Lower-Carb Blueberry Pie

 I've posted before about using almond flour for pie crust to lower the carb content of a pie.  I haven't done this for fruit pies previously, mostly because fruit pies typically have some sort of top crust.  I decided to give it a try with a topless blueberry pie.

I used my go-to recipe for the almond flour pie crust:

1 1/2 c almond flour

2 tbsp Whey Low D

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 c almond oil (or butter, or coconut oil)

I mixed this up and pressed it into the pie plate:

The filling ingredients I got from a recipe online somewhere, but don't have the link:

1 1/4 c Whey Low D (as a lower-carb replacement for sugar)

1/3 c clear jel (as a low-carb replacement for flour)

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp cinnamon

5 c blueberries

The powdered ingredients are substantial:

 

In the shell, ready to go in the oven:

 

 As usually seems to happen, the crust got a little over-done, at least in appearance (after about 40 minutes at 425).

I don't have any pictures of what happened when it was cut open, but I have not had much success in getting blueberry pie filling to  hold together.  It tends to fall apart when cut, and that held true this time, as well.  Still, it was no worse than normal.  This was my first attempt with clear jel, and I thought that might be the solution (as well as lowering the carb count).  However, it didn't work out as hoped.  The crust's flavor was fine, even though it was dark.

The blueberries themselves have a lot of carbs, of course (about 18 net grams per cup, accoring to Fat Secret).  Assuming the Whey Low D has about 20% of the carb hit of regular sugar (see discussion here), the carb load for the entire pie would be about 300 grams, or 38 grams per slice.  That isn't exactly great; it's a pretty solid hit for someone who has carb issues.  However, it compares very favorably to a pie made with wheat flour and sugar, which would be around 150 grams per slice (increasing to about 168 grams if a top crust is added).  Relatively speaking, it's not bad--though a nut-based pie would be much lower.

It's something potentially useful to keep as an option for lower-carb baking.

(Relatively) Low-Carb Apple Crisp

I make a variety of (more or less) crustless pies that are generically referred to as crisps.  The original recipe was peach, which I have since adapted to rhubarb and apple.  When using pre-canned apple pie filling, the recipe is:

1 cup rolled oats
1 cup flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 stick of butter
1 quart apple pie filling

Put filling in a 9" x 13" greased dish, then mix the dry ingredients and spread on top.  Cut the butter thinly and place on top.  Bake at 350 for about 35 minutes.

I adapted this to:

1/2 cup rolled oats
1 1/2 cups almond flour
1/2 cup brown Whey Low

...the other ingredients were the same.  After about 32 minutes in the oven, this is what it looked like:

Its appearance is not bad. The subtle grid pattern is from the pats of butter that were on top of the almond flour and oat mix.  Here's a side view.

This ended up being very sweet; overall it had extra sweetener because the pie filling already had some in it.  Taste- and texture-wise, it was completely fine.  For some applications almond flour works very well as a substitute for wheat flour.

Cranberry Sauce, 2017

I usually make a canner load of cranberry sauce sometime before Thanksgiving, when berries are usually widely available in stores.  This year I missed that window, but found some at Costco in mid-December.  I brought home ten pounds; my normal batch is about 8-9 pounds of cranberries that make about 8-9 quarts of finished sauce.

As usual, there were a lot of bad berries.  I have gotten better (I think) at picking through them; this time I spent about 10 minutes per 2-pound bag sorting out the culls.

The bags were actually somewhat over-filled; although I pulled out almost 1.5 pounds, I ended up with about 9 pounds total--enough that they didn't fit in the pot initially (the picture below shows about eight pounds' worth when they were first added).  The berries rapidly compress as they start to rupture with the heat (my normal mix is 10 2/3 cups each of water and Whey Low, plus the berries; the berries pop when the water gets hot enough).  I added the remaining berries as the mixture cooked down a bit.

Here's something I forgot from previous sessions:  cranberries compress not only when first heating but after canning.  I had a note in my recipe book to leave 1/4"-1/2" headspace but observed that the sauce compresses as it cools. The Ball Blue Book recommends 1/4".  I ended up leaving about 1/2" in most of the jars, which led to this:

As you can see, they collapsed a lot.  The large ridge around the neck is about at the 1/2" mark, and the contents receded well below that.  They'll still be fine, and all the jars sealed with no problem, but they look like some of the contents leaked out during processing--which has happened, but did not happen this time.  I've never had issues with any jam-type products doing that, only ones with a lot of water in the jars (e.g., pickled things).

I go through about nine quarts per year, so one canner load is about right.  They keep for a few years; I have opened jars up to three years old that were completely fine.  As I noted previously, I used to buy bags and stash them in the freezer, to make sauce on demand whenever I wanted it--as it turned out, that usually did not work well and I ended up tossing them eventually.  Canning works much better to preserve them.

This sauce ends up being relatively low-carb compared to an alternative sweetened with sugar.  According to the Fat Secret website, raw berries have about 3.46 grams of carbs per ounce, but 1.3 grams of that is fiber--net 2.16 grams.  That means there are about 35 grams of carbs per jar from the berries (one pound), plus the carbs from the Whey Low.  For 10 2/3 cups divided by 9 quarts, the amount of Whey Low per jar is about 1 1/6 cups per jar.  That much sugar would be about 235 grams of carbs.  If Whey Low clocks in at 20% - 40% of that, it will reduce the overall carb impact of the sauce--when consumed in moderation.

Low-Carb Pecan Pie

This recipe is not any different from the low-carb black walnut pie I described a couple of months ago with two exceptions: most obviously, the nuts were pecans, and secondly, I made the crust with about 75% whole grain rye flour.

Although the amount of sweetener was the same, it tasted sweeter, probably because of the influence of the pecans versus black walnuts.  Pecans do seem to be somewhat sweet.

3/4 cup brown sugar Whey Low (aka Whey Low Gold)
1/2 cup Whey Low Type D
1/4 cup butter (4 tbsp)
3 eggs
1 tbsp vanilla
1 cup nuts
1/8 tsp salt

I baked it at 350 for 40 minutes, similar to the black walnut pie.  The crust fell apart above the pie filling when each slice was removed from the pie pan, but it held together reasonably well elsewhere.  The rye flavor was fine.

It's another potential dessert to add into the mix with someone who's diabetic.

Low-Carb Black Walnut Pie

Although I have mentioned black walnuts before (more than once), I'm not sure I've ever commented on the flavor.  It's good and quite unlike English walnuts, which are more commonly available commercially.  Black walnuts are strong and it's probably accurate to call it an acquired taste.  My first exposure wasn't very positive, but I have grown to like them a lot.

Black walnut pie is a great way to eat them, and I have a few other recipes that use black wanuts, too.  The basic recipe is something like this:

1 cup sugar (white, brown, or a mix)
1 cup corn syrup or sorghum
1 tsp vanilla
3 eggs, beaten
2 tbsp butter, melted
1 c nuts (all black or can mix 50/50 black/English)
1/8 tsp salt

Mix, pour into a pie shell, bake 10 minutes at 400, then at 350 for another 40 minutes.

That's pretty high in carbs, mostly because of the sweeteners.  Here's an alternate (I developed it for someone who's diabetic):

3/4 cup brown sugar Whey Low (aka Whey Low Gold)
1/2 cup Whey Low Type D
1/4 cup butter (4 tbsp)
3 eggs
1 tbsp vanilla
1 cup nuts
1/8 tsp salt

Bake at 350 for 30-40 minutes.

For the shell (rolled or swaged):

1 cup whole wheat flour (could also use rye)
1/4 cup oil, butter, or lard
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup water (if rolling crust out; otherwise not needed)

I don't know what the carb content per slice is.  For the crust, the total net carbs are 76 grams (72 grams with rye); this is less than 10 grams per slice. The black walnuts have about 4 net grams of carbs per cup.  The Whey Low adds some carbs.  The carb impact is substantially lower than with sugar. The Type D is somewhat lower than the regular granulated Whey Low according to this analysis on the Whey Low site.  One cup of sugar has about 200 grams of carbs; 1.25 cups would have 250 grams--meaning the per-slice carbs from the sugar would be 31.25 grams (if sugar was used).  If the Whey Low impact is overall 18% of that, it would be pretty low per slice.

As noted previously, 100% whole wheat does not hold together well when rolling out a crust.  One solution is to add some white flour, but that a little to the carb content (88 grams per cup for white versus 76 for whole wheat).  Another approach is to swage the crust.  Swaging is probably not the best term, but basically it's just a process of dumping the flour mixed with the fat and other ingredients into the plate as clumpy powder, then forming it to the bottom and sides.  Maybe cold sintering would be a better term.  At any rate, it works, albeit at the cost of making a fairly friable and fragile crust.

So that's what I did.  I used sunflower oil and mixed it well, then formed the crust to the plate.  After that, I mixed the filling ingredients, adding the nuts last, and dumped them into the pie shell.

While this does not make for an award winning crust, it works decently well.  I put the pie in the oven and the result looked pretty typical for a black walnut pie, albeit somewhat compressed (the volume of sweeteners was somewhat lower than normal, so as it cooled it compressed a bit--still, it was decent and didn't look at all bad--the picture below is fresh out of the oven).

 

The flavor was fine.  Since I didn't bake a more-traditional pie at the same time, I couldn't do a side-by-side comparison but it was very tasty and not recognizably different.  My friend's blood glucose readings after eating a slice were comparable to what he sees otherwise, meaning it didn't cause a spike.

Nut pies have better low-carb potential because the main ingredient of the filling is essentially carb-free, unlike fruit pies.  It may be worth investigating if \dessert options that have a lower carb load are desirable.

Apple Pie from Pre-Made Filling

Earlier I mentioned canning apple pie filling.  The payoff comes at times like Memorial Day weekend:  a friend was having a cookout and I volunteered to take a pie.  I have blueberries and peaches in the freezer from my own harvest last summer, but decided to use up some of the canned filling I put up a couple of years ago.  It's very easy.  I previously wrote about using the same canned filling with whole wheat pie crust, but in this case I used store-bought white flour crusts.  All I did was lard up a pie plate, dump the filling into the bottom crust, do a bad job of joining/crimping the top crust onto the bottom, and bake at about 375 for 50 minutes.


I normally do lattice-top pies, but for some reason a solid crust seems more appropriate for apple.  Assuming one has a crust that can handle being cut into strips, the lattice top is actually easier in the crimping department.  I also have a pie bird that I have never actually used in a pie; instead I cut slits--which work well.

By the way, for a pie made from raw apples, the solid crust can be problematic: the apples will cook down a lot and lose volume as they bake, leaving air spaces under the crust.  Since the pie filling is pre-cooked, that problem is more or less eliminated.

The results are decent.  I think the pie the filling makes is pretty basic, although good, but I've uniformly gotten rave reviews whenever I've taken one somewhere.  Fast and easy (setting aside the pre-work of putting up the filling) is a good combination.

Cranberry Sauce, 2016

I just did the annual canner run of cranberry sauce.  I followed the same general procedures described last year, but this year started with more berries. I missed out on the three-pound bags at one warehouse club--they were only there one weekend and my refrigerator was full of other things--but another club had two-pound bags.  I got five.

As I have done previously, I started by culling bad berries. There are always some that have a few soft spots, and some are profoundly bad.  It takes a bit of time and I'm sure I miss some even with the sorting; nonetheless, it improves the finished product.  FWIW, making cranberry sauce on your own rather than buying what's available already canned makes sense for this reason alone: some of the bad berries may be removed at canneries by quality control procedures, but some probably make it into the finished product.

I spent close to an hour picking through the berries, and at the end I removed 21 ounces' worth.  Last year I noted that I had an 18% fail rate; this year was better--only 13%.

That left me with a lot of berries, and I knew I'd have more than one canner load (eight quarts) of sauce.  I upped the water and Whey Low by 12%, using 12 cups of each. 

Given the increased quantity, I used my big stock pot, which has a capacity of 20 quarts. It fit everything with ease.   After picking through the berries, the only other thing I do to them before pouring into the pot is rinse them in a colander.

I let the syrup boil before dumping them in; some rupture immediately but some take a while.  Probably 15 minutes elapsed between pouring the berries into the pot and having a finished product ready to ladle into jars.  I got about ten quarts.  The last quart jar was only about 80% full, so I didn't process it--I just stuck it into the refrigerator.  It's mostly syrup, anyway.  As the picture below shows, I still have trouble balancing berries and syrup in the jars. I don't worry about it--they all end up being edible.

Out of curiosity, I checked the pH.  It looks to me like it's about 3.0, maybe 3.0-3.5.  Everything's looking good.

Apple Pie Filling

This is a straightforward application of the recipe at the NCHFP:  Apple Pie Filling.  I mix up the seven quarts recipe.  Apple cider or juice are both fine, and I used Whey Low instead of regular sugar (although the company says it can be used as a sugar substitute, there's no research on it as far as I know--however, I made a very heavy Whey Low syrup sample and tested its pH; it was comparable to what I get with straight tap water as discussed recently...so it seems to be fairly neutral as is sugar).

The fist step in making apple pie filling is to peel and chop the apples.  I could do it the same way I did the pears, which was pretty slow, but I used my apple corer/peeler/slicer.  Models are sold by various vendors; essentially it's something that is cranked and it quickly slices, peels, and cores an apple.  I then cut the rings into quarters for pie filling.  After that, I dunked them into a bowl with some ascorbic acid to reduce browning.

As can be seen (though not well) in the picture, there is still some peel attached to the top and bottom of the apple.  I snapped those bits off and ate them while I worked.  I suppose I could've manually removed them or just left them on, but I went for a somewhat-cleaner look (and ate the equivalent of one apple during the processing because of it).

The filling mix itself includes clear jell, which is corn starch with some level of special processing so that it will be well-behaved in recipes.  The clear jell thickens the mixture.  Initially, when mixing the sugar, clear jell, cinnamon, water and apple cider, it's very thin (I skipped the nutmeg).

As it starts to heat, the clear jell begins to clump together as shown below.  Eventually, it sets up and assumes a very thick consistency.  I stirred it almost constantly during this time.  When it starts to boil, it's like magma: large bubbles pop, flinging bits fairly high.  I got some on my arm and one finger, which caused minor burns.  A minute of that was enough.  I dumped in the 3/4 cup of lemon juice and quickly followed with the apple slices.

 The NCHFP recipe calls for blanching the apple slices, but that didn't seem necessary to me: after all, it will be subject to boiling during the canning process.  I have made this one time before, as briefly noted previously, and did not blanch that time, either: the finished product the first time around was good.

One caveat: the NCHFP calls for one inch of headspace, which is a lot, but it's necessary.  I tried to leave that but a couple of jars overflowed during the canning process nonetheless.

Using this stuff is pretty easy: dump a jar into a pie shell, put a top crust on, and bake.  It's something nice to do when you have a surplus of apples.

Cranberry Sauce

I made some sugar-free cranberry sauce today.  I've been doing it for a few years.  Originally, I didn't can it and only made it as needed, storing it in the refrigerator.  I also used aspartame as the sweetener, which worked in terms of sweetness, but changed the consistency.  At the end of the season, I'd buy bags of berries, put them in the freezer, then try to use them in ensuing months.

Whey Low works much better as a non-sugar sweetener.  And when I started canning it, my experience with cranberry sauce in the off season improved.  Warehouse clubs often get three-pound bags of berries, which is too much if you just want a side dish at Thanksgiving, but works out well if you're doing a canner load of sauce for use in the next year.

I use this recipe, adapted from the Ball Blue Book (BBB):

About 21 1/3 cups of cranberries
10 2/3 cups each of water and sugar (or Whey Low)

The berries have to be picked over carefully.  I always find a lot of bad ones.  They're often off-color and squishy; they may be translucent pink, or turning black.  If you don't get all (or most of them) out, the cranberry sauce will have an off-odor and flavor, somewhat reminiscent of PineSol.  Tonight I started off with nine pounds and culled out about 26 ounces, or 18%.  It took about an hour to do so.  I used the above amounts of water and sugar, but didn't measure out the berries.  From past experience, I know that nine pounds will net out to about 8-9 quarts.  Tonight I got about 8.5.  They can be canned in the boiling water bath canner.  I do them for 25 minutes.

 To make the sauce itself, I just boil the water and sugar, then add the berries.  They'll start to rupture immediately.  I stir them and eventually mash the few remaining stragglers against the side with the slotted spoon I use to stir.  Everything fits into a 16 qt. stock pot, though it is tight at first.  Until the berries break down, it will be nearly full.

You can see a couple of things in the picture.  One is that foaming becomes a problem as it continues to cook (and boil).  Another is that the berries (even once they burst) float at the top of the mixture, leaving a more syrupy consistency below.  I try to balance out what goes into each jar, but obviously miss the mark sometimes.  Still, it all works out and they're good.

The Whey Low does admittedly make this an expensive indulgence.  The three bags of berries cost about $14, and the amount of Whey Low (a little over four pounds) costs probably $30 or so (without any discounts, which are easy to get if you're willing to go on their e-mail list).  I could use sugar, which would cut the price dramatically. For preserves I use sugar; Whey Low would be prohibitive.  But for cranberry sauce, I figure it's worth it to lighten the load calorically.