(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.

Nut-Free Black Walnut Brownies

I know someone who tries to avoid eating nuts because of digestive issues.  While any brownie recipe can be made with or without nuts, brownies without black walnuts are a disappointment.  However, I have found what seems to be a reasonable workaround.

I saw some black walnut oil at Wal-Mart on a shopping trip last spring and decided to get it to see how it tasted.  The label hinted at flavor--some oils are very subtle, with olive oil being the most obvious exception.  It was also fairly pricey.

I put them into this recipe, adapted from tasteofhome.com:

2 1/2 sticks of butter (1 1/4 c), softened but not melted [note this is slightly reduced]

2 2/3 cups sugar

4 eggs

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

2 cups white flour

1 cup cocoa powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

...and I normally add a cup of nuts.  I substituted 3/4 cup black walnut oil and 1 stick of butter for the fat instead of all butter.  And, since I'm an inveterate whole grain lover, I used 1 cup of whole wheat flour and 1 cup of white flour.  I used dark chocolate cocoa powder and Whey Low as the sweetener. The result needs baking longer than the 30 minutes advertised on the site--especially since, I have recently learned, my oven runs about 10 degrees cool (I suppose I should just up the temperature I bake everything at, but I've grown accustomed to it).

The result (apologies for the bad picture below) was more cakey than fudgy, but there was a noticeable black walnut flavor.  Overall, it worked well.

Good Oven Spring with a Whole Wheat Loaf

As I have written before, I sometimes do 100% whole wheat flour loaves.  I usually add vital wheat gluten (VWG) to improve the rise of the dough.  As I have also mentioned, I get better results in the winter--the lower temps inside the house seem to help the dough ferment (though this year I've been finishing the dough rise in the oven with the light on.  I saw a tip online somewhere that doing so would increase the temperature a bit and it does).  Too much rise on the counter translates to less in the oven.

This loaf was baked just before Christmas:

As you can see, it's nicely-shaped and the loaf broke at the top, which 100% whole wheat loaves usually do not. The crumb is still fairly dense (ignore the uneven slicing):

 

Flavor-wise, this is normal red whole wheat bread.  It looks pretty much like the non-VWG loaf I discussed previously...so maybe this isn't so impressive, after all.

It can be done, however, even if I seldom achieve it.  This loaf took a lot of extra water--2 3/4 cups total, for 3 3/4 cups of flour and 1/2 cup of VWG.

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.

Stuffing

I apologize in advance; it looks like there are strange things going on with the fonts in this post again.  The Blogger tools may or may not be fixing the issues.

There is absolutely nothing special about this recipe.  In days of yore, my mother made stuffing, aka dressing, and shoved it into the turkey before putting the bird into the oven at Thanksgiving.  I've never done that, but a few years ago I decided to try to recreate the stuffing itself, to be baked in a casserole dish along with the turkey.

Since I make my own sourdough bread routinely, I just did a Google search for sourdough stuffing recipes, finding a few from which I created this composite (the original link or links are lost).

1 lb sourdough bread

8 tbsp butter (1 stick)

2-4 stalks celery cut in half lengthwise & sliced

1 medium onion, chopped

2 tsp dry sage

1 tsp dry thyme

3 tsp dry parsley

2 1/2 c chicken broth (this works out to one Cambell's can reconstituted, but there are a lot of non-condensed options, too)


One pound of bread is half a loaf.  I have used both my basic recipe, roughly 50/50 white and whole wheat flour, and all whole wheat.  Both work fine.  I slice the bread into cubes and put it in the oven on a cookie sheet at 350 for 20 minutes, after which time it's thoroughly dried.

The bread goes into a casserole (I use an old round Pyrex casserole dish, 2.5 liters--it has to be at least that large; 2 liters would not be big enough).

I then melt the butter in a saucepan, then add the other dry ingredients (chopped celery, onion, and spices).  The chicken broth either goes in a few minutes after that or it can be added at the same time.  I continue heating the mixture until it is hot, then pour it into the casserole dish into which I've put the bread, mix it a little, and then put it in the oven. 

If it's baking with a turkey, the oven will be at 325, so it stays in for 50 minutes (half covered, half open).  It can also be baked a little higher (350) for a little shorter time (maybe 40 minutes).

That's it.  It's very savory and the flavor does seem similar to what I remember.

Bumper Crop of Black Walnuts

Last year (2016) I got no black walnuts.  North Georgia had a severe drought in the late summer and early fall; although I had some nuts on the trees in July, by the end of August they had all aborted.

This year was different.  A lot of nuts were downed in early September by Irma.  As I mentioned in September, I went ahead and cracked some of them right away to see if they were okay and they were.  Lesson learned, however:  The nuts had not cured.  I left the container of nuts shown in the Irma post out at room temperature to see what would happen, and after a week or so the nut meats molded.

I didn't go back for the rest of the Irma walnuts because (as noted previously) it was a total pain trying to remove the husks.  It probably took 30-60 seconds of hammering to get them off each nut.

The remainder of the crop started to drop in October.  In all, I probably got about 20 gallons' worth off of my two trees, and I left many more on the ground unharvested.  I just couldn't get to them all in time.

It takes me about an hour to process five gallons.  I have gotten better at it, but it's still labor intensive.  First I knocked off the hulls with a hammer. The fully ripe ones were much easier to de-husk.  I had some husk fly larvae but not many; perhaps last year's failed crop cut down on the population some. Then I swirled them in water in a bucket, using both the water stream out of the faucet and the nuts themselves to remove remaining husk.  I did about three or four rinses, ending up with what you see here.  That's about clean enough, though I have seen cleaner shells.  People pressure wash them or do many more rinsing cycles to get them cleaner.  They don't have to be works of art.

I haven't cracked these yet--that's actually the most labor-intensive step in processing--but they are ready to go.  They'll be good in the shell for a year or two.

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.