Pastuccia (Italian polenta pie)

The nature of my research means I end up studying a lot of cookbooks from a purely academic perspective - I read far more recipes than I could ever possibly cook, and the ones I do select to prepare are carefully chosen for their research value. But occasionally a book I initially intended to use merely for investigative purposes ends up going above and beyond its usefulness as an academic reference and earns a spot as a treasured resource in my kitchen as well. (This means I have to get my own copy to keep, so I can quit monopolizing the library’s one!) 

La Cucina (originally published in Italian as La Cucina del Bel Paese), if you’re not familiar with it, is essentially a giant community cookbook comprising the entirety of Italy. It represents the culmination of 50 years of research by the Accademia italiana della cucina, started in 1953 to record and preserve Italy’s regional culinary heritage. A fantastic project! But because the recipes were collected from regular people rather than developed by a test kitchen, some of the instructions are a little sparse - and because it’s been translated and adapted for an English-speaking audience, some words also become less specific. In the recipe I wanted to make, it wasn’t clear to me what type of sausage should be used, or even how thickly or thinly the dough should be spread, so I turned to the internet hoping to find some clarification.

Well, after comparing the variety of recipes available online, it appears that this dish - like pretty much everything that is baked in a casserole, come to think of it! - is the kind of food where you use what you’ve got. So what makes it a pastuccia? The common defining elements seem to be cornmeal, pork (usually a combination of sausage and pancetta), almost always egg yolks in the dough, and usually some raisins too. The proportions, procedure, and other specifics are open to much freedom of interpretation. To answer my initial question, it turns out some recipes use fresh sausage, some use dry, and many use something in between. What’s more, some versions are essentially a giant savory corn-cake, mixed with cold water to form a crackled, crumbly dough; others are rich casseroles which require first cooking a soft polenta. Oh, and the additions may be mixed into the dough or distributed mostly on the bottom and top. Most versions go in the oven, but a few apparently are cooked entirely on the stove. And so on...As I said, it’s pretty flexible.

In the spirit of this variability, writing it out as a recipe seems a bit stuffy - instead, I’m just going to tell you what I did. You can do the same, or you can change things depending on your tastes and what you have available. 

How I made the pastuccia:

(These measurements are for a small pastuccia - most recipes use at least double the amounts I’ve given here, so scale it as you see fit. It was so delicious, I wish I’d made a larger one!)

First, I took about ¼ lb of raw local pork sausage and browned it in a cast-iron skillet, then added 70 grams of minced semi-dry andouille sausage (I didn’t have any pancetta/guanciale, so I improvised - I know it’s very different, but it worked anyway!) and cooked it until the bits were nice and crispy. Meanwhile, I put about a cup (140 g) of cornmeal in a bowl along with a pinch of salt - this was mostly Arrowhead Mills’ organic cornmeal, but I also used a little of Anson Mills’ heirloom Italian polenta integrale for the flavor - and stirred in 120 g (½ cup) very hot water to form a stiff dough. Next, I mixed in 40 g (¼ cup) of golden raisins (I had previously soaked these in water for a few minutes to plump them up), followed by one raw egg yolk, which made the dough quite soft and sticky. 

At this point I removed about half of the sausage mixture from the cast iron pan, pressed the dough into the hot pan with the remaining sausage and cooked it a moment to brown the bottom, then scattered the reserved sausage mixture over the top of the dough. Then I put the whole thing into the oven (preheated to 200º C/395º F) and baked it until it was golden and cooked through - this took about half an hour I think, or maybe a little less. 

Cut it into wedges to serve as part of a main course or as an appetizer. These types of cornmeal cakes are traditionally frequently paired with cooked green vegetables. Leftovers (if you have any!) can be reheated in the oven or enjoyed cold.

P.S. Don't forget, the Raleigh GFAF Event is in one week! See here for the details, and go to this post to win free tickets!

Raleigh GFAF Event Announcement!

It’s that time again! Yes, the Raleigh, NC GFAF event is coming up on August 13th - that’s just 2 weeks away - and I have tickets to give away! You’ll get to meet local food producers, sample all sorts of GF foods, learn about navigating life with food intolerances safely and happily, and meet other people in NC and beyond who live with celiac disease and other dietary restrictions. 

To show you an example of the kinds of things you’ll get to try at the event, I finally got around to making this Double Chocolate Chip Cookie mix, which I got from Caly’s Kitchen at the Charlotte event this spring. (And then I decided to make the cookies into ice cream sandwiches. It was a good decision.) Leave a comment if you want to enter to win free tickets - hope to see you there!

The Gluten-Free History Project

May is Celiac Awareness Month, so this seemed like the perfect time to officially introduce a project I'm organizing: The Gluten-Free History Project! 

I am aiming to document the food traditions of individuals and families with celiac disease and gluten intolerance. The ultimate purpose of this project is to establish a cultural history and unite people for whom gluten-free is a necessary way of life. 

You may already know about my ongoing obsession with traditionally-GF recipes - I've been cataloging the many uses of our flours from all around the world. For a while now, I have also been researching the history of cooking and baking with food sensitivities - I even have a (small but growing) collection of vintage gluten-free and food allergy cookbooks! 

Part of Gluten-Free History...three of the earliest GF books I've found!

But cookbooks and journal articles only tell a part of the story...so that's where YOU come in! I am looking for people to contribute experiences and information, and/or are willing to answer some informal interview questions, regarding things like:

• Adaptation of established family/cultural food traditions and creation of new ones
• The evolution over the past several decades of GF cookbooks/recipe resources and how people use them
• The availability of GF supplies/products across time, particularly flours & other scratch ingredients
• Community and culture surrounding GF food online and in person, including the role of blogs, forums, restaurants/bakeries, and support groups

I have a list of informal interview-type questions I will be posting soon, and you are also welcome to contribute information apart from these questions. I’d love to hear from anyone who would like to share some of their experiences with living gluten-free! 

The project is ongoing - I am just announcing it this month because it coincides so well with the topic of Celiac Awareness. All new information and updates related to the project will also be collected on this page.

If you or someone you know would like to contribute to the project, or if you have any questions about it, please contact me!

Of crusts and crumbs

I first developed this crust when I wanted to try this pie filling, which originally calls for a saltine-cracker crumb crust. Mine doesn’t taste like saltines, of course, but it works great anyway - it’s exactly the right amount of crumbliness and has the right salty-sweet flavor to complement the tart, rich lemon filling. I took the above pie to a gathering of non-GF people and it disappeared pretty fast! Proof that despite being different than the original, this crust does exactly what it’s supposed to. I’ve since used the same crust successfully in layer bar cookies that normally use a graham cracker crust, and most recently in this lighter lemon-lime pie I’m sharing with you now.

But, you may be wondering, why not just use GF crumbs? Well:

First, let’s take a look at why crumb crusts are used in the context of wheat based baking. For one thing, crumbs provide an alternative to both the tougher flaky pie crust or the denser, more solid shortcrust pastry made of wheat flour. The latter types require some liquid to mobilize and develop a little gluten and allow some starch to gelatinize during baking (among other reasons), whereas crumb crusts are made with cookies or crackers that have already taken care of that step, and so can be made with just fat and sugar.

The second thing to consider, though, is far more utilitarian: graham crackers/cookies/etc are convenient - they’re cheap and something most people would already have on hand. When adapting to gluten free, then, this convenience ingredient starts to look less and less convenient! It’s both expensive and time consuming to hunt down GF graham crackers - or worse, make them from scratch - just to turn around and pulverize them into crumbs.

So, when neither of the two main reasons crumbs are used in this recipe apply to GF ingredients...it suddenly makes sense to look for another approach! Because we have such a diverse array of GF ingredients available, it’s possible to make a crust with similar texture and flavor from scratch, in one step, no crumbs needed. I find this approach more elegant and far simpler, on top of being delicious. This particular recipe is just one way to do this, but I like it a lot.

This is a nice uncomplicated formula - just rolled oats (half ground into flour), coconut flour, brown sugar, salt, and melted butter (or equivalent). A crumb crust doesn’t need to hold together on its own beyond the most basic level: there’s no dough to roll out, and after baking it’s attached to a stiff, sliceable filling/topping such as cheesecake or key lime pie - the filling supports itself. As a result, this recipe doesn’t need any added binder - the slight binding ability of the oat flour is enough. Coconut flour is unusual amongst flours, as it’s made from the fibrous pulp that is left after fresh coconut has been pressed for oil or grated for milk. As a result, it’s much better at absorbing both moisture and oil than nut meal, almost like a starchy flour in that regard, yet its texture and properties are unlike any other flour. A crust made with starchy flour would be more of a shortbread texture, while coconut flour instead contributes a pleasant crumbliness and unique mouthfeel along with a nice toasty taste (surprisingly enough, the flavor is not particularly coconut-y).

Press and bake the crust...

Lemon-Lime Pie

Crust:

120 g (heaping cup) rolled oats, divided (see note below)

45 g coconut flour

36 g (3 T) brown sugar

½ tsp salt (or less, to taste)

65 g butter, melted (see note below)

Put half of the oats into a food processor or blender and grind into flour. Combine remaining oat flakes, oat flour, coconut flour, sugar, and salt in a bowl. Stir in melted butter - mixture will still seem dry and floury, but will cling together a bit. Press the mixture evenly into a 9” round glass pie plate, making sure to come up the sides to contain the filling. Put the plate in the fridge to chill about 15 minutes, then bake 15 minutes at 350º F and let cool.

Meanwhile, make the filling:

250 g coconut milk (the kind in a can, not the thin drink)

150 g sugar

2 eggs, separated

60 g (¼ c) lemon juice

60 g (¼ c) lime juice

15 g arrowroot starch

...and it will hold together nicely once the filling has set.

Put the egg whites in the bowl of a mixer fitted with paddle attachment. Put egg yolks in a small dish. Combine coconut milk, sugar, and starch in a small saucepan over low heat, stirring frequently with a silicone spatula, until smooth - it will start to feel slick/slippery when you run the spatula along the bottom of the pan. Carefully whisk some of the warm liquid into the egg yolks, then add that mixture back to the pan (this prevents the yolks from curdling) and continue stirring over low heat until it thickens to the consistency of a thin custard. Remove from heat. Gradually stir in the lemon and lime juice, then turn the mixer on at low speed and with mixer running, slowly pour the whole mixture into the egg whites and mix until smooth.

Pour the filling into the cooled pie crust (it’s OK if it’s not totally cold) and bake the pie until filling is no longer liquidy, about 25-30 minutes.

Chill pie in fridge several hours before cutting. Serve with coconut cream or whipped cream, if desired.

Recipe notes:

1. I personally like the textural contrast of the oat flakes, but if you don’t want such obvious bits in your crust, you could replace the rolled oat flakes with instant oats, or possibly even just grind them all into oat flour. I haven’t tried an oat-free variation yet - if you do, please let me know how it turns out!
2. I imagine coconut oil would probably work just fine instead of butter. That said, keep in mind the fact that butter contains a little water (around 14%), while coconut oil is pure fat. I’m not sure whether that little bit makes a difference in this particular recipe, but to be on the safe side, if using coconut oil you might want to sprinkle in about a teaspoon of water. Any dairy-free butter equivalent should work as written.

Charlotte GFAF Event

The Charlotte GFAF Event was this past Saturday. Events like this one are a great opportunity to try new GF foods from both local bakeries/restaurants and big-name companies alike, to hear helpful info from bloggers, authors, and medical professionals, and also to meet other people who are living with food sensitivities. If you were there, you already know it was a lot of fun; if not, I'm here to share a few of the highlights! 

My favorite new find was these potato & veggie fries (center picture above). The inside is light like fluffy mashed potatoes, the outside has the crispness of a lightly floured/battered fry, and all four flavors are pleasantly savory. I think I like the chickpea & red pepper ones best of all, but all four are tasty. 

Caly's Kitchen (top right picture), a local NC-based bakery, offers baking mixes, granola, and - if you're in the Waxhaw, NC area - some very tasty cookies and other treats. They use pea starch rather than potato or corn, and they are also the only source I know of for home bakers to buy pea starch in small quantities - it's a useful ingredient.

Nourish is an entirely GF & vegan delivery food service in Charlotte. They were sampling butternut macaroni (right center picture) and a tasty pimiento spread with hearty seed crackers (bottom left picture), among other things. They deliver weekly in the Charlotte area, and they also ship throughout NC.

Aleia's almond horns (top left picture) are a traditionally-GF style of cookie, as these are made with almond paste instead of flour, similar to some types of amaretti, almond rings, etc. They also have several more kinds of cookies and other things.

Pure Pizza in Charlotte offers a sprouted-grain GF crust (left center picture). It's not leavened/fermented, but the sprouted ingredients give it a very pleasant soft flatbread texture. 

Fields of Gold Farm was sampling goat milk gelato (bottom right picture). I tried the pistachio macaron flavor - it was delicious and rich. They also sell goat-milk soaps. 

Lenny Boy Brewing was there with some kombucha, a fizzy fermented non-alcoholic tea beverage brewed with a complex community of bacteria and yeasts. It's kind of polarizing as to whether or not people care for the flavor of the drink, but I'm firmly on the "love it" side. I especially like their "Elite Beet" flavor, which is gingery, earthy, and a little bit sweet. 

A couple of cider companies were there with drier (as in less-sweet) cider varieties, which I like a lot. Bold Rock is a Virginia-based cidery that just recently expanded into NC. They were sampling a green apple variety and a lovely new dry-hopped cider (cleverly called IPA, for "India Pressed Apple"). Hopped ciders are sometimes way too sweet, way too bitter, or both, but this one was just right - light, aromatic, and refreshing. I will definitely be looking for this at the store. Red Clay Ciderworks brought a classic dry cider and a tart cherry cider. They also make a herbal hopped cider which I'd like to try. Red Clay is just in the western part of the state for now. I hope they will make it up to the Triangle before too long, but if you're in Charlotte, stop by their taproom! 

New Udi's bread & Glutino toaster pastries.

There was more than just food and drink too - I found some really nice lotion (sadly I forgot to take a picture, and can't remember the brand!) and other skincare products. (FYI, skin products frequently contain wheat derived ingredients and/or conventional oats - not good to be slathering on your hands if gluten makes you sick!) 

In between all the snacking, I also managed to catch some of the presentations from the other speakers - there was some great info on living with food sensitivities, including tips for meal planning, current issues with the FDA's GF labeling guidelines, and good nutrition with dietary restrictions. 

These are just a few of the highlights. You can see lots more about the day from other bloggers and attendees by searching tags on Twitter - look for Charlotte #GFAFEvent and #GFAF tags. To see if there are any upcoming GFAF events near you, check out the schedule here - I will be at the events in Raleigh in August and Greensboro in September, hope to see some of you there! There is also a separate GFAF Expo which will be in several bigger cities this year.  

As you may know if you've ever been to one of these events, there were plenty of freebies to take home, too. So many snacks and coupons! The Milton's products were new to me - the crackers taste a bit like pita chips, and the baked chips are a nice salty crunchy regular chip style.

And, last but certainly not least, the surprises in my Blogger Bag! There was a lovely gift box from Caly's Kitchen, including a chocolate cookie mix and a bag of their tasty granola. I like to mix it with some plain oats, seeds, etc. for muesli. Also a bottle of spiced elderberry syrup from Norm's Farms, a local company specializing in elderberry jam and other products. (I know it's totally not the intended purpose, but I'm seriously considering using it in cocktails! Or macarons. Or both.)

Caly's Kitchen granola, two ways: mixed into muesli, or straight up w/ fruit. 

As always, all these opinions and statements are completely my own; as an event blogger I received the items provided by vendors and sponsors, but I was not otherwise compensated and I was not obligated to write about or feature any specific product(s) or vendor(s). 

Irish Oat Soda Bread - A traditionally gluten-free recipe

When I first delved into GF baking over 8 years ago, the ingredient list required for most bread recipes was rather formidable for someone baking in a tiny dorm kitchen shared with several other people. A few months in, I was thrilled to discover an authentic traditional Irish 100%-oat soda bread that, being traditional, didn’t require any special starches or binders. It’s remained one of my standbys ever since. (I've mentioned it briefly once before, but I honestly don’t know why I’ve never shared the recipe here in all this time! Silly me…)

Sorry, oat-intolerant folks, but there’s not exactly a substitute for this one: the original recipe consists of oat flakes, steel-cut oats, and oat bran, with no other grains or flours. There’s really nothing quite like it - the texture is distinctly nubbly and it’s somehow simultaneously dense yet springy, with a delightfully chewy crust. I’ve tweaked it a little over the years, replacing some of the oat flakes with oat flour to bind it a little better, and letting the dough rest overnight in the fridge before baking to hydrate the oats more fully and develop flavor (original recipe bakes 30 minutes after mixing). More recently I’ve enjoyed using a little sourdough starter in place of part of the buttermilk. Here I’ve added a pinch of yeast instead to contribute some of that same depth of flavor, since I know most people don’t have GF sourdough starter on hand. I also like baking it in a dutch oven - it makes the crust chewier.

The original recipe also makes twice this amount - I made it smaller so the individual wedges would be more scone-sized. If you want to double it to make the full loaf, use an 8” round pan or skillet.

Irish Oaten Bread

{Adapted from a recipe in The Irish Baking Book by Ruth Isabel Ross (1995) - see above for the changes I’ve made.}

Makes 6 scone-sized wedges

100 g steel-cut oats

75 g oat bran

40 g rolled oats

20 g oat flour [or you may use more rolled oats instead]

3 g (½ tsp) salt
1/2 tsp brown sugar

3 g (about ½ tsp) baking powder - I recommend Bob’s Red Mill

3 g (about ½ tsp) baking soda

300 g (about 1 ¼ cup) buttermilk -OR- 240 g kefir/yogurt plus 60 g water

Pinch of dry yeast (optional)

Combine all dry ingredients, including yeast if using. Mix in the wet ingredients until well combined and transfer to a buttered 6” round cake pan. Cover and refrigerate overnight. Next day, take the pan out of the fridge and preheat the oven to 400º F/200º C, with a dutch oven or other lidded baking dish large enough to hold the cake pan. Using a stiff spatula or knife, score the loaf into 6 wedges.

Put the pan inside the hot dutch oven and cover it - immediately lower the oven temp to 350º F/175º C, and bake covered for 8-10 minutes. Remove lid and continue baking for a total of 35-45 minutes - the center should appear set and no longer moist, and the edges should be nicely browned. Let it cool in the pan a few minutes, then turn it out on a cutting board. Let cool before serving. Serve with good butter and/or jam, marmalade, or honey.

Notes:

Make sure all oats/oat products are marked GF! Conventional oats are frequently contaminated with small amounts of wheat, barley, or rye due to grain processing procedures. Arrowhead Mills and Bob’s Red Mill both sell GF steel-cut oats; BRM sells GF oat bran; GF rolled oats are available from many brands including BRM and Trader Joe’s. Oat flour can be ground from rolled oats in a food processor or blender.

Substitution spotlight: Traditional non-dairy milks in European baking and cooking

A traditional-style homemade seed milk.

Ah, good old-fashioned plant milks. No, that's not an oxymoron! It's often assumed that the idea of a milk substitute is a modern concept; sure, other things may fill the same culinary niche in cultures without a major tradition of dairy production, but it's not like people in previous centuries needed something to use for vegan cupcakes...right? Historically, if you couldn't have milk for whatever reason, you'd just leave it out...right?? Not necessarily! Milk is highly perishable, and it's easy to forget that until relatively recently, it was also a seasonal food. Add this to the many days with dietary restrictions imposed by the Catholic church interspersed throughout the calendar, and the existence of non-dairy milk becomes quite logical. Their use was by no means restricted to times when dairy was unavailable. From this we can see that people found them useful and enjoyable, and even practical. In some cases, they were indeed used as a milk substitute in the modern definition (though not necessarily for the same reasons) and treated as interchangeable with dairy; in other dishes, they were simply part of the recipe.

Almond milk, in particular, has a long and rich history, having originated during the middle ages in the Arabic-speaking world and becoming popular as a dairy substitute in Europe a couple of centuries later. The first English-language mention of almond milk I’m aware of was in 1390, though because it's called for as an ingredient in a larger recipe, I'm guessing it was already well-established by that time. Other nut and seed milks can also be traced back to this era; where almonds were prohibitively expensive or unavailable, milks made from regional ingredients like poppyseeds, hazelnuts, and hempseeds are also well-documented!

Milk was not even the only way people found to use nuts and seeds like dairy - recipes also detail the preparation of almonds in ways which resembled cream, butter, and even a sort of acid-curdled cheese! This is where I should point out: all these preparations bear little resemblance to modern processed, emulsified, stabilized milk substitutes, and the cheese certainly would not melt like some of the new products do (it is more like a crumbly or spreadable fresh cheese). Rest assured, though - from a food science perspective, these traditional nut and seed milks are actually much cooler! Thanks to the unique properties of their proteins, fats, etc., you can do things with them that simply can’t be done with the commercial stuff (the packaged kind is very watered-down, and on top of that, the stabilizers and other additives get in the way). (By the way, this applies to soy milk, too, which is about as old as almond milk and just as traditional, but I have not included it in this discussion as it was not considered as a deliberate dairy substitute until just a few decades ago. The same goes for coconut milk.) The real, homemade varieties of all these plant milks not only make for much better milk substitutes than the store-bought kinds, they also can do some things that dairy milk can’t! Coming up, I will show you some neat ways to use these qualities in baking and cooking.

Speaking of substitutions, I will be giving a presentation at the upcoming Charlotte, NC GFAF Event entitled "Recipe Remodeling: The Art and Science of Ingredient Substitution," in which I will explain how to keep the spirit of your traditional recipes even when you need to change key ingredients! The event is on Saturday, April 2nd - location and directions can be found here. I also have some tickets to give away!! If you’d like to win a ticket to the Charlotte GFAF Event, leave a comment telling me what kind of traditional dairy substitutes you want to see featured in a future recipe!