cookies. I’d say roughly half the carbs of a standard wheat-flour-and-white-sugar cookie.

1/2 cup (1 stick) softened butter
1/3 cup dark brown sugar
1/3 cup Splenda
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 eggs
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup + 1 Tbsp coconut flour*
1/4 cup almond flour
1/4 cup tapioca flour
1/2 tsp xanthan gum
1 cup chocolate chips (I prefer semi-sweet morsels)

Bake for 10 minutes at 400° F. makes approximately 20 two-inch cookies.

Usually, my coconut flour cookies are more fluffy and cake-like, and not so much chewy. These, while they did puff up a bit, actually did have some chewiness to them. I took them to work and asked my coworkers for feedback. Comments ranged from the simple “Awesome!” to “They’re really moist and chewy” to “These are bake-sale-worthy.”

I think the tapioca flour helps with the chewiness. After all, it can be used to make the fantastic Pao de Queijo — the gummy cheesy little rolls served at Brazilian steakhouses.

This makes a smallish batch — the chocolate chip cookie recipe on the side of the Toll House bag requires two sticks of butter, so I’d call this a half-batch, easily doubled.