Category: Food

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My usual vehicles for chocolate fixes are 72 percent dark chocolate bars from Whole Foods. Last week, I ran out — a rare occurrence. That left me to figure out what to do with cocoa (which I always have) that would provide a chocolate fix with a minimum of carbs.

The first experiment yielded dry, uninteresting brownies. I realized that, if you reduce the amount of fat and sugar, the brownies are no fun. Then I thought of apple sauce (or apple butter). It was easy to make that connection because my favorite cake since childhood is a chocolate apple sauce cake in which the only liquid ingredient is apple sauce. There aren’t even any eggs in the cake. The pectin in apple sauce is a remarkably good replacement for eggs.

I actually made a recipe:

1 cup barley flour

1 cup apple butter

1 egg

1/4 cup maple syrup

1/2 cup cocoa

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/4 cup olive oil

For the flour, substitute whole wheat flour or any flour. Apple sauce or apple butter would work equally well. Honey or even molasses would work as well as maple syrup. Any kind of oil, or even butter, could be substituted for the olive oil.

Mix everything together and pour the batter into an oiled 8-inch baking pan. My brownies needed about 25 minutes at 350 degrees. They’re done as soon as they pass the toothpick test.

I wouldn’t say that these brownies are chewy, exactly. But they’re very moist and satisfying. They’re also cheaper than chocolate bars.

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I posted a few days ago about a dessert pumpkin pie with a barley crust. But with more than twenty little pumpkins stored under the stairs that need to be used before spring is over, dessert pies wouldn’t be very healthy, with no one but me to eat them. So here is a quiche-like vegetable pie, with a reasonably low level of carbs as well as fat.

In my previous experiment with barley crust, I used the amount of oil that I would normally use for a wheat crust. That was entirely too much oil for the barley. The crust was too crumbly. This time I reduced the amount of oil by half (to a quarter of a cup for two cups of flour) and made up for it with water. That worked great.

My little pumpkins look so magical that I have a hard time taking a knife to them and eating them. I have to remind myself that that’s why I grew them, and that, left under the stairs, they’d only rot. I do take a portrait each time I use one. Though these are true pumpkins, they’re also like winter squash. So if you don’t have baskets of little pumpkins under your stairs, you could use winter squash for a tarte like this. I used two large stalks of leeks, lightly sautéed in olive oil. The other ingredients are two eggs, some grated Gruyère, and seasonings including a quarter teaspoon of nutmug. The top of the tarte is sprinkled with grated Gruyère and some parmesan.

The dough for barley crust is stickier and more fragile than a wheat crust. I roll pie crusts between sheets of waxed paper. To keep the barley crust from sticking to the paper, I oiled the paper lightly with olive oil.

The tarte was delicious. Many kinds of vegetables can be turned into a tarte. A turnip tarte? Why not. Next time, I’d like to impart a little roasted flavor into the tarte, maybe with some browned onions or shallots. Also, I’ll oil the pie plate next time, to give the bottom crust a bit more crustiness.

Though this tarte looks like a quiche, there is no milk or cream in it. Just two eggs and some grated cheese with vegetables.

The crust is organic hulled barley, which I grind into flour myself.

Portrait of the little pumpkin that was dispatched for this tarte, with a spice bottle for scale

The top of the pumpkin browns because I used the small oven. But the texture of the pumpkin inside is more steamed than baked.

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I wrote about Scotch broth here five years ago, and I mentioned that the best soup I’ve ever had was a Scotch broth. It was in Edinburgh, on my first trip to Scotland in the mid-1980s. Though it was a vegetable soup, I might not have known at the time that the stock was based on sheep bones.

With Scotch broth, the broth is everything. It’s the sheep bones, I’m sure, that give authentic Scotch broth its sturdy substance. I’ve never made broth with sheep bones, so I’m always looking for substitutes. It occurred to me that the cooking water from chickpeas might help. I’ve never tried it, but I’ve read that if the cooking water from chickpeas is concentrated enough, it will whip up like egg whites. For this pot of broth, I used about one-quarter chickpea broth, one-quarter pumpkin juice (drained from a baked pumpkin that went into a pie), and one-half water. The barley, which is essential to Scotch broth, also helps with thickening the broth.

I’ve been known to make a slightly reddened Scotch broth with a touch of tomato paste. But the Scotch broth that I had in Edinburgh was green — from split peas and leeks, I’m sure. I went for green on this pot of Scotch broth, and I got the color I wanted.

The ingredients are the stock, barley, dried split peas, some rutabaga (which I believe the Scottish call a swede), onion, carrot, celery, and leeks. The soup needs a long, slow simmer. I added the leeks for the last 20 minutes of cooking.

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Pumpkin pie with barley-flour crust

I have written before about my experiments with home-ground barley flour: When is it a good substitute for wheat, and when is it not? Barley flour makes a very good pie crust.

It’s good, I would say, but not perfect. Made with the usual amount of oil, the barley-flour crust is too crumbly. But, particularly for the parts of the crust that stand above the pie and are exposed to the heat of the oven, the tasty toastiness of the barley crust is fantastic. For my next experiment with barley-flour pie crusts, I will reduce the amount of oil in the crust and compensate with water.

Over the next few days, I will eat this whole pie. So I wanted it to be as healthy and low-calorie as possible. I reduced the amount of sugar by half — from three-quarters of a cup to half a cup. It still tastes like a desert. But the reduced sugar actually enhances the pumpkin taste. And the pumpkin taste is very good. I can even imagine a savory vegetable pie based on pumpkin with no sugar at all. These are my organic homegrown pumpkins. I still have lots of pumpkins left from the 2018 pumpkin crop, stored in baskets under the stairs.

Something about the barley taste is very old-fashioned. The taste of toasted barley is so good that I Googled for “toasted barley flour,” thinking that it surely must be a thing. Sure enough, toasted barley flour is a staple of Tibetan cuisine.

The old-fashioned taste of the barley and the reduced sugar produced a kind of austere pie that actually was appealing in its austerity. Pumpkins are a New World food. But if some monks in Gaul in the 13th Century had some pumpkin pie, then this is what I’d imagine it would taste like.

One of my little pumpkins after baking. I’ll scoop out the flesh and give the rest to the chickens.

Fresh-ground barley flour

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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.