Category: Food

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Barley biscuits

One of my kitchen projects at present is figuring out whether it would be possible to entirely replace wheat carbs with barley carbs without hating what we eat. We all know that wheat carbs, though addictively delicious, are not the healthiest carbs in the world. Whereas barley carbs have lots of health benefits. I will probably conclude that replacing wheat carbs with barley carbs would not greatly diminish the tastiness of our baking.

When baking with barley flour, the main challenges are yeast (or sourdough) breads, and biscuits. Heavier things such as muffins or banana bread would be dead easy. Pie crusts I haven’t yet tried.

Barley flour has much less gluten than wheat flour, and therein is the challenge. I cannot make good barley biscuits without using about one-fifth wheat gluten. Yeast breads require a higher proportion of gluten — one-fourth or a little more. When making yeast breads, you want a dough that feels as springy as wheat dough when you knead it. That requires gluten.

I’ve written about this before, but I am not a soldier in the anti-gluten wars. My system loves wheat gluten. It’s the wheat carbs that make us gain weight. Wheat gluten is 75 percent protein. Adding wheat gluten to barley flour improves the carb-to-protein ratio of the bread, in addition to greatly improving the quality of the carbs.

For biscuits, with four parts barley flour to one part gluten, most biscuits recipes probably would work with little modification. For yeast breads, three parts barley flour to one part gluten should work. But I would recommend these barley-bread experiments only to cooks who have the experience to know how a proper dough should feel and can adjust things as necessary.

You can buy barley flour at most grocery stores in one-pound bags. I prefer to grind my own, using organic hulled barley, bought in bulk at Whole Foods. Store-bought barley flour has a slightly lighter color than my home-ground flour, so I wonder if the store-bought flour is more refined than I would like.

Barley flour, as a thickener for gravy, seems to thicken a gravy pretty the same as whole wheat flour would. The gravy will have a slightly grainy texture, but it’s delicious. Because it’s the starch in flour that thickens a sauce, you don’t want to add gluten to the flour that you use for making gravy.

I would rate barley gravy at 3 stars out of 5. I’d rate barley biscuits at 4 stars out of 5. Barley biscuits are vastly better than whole-wheat biscuits, something I gave up on trying to make a long time ago. Barley biscuits have a nice, nutty flavor that tastes great with a little honey and butter.

I’ll post in the future on yeast breads made with barley flour. I’m even going to try a pie crust.

Barley biscuits and barley gravy. The only fat that I ever use for making gravy is olive oil.

Organic hulled barley, bought in bulk at Whole Foods

My flour-grinding apparatus

Flour from whole-grain hulled barley, nice and fresh

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I haven’t been able to get lemon cake out of my head. I am working on the third novel in the Ursa Major series, and I just wrote the scenes in which Rose, the Scottish cook, sees Jake again. She wastes no time making one of Jake’s favorites — her lemon cake.

But it’s just me and the cat and the chickens right now, so what would I do with a huge cake involving six eggs and half a ton of butter and flour? I read a bunch of lemon cake recipes and came up with a recipe that uses only one egg, with the other ingredients similarly reduced. I wanted a dense cake, more of a pound cake. I wanted it to be very lemony, and I wanted nutmeg in it.

Here’s what I came up with:

1/2 stick butter
1/2 cup sugar

1 egg
1/2 cup flour
juice and gratings from 1 lemon
1/4 cup cream
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon turmeric (for color)

Follow the usual procedure for cakes. I used used a stand mixer. Cream the butter and sugar. Add the egg and beat the living daylights out of it. Add the other ingredients and beat just enough to mix it well.

I used the 4-inch spring-form pans that I bought for Scottish pies, in two layers. Bake the cake at 325 degrees until it passes the toothpick test. My pans and oven required about 29 minutes.

For the icing, I made a slurry of 1/4 cup of powdered sugar, the juice and gratings of one small lemon, and half a teaspoon of nutmeg. The icing was too runny and did not make a proper glaze, but I just didn’t want to add more sugar.

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Y’all knew this was coming, didn’t you?

What’s remarkable, though, is that the pumpkin I used for this pie was just over one year old. I was hoarding the last of the little pumpkins from the 2017 pumpkin crop, which was much smaller than the 2018 pumpkin crop, which is now stored under the stairs for the winter. But it wasn’t just hoarding. I also was experimenting, to find out whether the last of last year’s pumpkins was as well-preserved as it looked. It was. When I cut it in half before baking it, it looked as fresh inside as a new pumpkin. I have previously blogged about these amazing little heirloom pumpkins here.

The little pumpkin that finally met its end today in the kitchen is the little pumpkin that I used as a photo prop last winter. One of its portraits, shot in December 2017, is below.

It had a good life.

I gave its seeds to the chickens.

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Click here for high-resolution version.

Lots of things that come from the garden are magical, but First Prize for magic goes to the little pumpkins. This year’s crop is in, with a total haul of 90 pounds.

The friend who first gave me these seeds called it “the Kraken vine.” That’s because the vine is enormous and will keep growing until the first frost stops it. This year’s Kraken vine succumbed to the frost on Oct. 21. It’s best to leave all the little pumpkins on the vine until frost, then harvest them all at once. The crop started with only three hills, three seeds each. By harvest time, the vines were 35 feet long. The vines had jumped the garden fence in two places and were working their way across the yard.

Though I call them “little pumpkins,” if you buy the seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, they are called “Long Island Cheese Pumpkins.” I assume that’s because they resemble a wheel of cheese — and they’re just as heavy as a wheel of cheese. The 6.5-inch pumpkin in the photo below weighed 3.3 pounds. My pumpkins are smallish and rarely exceed 8 inches in diameter. Check out the rave reviews for these pumpkins at Baker Creek. The Baker Creek variety seems to be a slightly larger variety than my variety, which came from a friend. He acquired the seeds from a community seed bank.

Another remarkable thing about these pumpkins is that they will keep forever. I still have one left from last year’s crop! I plan to wash the new crop and store them under the stairs. They make an incredible winter food for storage.

This 6.5-inch pumpkin weighs 3.3 pounds.

The wheelbarrow was so heavy that I could hardly push it.

The Kraken vine, after it jumped the fence into the yard and headed for the house.

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Good kitchens roll with the seasons. When fall sets in, and the summer tomatoes and basil have been mourned, greens and sweet potatoes appear as compensation. Peppers will keep going until the first frost. Come winter, we’ll have nothing fresh other than what is shipped in. So sprouts are a winter thing, especially if you have a sunny kitchen window.

Sprouts are cheap, too. These days, Amazon has all the sprouting seeds and apparatus you need. Growing sprouts is no trouble. The only moderately pesky part of sprout farming is the final washing and rinsing away of the seed husks. You want not just salad sprouts, but also bean sprouts for Asian dishes.

I’m not turning into a food-only blog. It’s just that it’s also political season at the moment, and I have political duties almost every day, such as making sure that our county’s Democratic headquarters are open during the hours we’ve promised. Political responsibilities have cut into my time for doing and thinking about other things. After the election on Nov. 6, that will change.

There are other cycles in good kitchens — not just seasonal cycles. Just now I’m in a healthy-kitchen cycle. But there are times when a good kitchen turns out comfort food, calories be damned. I’ve been there, and you probably have been, too. After all, we have to look after our psyches, not just our bodies. The aftermath of the 2016 election was such a time.

Let’s hope that, the day after election day, Nov. 7, 2018, progressive people and their progressive kitchens will be celebrating, while deplorable people’s kitchens will be turning out even more deplorable things. We have just over two weeks to figure out the menus. I promise to post about whatever fare seems appropriate for Nov. 7.

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After all, it’s high season for sweet potatoes. I was trying to figure out what to do with a sweet potato for breakfast. The only thing that seemed appealing was a sweet potato cake. It’s just like the potato cakes you might make from white potatoes. There is diced onion, with an egg, some wheat germ, and some food yeast to make the cake set. I slowly fried the cake in butter, then fried the egg in the same skillet to give the egg that bacon-grease look. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any bacon.