homemade

A Sausage Walks in to a Bar…

1 · May 3, 2012 · Leave a Comment

A story for carnivores

Assador - Alice DeLuca 2012 digimarc — Assador - for roasting sausages

This whole adventure started with a search for the perfect sausage to use in a recipe for pork with clams, which led to a little ceramic pig, and ended up with a truly excellent party. This cute little piece of specialty cookware, which looks like footwear for some impossible outer-space monster, is in fact designed for brazing sausages over flaming, hi-octane Portuguese liquor. As we learned the purpose and the method for using this device, we became completely distracted from our original mission and found ourselves planning a sausage-roast.

Linguica roasting - Alice DeLuca 2012 digimarc — Linguiça roasting over flaming aguardente

First, we had to obtain the little pig dishes from Portugal – that was easy and took only a few weeks. As soon as the dishes arrived we set about making home-smoked sausages and invited some guests to come over and roast them with us – RSVPs were instantaneous and none declined the invitation.

The sausages that are required – linguiça or chourico – are not easily found freshly made in the grocery store; the smoked sausages you do find are often laminated in plastic, oozing a creepy slime when opened, delivering a texture of rubber bands with what seem like bits of potato thrown in – the bits are the fat but for some reason completely unlike the fat in a homemade sausage. If these laminated sausages are the only smoked sausage you have ever known, then you must find some real, home-smoked sausages, or make your own. With pork shoulder and a few other ingredients, a good old-fashioned meat grinder, and some type of smoker, you can have a plate of these sausages to set fire to with your friends.

Linguica on Heathware plate - Alice DeLuca 2012 digimarc — Vermillion Linguica looks stunning on blue Heathware plates!

People have been making sausages and brazing them since the dawn of time. You can follow the accurate but brief instructions provided in the Ancient Roman De Re Coquinaria of Apicius (published by Walter M. Hill, 1936). Here, the proper color of smoked sausages is described perfectly – vermillion – a nearly forgotten word and color that deserves to make a comeback. Vermillion is the color of notoriously poisonous cinnabar, which is a substance with an interesting history of its own. Take a look at cinnabar on dolomite and you will see that the Romans have described the color of smoked sausage precisely in the recipe for Cirellos isiciatos, Round Sausage.

“Fill the casings with the best material [forcemeat]. Shape the sausage in to small circles, smoke. When they have taken on vermillion color, fry them lightly.”

The Recipe

To make linguiça, we chose “the best material” – a simple formulation with garlic, paprika and sweet rosé wine because pork is so often excellent with sweet, fruity flavors. Sausages of this type sometimes include oregano and vinegar, but this recipe “LINGUICA PORTUGUESA A’LA ANA“ is more delicious than those, perhaps because of the sweet rosé. The sausage ingredients are posted here with permission from AnaCatarina Louro Ferreira Alves, who generously provides the recipe to the world on her blog: http://anydaysoiree.com/

5 lbs. ground pork butt
3 Tb. paprika (not smoked)
2 Tb. fine minced garlic
3 Tb. salt
1 cup sweet rosé wine
1 tsp. sugar
1 Tb. black pepper

A sliced lemon for soaking the hog casings

Apple wood for smoking

Hog Casings – for stuffing – about 2 or 3 feet of casing per pound of meat

Concerning the Meat and its Preparation

Start out a day or two before you want to eat the sausage, to complete the marinating phase.

In an agrarian economy, the seasonal time for making sausage was in the fall when a hog was slaughtered; everyone hurrying to preserve the large quantities of meat for the long winter. Smoked sausage was a hedge against starvation. In the modern, refrigerated world, sausage can be made year-round and is a reason for a party! When making sausage at home, be careful to use safe food-handling techniques, clean equipment and clean hands at all times. Note that the Latin root of the word “botulism” is the word for sausage – botulus. That is not a coincidence. Study the conditions under which food pathogens can replicate and then avoid those conditions.

To obtain several pounds of ground pork for sausage, purchase a “pork shoulder” weighing over 9 pounds. Very carefully remove the skin from the pork shoulder (not used in the sausage), slice the meat from the bone with a boning knife, and cut the meat in to large chunks. The foundation of the pork shoulder is a complex articulated joint, so extreme care must be exercised when wielding the boning knife. How do orthopedic surgeons ever actually manage a functioning joint replacement?

Save the bone to cook with dried beans.

After cutting the meat from the bone, modern cooks might be tempted to eliminate and discard all the fat, but the fat and connective tissue are the keys to great flavor. Remove the fat and you surely will create disappointing, dry sausage like the last bit of an overcooked turkey breast that’s been loitering on the platter way too long after the Thanksgiving dinner. To make a good sausage, fat is required.

Marinating

Weigh the boned meat and season it with proportional amounts of the paprika, fresh garlic, salt, Portuguese rosé wine, sugar and pepper called for in the recipe. We had 6 pounds of meat, so we increased the seasonings proportionally.

Stir together the spices and wine, then mix in the chunks of meat – and commune with the ancestors who were marinating meat for millennia. Judging from 18^th century engravings, the ancestors seemed to have had cats, chickens and dogs running around under the table during the sausage-making process, not the ideal situation for food preparation. Perhaps it is wise to banish the cats, dogs and chickens to the yard, before proceeding.

Unlike ancient peoples, we refrigerate the marinating meat and keep it cold during the remainder of the 1-2 day process.

Grinding

After marinating the meat under refrigeration, grind or chop it in to small pieces. There are many different types of grinding devices available. Whichever method you use, your goal is to produce small bits but not a paste – one of the principle differences between a sausage and a lowly hot dog is the consistency.

The mechanism of the old-fashioned meat grinder is an Archimedes screw. Archimedes of Syracuse, c. 287 BC – c. 212 BC, is credited with the invention of the screw conveyor which has been used since antiquity to move water uphill from one place to another. In a meat grinder, the screw is carrying the meat from one place to another (from the hopper to the blade.)

We use a Magimix food processor for chopping meat, working with a small amount of the meat at a time (maybe a half pound) and using the “pulse” feature – intermittent chopping – as noted in the directions that came with the machine. This works very well. Many older-model food processors would grind the meat too finely.

If you have an old fashioned meat grinder, use the blade and the coarsest disk. Again, a great opportunity for living the life of the ancestors presents itself. The sinews can clog up the disk, requiring frequent cleaning, We use our old-fashioned grinder mostly for stuffing the sausage casings. The grinder clamps to the table and can be easily removed, cleaned and stored.

Another style of meat grinder is screwed permanently to the table. We can’t see how this would be practical unless you grind things every day or perhaps enjoy the aesthetic and conversation-piece value of the thing – “Let us show you our newly renovated kitchen with built-in meat grinder….”

The other meat grinder that makes no sense is the kind that suctions to a smooth surface. This seems impractical because of the amount of force required to grind meat, and because suction devices usually cease to function correctly despite being adhered to a glass-smooth surface. How many times has the suctioned soap dish fallen in the shower, or the GPS device toppled in to the automobile?

One way or another, chop the marinated meat in to small bits, then chill it while you prepare the casings.

Linguica chopped and seasoned -Alice DeLuca 2012 digimarc — Marinated meat, chopped and ready for stuffing

Preparing the Casings

The next step will be preparation of the hog casings. For unknown reasons, hog casings, if you are lucky enough to find any, are usually on the top right hand corner of the supermarket shelf that houses ham and pork products. In a plastic tub or sometimes a plastic bag, the “casings,” which are really cleaned intestines, are packed in salt. Years ago, hog casings had a distinctive funky odor but recently purchased hog casings have had no odor whatsoever. We were surprised to find that packages of hog casings come from all over the world – it is interesting to read the label on the package.

Soak the hog casings (3 feet for every pound of meat) in warm water with a sliced lemon for 30 minutes to soften and desalinate the casings, then run water through them to ensure they are clean (discard the lemon slices).

Soaking Hog Casings - Alice DeLuca 2012 digimarc — Sausage casings soaking with aromatic lemon slices

As the water runs through, marvel at the structure and strength of this wonderful material.

Cleaning Sausage Casings - Alice DeLuca 2012 digimarc — Rinsing the sausage casings

One of the many remarkable things about sausage casings, or intestines in general, is how terrifically strong they are. They have been used for millennia as string and thread, and as strings for musical instruments. The 120 foot intestine of a cow is formed in to harp strings and then, under enormous tension the strings are plucked to produce musical notes; Gut is used by surgeons to sew up wounds, and by tennis players to string their rackets so they can slam balls in to the ground at upwards of 70 mph.

Stuffing

Archimedes Screw - sausage grinder - Alice DeLuca 2012 digimarc — An Archimedes screw moves meat through a grinder

It is much easier and more fun to stuff sausage with two people working than all by yourself.

Use a meat grinder to stuff the sausages. You need 3 feet of hog casing per pound of sausage, allowing for a little extra at each end of the sausage. Remove the blade and grinder disk and attach a sausage stuffing funnel. Slide a length of hog casing on to the funnel. Now put the seasoned sausage meat through the grinder, turning the handle slowly and steadily with one hand and easing the meat in to the casings with your other hand. The meat goes in to the hopper and comes out in to the casing. When the casing is nearly full (with 6 inches of empty casing remaining) remove the sausage from the funnel and start on the next sausage. Don’t complicate your life by trying to tie knots in this sausage. Just set the filled sausages aside to chill in the refrigerator until it is time to smoke them.

Linguica stuffing - Alice DeLuca 2012 digimarc — The sausage stuffing funnel is efficient!

Smoking

Part of the reward for making your own smoked sausage is aromatic. The scent of smoked sausage would tame the wild wolf and bring him to your doorstep; it would make the wolf volunteer to be the captive family dog if only he could have some of this delicious meat.[i] (As expected, both our tame dog and cat became increasingly animated while the sausage was smoking, and eventually they were invited to retire indoors.)

Follow the instructions on a smoker, and use apple wood for the smoke. Check the internal temperature of the smoker to insure that it is hot enough to do the job safely. We used a Primo ceramic grill to smoke the sausage, paying careful and regular attention to adjusting the vents, and maintaining a higher temperature than recommended in the original recipe – just below 200° F. We chose to smoke the sausage until the internal temperature of the sausage was 170° F, which took approximately 3 hours. We recommend that any home cook do their own research to determine a safe process. The FDA provides some guidance on this. When completely smoked, the color of the sausages will be a deep red vermillion. The sausages are not preserved by this smoking – they are merely cooked through. From this point on, they should be preserved like any other meat – in cold storage for a few days or in the freezer for a longer period of time.

Do the homemade sausages look dry to you? That is the miraculous thing about real smoked sausage – although the exterior of the sausage is dry, the interior is just right – juicy and delicious. As a reward for your labor, taste a few slices before you put them away to chill.

Setting Things on Fire

Roasting sausages over flaming cheap brandy is a social form of cooking, an adventure to be shared with brave and hearty friends who enjoy hazardous adventure and are willing to take responsibility for their own actions. Perhaps you could have your guests agree to a “Safe Sausage Disclaimer”:

“I recognize that consuming homemade sausage is fraught with danger and I am willing to fully assume all the risk and untold horrors so I may experience real food.”

We used a little parade of two “assadors” to roast our sausages. For fuel, we used inexpensive aguardente, lighting the flame under the sausages with foot-long matches and keeping a fire extinguisher available nearby. (Incidentally, we are intrigued to learn more about the high-walled linguiceira shown at the Borderless Cooking blog. It appears immune to the windy conditions that prevailed during our party.)

Place the assador on a heat-proof surface, preferably in a location that is not windy. Pour a pool of aguardente in to the assador. Using a long match, set the aguardente ablaze without setting anything else on fire. Cut off pieces of sausage to fit the assador and place them on the racks over the flames. As the sausage cooks, some of the fat melts in to the cooking device and fuels the alcohol-based fire, and as this happens the flame goes from blue to yellow and the sound of sizzling fills the air. The blue flame from burning alcohol is cooler than the ensuing yellow flame from the burning fat. The cooking process speeds up as the flame turns yellow and gets hotter. Turn the sausages carefully with tongs, and make sure to cook them until they are blackened. Remove them from the flames too soon and the interior will be dry and hard. Keep cooking the smoked sausages until they are crisped up on the outside, and the fat is melting on the inside. One of our assadors acquired a small crack during the roasting party, so again, take precautions and take good care.

Video:

Linguica roasting over aguardente

We poured a rosé with the linguiça, to match the flavoring component of the sausage. A dry, hard cider and beer were also fine accompaniments, along with a Colombian bean dish, a selection of cheeses including the outstanding Winnimere cheese from Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont, and a fine green salad supplied by some excellent cooks among the company at the table. We ate, as the Hawaiians say, until we were tired.

Notes for further study: There are other versions of this type of sausage brazing grill – This one uses skewers, for example. This one shows a much deeper, sturdier cooker which we are interested in acquiring, in case anyone knows where to get one. Here is a video recipe that shows grilled linguiça as a garnish for a small soup.

[i] Read: The Cat That Walked by Himself, by Rudyard Kipling: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2781/2781-h/2781-h.htm#2H_4_0011

Say Cheese! – making homemade cheese

0 · Dec 9, 2011 · 1 Comment

By Alice DeLuca

Many years ago, on a train traveling slowly through the French countryside – I don’t remember exactly where and I refuse to invent a location for the sake of a story – I met a man whose job it was to sell cheese mold. This friendly man was sitting in the same compartment with me. I was naturally apprehensive when he started to speak. Sometimes men traveling on trains want to share stories and sometimes they want to show young women other things whether the women are interested or not, but that is another story.

The suited gentleman had a tidy briefcase which he offered to open so that I could see his wares. It was a great relief to find that he was a genuine gentleman, and that what he wanted to display was an assortment of tiny envelopes containing samples of unique cheese molds that were required in the production of famous French cheeses such as Camembert and Brie. Perhaps interpreting my relief at his desire to talk about cheese as an ardent interest in learning about his profession, he explained the whole process by which these molds would be sprayed on the cheeses during the manufacturing process. The uniform, paint-white rind of fresh Brie, with its mushroomy aroma, had mystified me until that moment when I learned that the rind was a fungus just like the kind of thing that produces mushrooms and that this fungus was sprayed on to the cheeses; an aerosol mushroom. I had wrongly pictured the right molds, living in the area, just meandering in on a fresh lavender-scented breeze from the French countryside and settled conveniently on each cheese, creating a uniform coating.

In fact, a mushroom is the fruiting body of an underground fungus, poking up through the forest floor. The Brie cheese rind is seeded with the spores of a particular fungus that does not make those pop-up fruiting bodies. So, fine cheese and mushrooms are related, which makes sense when you think about it, and I got the first inkling of this knowledge on a rumbling train.

It was also news to me at the time that cheeses were mass-produced rather than made individually the way we had tried to do at home. Unlike our lonesome artisanal cheeses that cured with the native spores traveling through the air at our house, there were whole rooms full of camembert, just sitting around waiting to be sprayed with precisely engineered mold. I pictured in my mind whole rooms full of cheeses just sitting there, waiting.

Our few attempts at making homemade cheese had been laborious. One particular cheese required a few gallons of whole, unpasteurized milk and some rennet, a funky smelling material derived from the stomach of a cow. You could obtain rennet at almost any grocery store by purchasing a package of “junket” mix – this is actually rennet that can be added to milk to make a sort of custardy dessert that has now fallen out of favor – or you could purchase rennet tablets specifically intended for cheesemaking, in a small cylindrical vial.[i] We used the rennet tablets and our homemade cheese had a pleasant flavor. We coated the cheese with wax that we tinted turquoise with candle-dye, to make our cheese stand out from those endearing goudas encased in the bright red wax that children love to play with at the table, annoying the grownups. Our wax was too hard and did not have the elasticity of the red cheese wax, so there were occasional holes and leaks in our coating which we patched horribly with little globs of additional wax. As amateurs we had lots of enthusiasm, but we didn’t have all the skills and equipment of the professionals.

There are so many diverse careers out there in the world. Here was a man who traveled around on trains with a suitcase full of mold. He provided a vital service to one of France’s major food industries, and he obviously enjoyed the work, the travel and the conversations along the way. He was not a Willy Loman character[ii] suffering from depression and despair, ruining his home life with his philandering ways. He was a proud, friendly gentleman who happily went about selling cheese mold to the heroes of French cuisine. I did not get his name, and by now he must be a very old man, but if I could I would thank him and ask him so many more questions.

I encountered another great member of the world of cheese professionals on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, New York, in the 1980s. My memory is of a small shop where a lumberjack-sized man with large handlebar mustaches created mozzarella cheese with his bare hands. He made it look easy, as he kneaded the white curds in nearly boiling water until the cheese stretched like taffy. The process of creating hot ropes of cheese from milk turned out to be much trickier at home, especially since my hands were not used to being immersed in very hot water for extended periods. My hands turned red as they cooked, and I did not have the strength of this giant professional.

This video demonstration evokes the gentleness and patience of the true process similar to what I recall from watching the fellow making mozzarella in the Bronx in 1982: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_48-nGlxaw&feature=related [iii]

I have recently learned that it is possible to make homemade mozzarella using a microwave oven. People swear by this method and some claim to make cheese every week, almost ritually. This development could revolutionize many home kitchens, whether or not the cook adopts an obsessive-compulsive cheese-making habit. Following are links to a pictorial instruction on how this microwave mozzarella is made. The thing that is missing though is the slow, steady stirring; the brilliant efficiency of the strainer sinking in to the whey to separate the curds; the loving kindness of the great artisanal food artist at work.

Homemade microwave mozzarella: http://www.cheesemaking.com/store/pg/21.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPUortoNUWo&feature=fvwrel

[i] Junket mix is still available today, and there are recipes for using it to make cheese here.

[ii] Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman.

[iii] This demonstration gives an idea of the same process done by cheese professionals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o-55_Hhjek&feature=related

Homemade Seasoned Rice Vinegar

28 · Jun 24, 2011 · 4 Comments

Gfzing.com is once again bringing you the DIY recipe you have been looking for – how to make your own seasoned rice vinegar – the kind of vinegar that is used to make sushi.

The proportions for making Japanese seasoned rice vinegar are as follows – as described in the interesting Japanese cookbook Japanese Cooking for the American Table (by Karen Green, 1986, ISBN 0-87477-376-8).

Mix:

4 TB rice vinegar
2 TB sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt

That’s it! In any recipe that calls for seasoned rice vinegar you can use this mixture. If you include your own homemade vinegar, even better! You can be sure that your seasoned rice vinegar is gluten free!

Homemade Vinegar

0 · Feb 3, 2011 · 1 Comment

Homemade vinegar is easy to make – it kind of makes itself under the right conditions – and we have been making our own for 25 years. The vinegar you buy in the grocery store (white, cider, wine) is sharp tasting and thin in flavor compared to the rich complexity of a homemade vinegar. Make your own vinegar and you will become a fan! Also, with your own homemade vinegar there is no need to read labels looking for gluten-containing items. The test of a delicious vinegar is this: sip up a teaspoon of the vinegar and you should want more! You will not want to waste this homemade vinegar making those baking soda and vinegar volcanoes that are so popular in elementary and middle school classes.

You will need:

Leftover Wine diluted with unchlorinated water
Vinegar culture (a bacterial culture, check with the manufacturer and do NOT use malt vinegar culture)
a wide-mouthed glass or stoneware container
Cheesecloth to keep fruit flies out of the vinegar while allowing air to enter the container
Room temperature (68-96 degrees)
surgical hemostat clamp (a ten dollar item) for easily removing old vinegar mother

If you really get in to making homemade vinegar, you may want to invest in a handy vinegar crock with a spigot, or an oak vinegar barrel. Bear in mind that it is not safe to use homemade vinegar in home canning or pickling, unless you are a talented chemist who can accurately test the acidity of your finished product. For pickling, you need 5% acidity.

Coyote Vinegar Crock gfzing.com square — Gfzing.com uses a vinegar crock with spigot - made by Clay Coyote Gallery

To make Vinegar:

Choose what kind of vinegar you are making: red, white, cider. Dilute leftover wine or hard cider with unchlorinated water, about 2 parts of wine to one part of water. Put about a quart of diluted wine in to a cleaned large mouth jar or bowl, or vinegar crock. We use C-brite to clean the container. Add the starter culture. Stir with a clean spoon; cover the container with cheesecloth secured with a rubber band (keeps out fruit flies while allowing air to enter). Store the crock at the back of the counter in your kitchen, where the vinegar will remain largely in the dark and at 68-96 degrees. In about 4 weeks the first vinegar should be ready to use in salad dressings and sauces. Pour off some of the vinegar, taste it and dilute it with additional water if it tastes too strong, then bottle it in sterilized bottles and cork the bottles.

Now add more diluted wine to your crock – this is called “feeding” your vinegar and let it go. Each time you get ready to bottle some vinegar, taste the finished product to see if it is ready for bottling, and add water if the flavor is too strong. Since this is a trial-and-error, imprecise method for achieving the final product, you will not know the final Ph of the homemade vinegar and cannot use this vinegar to make pickles or preserves that are not refrigerated.

Vinegar Culture:

To make vinegar, you add a starter culture of acetic acid bacteria to an alcohol base (like wine or hard cider). For the starter culture, you can use some vinegar from a friend’s vinegar crock, or you can buy a culture. For gluten free vinegar, do not use malt vinegar culture.

Vinegar Mother:

Vinegar mother is a thick cellulose material created by the vinegar bacteria. People who have never handled vinegar mother call it “slimy” but that is not a good description. The material is strong, thick and fibrous, stretchy, slippery and somewhat leathery – like the covering on a papaya seed, or a sort of fibrous jelly. It can break cleanly in to clumps when you pull on it. The mother accumulates in your crock or barrel, and eventually some of it needs to be removed to make room for more wine. The mother is not necessary to the formation of new vinegar – what you need is the bacteria. So, if you have a friend who makes good vinegar and does not pasteurize it, ask for a sample of their vinegar and you are ready to go.

Vinegar Barrels:

A word about vinegar barrels – the oak vinegar barrel adds a strong oak flavor to a red wine vinegar, and we use one for this purpose. However, the home vinegar maker should be forewarned about a couple of things. 1) The vinegar barrel should be soaked before using, to prevent leaking. 2) Unless the barrel has a large opening at one end, removing old vinegar mother from your vinegar barrel requires two people, because most of these barrels only have small holes through which to remove the mother. One person holds the barrel so that a hole is facing downwards (the largest hole is the air hole at the top) and the other person uses a surgical hemostat clamp to grab bits of the mother and pull them through the hole. This is a messy process.

Vinegar Crock and Barrel from GFZINGdotcom — Gfzing.com uses the Vinegar Crock for cider vinegar and an Oak Vinegar Barrel for red wine vinegar

Bottling:

We bottle the vinegar without pasteurizing it.

Homemade Vinegar and Pickling:

Do not use homemade vinegar for making pickles. Vinegar used in pickling must be of a certain Ph, or you can have spoilage and dangerous bacteria can grow in the pickles.

More Instructions:

Further instructions for making your own vinegar are available here: http://www.claycoyote.com/blog//SunsetMagazine_Vinegar.pdf

Homemade Poultry Seasoning

0 · Nov 23, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Once again, Gfzing.com cracked the binding on a bunch of cookbooks to find a tasty gluten free poultry seasoning for the Thanksgiving turkey stuffing. We looked through the usual suspects, those older books that included formulas for standard seasonings and came up empty! Then, on an old bottle marked “poultry seasoning,” we found a typed list, taped to the bottle. The ingredients are listed below.

The herbs and spices for poultry seasoning are similar in all formulations, it is just the proportions that change. The sage and thyme should predominate. Some poultry seasoning recipes include nutmeg, and some include celery seed.

We dried the herbs from our garden, at the end of the fall, by hanging them upside down in the kitchen to dry. If you don’t have home-dried herbs, you can use bottled herbs.

2 parts dried sage
3/4 part dried rosemary
1 part dried marjoram
1/2 part ground black pepper
1/2 part grated nutmeg
1 1/2 parts dried thyme

These ingredients are listed in “parts” – you can substitute teaspoon or Tablespoon for “part” in the recipe, depending on how much poultry seasoning you want to make. You can assemble all of these in a large, stone mortar and pestle and grind them quickly to a fluffy powder. It is the sage that adds the fluffiness to this preparation.

How to make gluten free beer

0 · Nov 5, 2010 · 8 Comments

At gfzing.com we have tried all the commercially available gluten free beers. Our favorites were those made by Green’s – there are three that are imported in to the U.S., and in our area they generally sell for a mind-boggling $7/bottle. This was the motivating factor behind a successful attempt at home brewing gluten free beer, the techniques of which are outlined here. A reasonable glass of gluten free beer (in the weissbier or weiss beer style), can be made for less than a dollar a bottle after start-up costs. The beer is similar to the St. Peter’s Sorgham Beer from Suffolk England.

The major difference between most fine artisanal beers and gluten free beer is that the ordinary beer is made with malted barley and wheat, and the gluten free beer cannot contain either barley or wheat. Therefore, the gluten free brewer must rely on other malted grains. The ingredients for gluten free beer are available from home brewing shops. The two tricky items to locate are the sorghum syrup, which lately we have had to purchase online from morebeer.com, and the gluten free brewing yeast. The actual link for purchasing the syrup is here.

To make home brewed beer, you should first read some of the fine homebrewing websites and chats on the net, and learn the basic technique. You are going to make a sort of soup called wort, and then ferment this soup with yeast in a large container with an airlock. When it has finished fermenting, it gets bottled with a little “priming sugar” added to each bottle to cause another fermentation in the bottle – this produces the carbonation. An excellent discussion with photos is available at WikiHow.

These instructions are provided here for use by adults of legal brewing age.

Recipe from gfzing.com for about 48 twelve ounce bottles of gluten-free beer requiring 2-3 hours of cooking time and about 7 weeks from starting the process to pouring:

Ingredients:
Malt Base – 6lb Sorghum Extract

Specialty Grain –

1lb Flaked Maize
1/2lb Whole Sorghum (for toasting)
1/2lb gluten free Oats (for toasting) – optional

Specialty Sugar – 1/4lb Belgian Dark Candi Syrup (this is a product that is worth the trouble of obtaining – it can be ordered online)

Hops –

1 oz UK Northern Brewer Leaf hops (bittering)

1oz Cascade hops (aroma)

Yeast- Notthingham Yeast (check for gluten free status on the package)
Other-

1/4 tsp Irish Moss
3/4 oz Coriander Seeds
3/4 oz. Bitter Orange Peel (in the event of a beer emergency, you can use the zest of one fresh orange)
8oz Malto-dextrin (a weird, nearly flavorless material that makes a smooth “mouth-feel”)
15 black peppercorns

Other: Priming sugar (about 1 cup for five gallons) dissolved in a couple of cups of water

Instructions:
Toast Whole Sorghum & gluten free Oats in the oven for 20 minutes @ 375 F.

Grind toasted Sorghum & Oats using a grain mill that is only used for gluten free grains, and then combine these with flaked maize.
Maize, Oats and sorghum go in a muslin bag in one and a half gallons cold well water in a large pot – large enough to hold at least 3 gallons.
Heat to 160F, hold at this temperature for 10 minutes.
Remove grains (the muslin bag full of grain will have swelled considerably) and discard.
Add Sorghum extract & Belgian Dark Candi syrup to the grainy water, stir to dissolve. If you have no Belgian Dark Candi syrup you may be tempted to use molasses. Our advice – don’t use molasses because it will impart a distinctive molasses flavor to the finished beer. If you must substitute for the Dark Candi syrup, try dark brown sugar or panela.
Bring to boil. ALERT: at this point, there are 60 minutes left in the cooking process. All the times listed next to the ingredients below are the total cooking time for that ingredient. When we say “set the timer” that is to indicate the time between steps.

Start proofing yeast in a cup of water – Nottingham yeast (marked gluten free).
While grainy water and sugars boil, add the following for the minutes indicated (this is a standard beer recipe convention, and you have to study on how beer is made so that this series of instructions will make sense):

1 oz. Northern Brewer Hops (60 min)
Set Timer for 45 minutes

When timer goes off, start adding the following ingredients and cook them for the amount of time indicated:

1 ounce Cascade hops (15 minutes)
Set timer for 5min, when timer goes off, add
1/4 tsp Irish Moss (10 minutes)
Set Timer for 5min, when timer goes off, add

1/2 lb. Malto-dextrin mix with cold water first (5 minutes)
3/4 oz coriander seeds (5 minutes)
3/4 oz bitter orange (5 minutes)
15 black peppercorns(5 minutes)

After 5 more minutes, all the cooking is done.

The total cooking time, from the time an ingredient is added to the end of the cooking is show in parentheses next to each ingredient. This is how beer-making recipes are generally written. The instructions about “set the timer for X minutes” are our own addition and show the time between steps. So, the Northern Brewer hops go in, then you wait 45 minutes and add the Cascade Hops, then wait 5 minutes, then add the Irish Moss etc. The last 4 ingredients all go in at once, and they only cook for the last 5 minutes of the boil.

Pour wort through a fine strainer in to 2 gallons of cold water in a sterilized 6 gallon fermenter.

Add cold water to increase to 5 gallons total volume in the fermenter (it helps to mark the fermenter at the five-gallon level so you know when you have added enough water).
Cool to 72 degrees F.
Measure the starting specific gravity and record. It should be around 1.040.
Add the proofed yeast, give a stir, cover the fermenter and add an airlock. This mixture should ferment for two or more weeks. This beer will not bubble as vigorously as a barley or wheat beer – it is a gentle fermentation and does best at around 70 degrees.
After the primary fermentation, rack off the beer in to another vessel, add the dissolved priming sugar, give the mixture a vigorous mixing, and bottle in sterilized bottles. Cap the bottles with new caps (you cannot re-use caps). The beer will be ready to drink in about 3 weeks.

Homemade Spicy Tomato and Sweet Pepper Ketchup

0 · Nov 3, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Making your own custom ketchup is easy-peezy! At gfzing.com, we made a careful study of the available recipes for homemade ketchup, and concluded that the ingredients in most tomato ketchups are pretty much identical. The spicy ketchup variant here is gluten free and can be served with fries, meatloaf, Shepherd’s Pie, hamburgers, hash browns, corned beef hash or any other dish that requires ketchup.

We tasted the typical store-bought ketchup which is very smooth, mostly sweet, with heavy tomato and celery seed notes – sort of like sweetened and thickened V8 juice! We also read Malcolm Gladwell’s interesting discussion of why there are so many mustards and only one ketchup. Afterward reading that, we thought that we would not like a ketchup substitute, but we were wrong. This ketchup is better than bottled ketchup!

Spicy Tomato and Red Pepper Ketchup — Homemade Ketchup has a rich color and complex flavors

We started with a Saveur recipe for homemade ketchup. We replaced half the tomatoes with sweet red peppers, added sweet potato and dates for sweetening and thickening, and switched out their brown sugar with some agave syrup and gluten free fruit jam, to reduce the amount of refined sugar in the recipe. We changed the amount of spices, and upped the hot peppers. The final ketchup has some chutney-like flavors. It has more flavor than bottled ketchup, and far less refined sugar. It provides dynamic tension for your meatloaf!

Ingredients:

14 0unces diced or petite cut canned tomatoes

3 long sweet red peppers, stemmed, seeded and sliced

1 cup water

1/2 of a large red onion, peeled and chopped

1 clove garlic, peeled and sliced

1 dried cayenne pepper, stemmed and sliced

2 Tablespoons agave nectar

1/3 cup cider vinegar (we make our own cider vinegar out of homemade New England apple cider, from local apples)

1/4 teaspoon celery seed

1/4 teaspoon dry mustard

1/4 teaspoon ground allspice

1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

1/8 teaspoon ground cloves

1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

2 Medjool dates, pitted and sliced

1 1/2 ounces of peeled sweet potato, chopped – a piece of sweet potato about the size of an extra-large egg

2 Tablespoons plum jam

How big are the peppers — A dried cayenne pepper on the left, and a sweet red pepper on the right

The Steps:

Homemade Spicy Tomato and Sweet Pepper Ketchup before cooking — The ketchup before the cooking...

First, put all the ingredients in a saucepan and cook over medium heat for about 45 minutes, stirring occasionally, until reduced by half. The material will start to stick to the bottom of the pan. Be careful that it does not burn.

When cooked, cool and then puree the mixture thoroughly in a blender or food processor. Taste, and adjust the salt, sweet, and sour flavors as necessary. That’s it! Serve warm or cold. Store, covered, in the refrigerator. This is not a “preserve” since it has a low sugar content and low salt content. It cannot be kept indefinitely. Make sure all your ingredients, including spices, are gluten free.

Homemade Garam Masala

0 · Oct 19, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Garam masala is an Indian spice mixture used in many dishes and often added at the very end of the cooking of a dish. It can be 100% gluten free if made correctly. Like curry powder, garam masala usually seems to be made from a standard list of spices, the amounts of each spice customized according to taste.

Interestingly, if you do a Google search for “homemade garam masala” there are only a million hits – that’s twice as many hits as for “homemade ketchup” or “homemade mayonnaise” but not as many hits as for “homemade mustard”. What is going on with that mustard? Are beer drinkers interested in mustard at the season of the Oktoberfest?

Back to the topic at hand. We compared recipes for Garam Masala from two authors: Julie Sahni and Madhur Jaffrey. Both have written wonderful cookbooks which are excellent and frequently consulted resources – these authors were instrumental in bringing the world of interesting, largely gluten free, Indian cooking to the North American audience.

For a generic Garam Masala (there are other more specialized types of garam masala as well) these authors offer varying formulas, using the following spices. The weights in parentheses are just there to give you an idea of the ratio of amounts that could be used – we have measured here the weights for one of the Jaffrey recipes:

Cardamom Seed (25 pods – see the picture below for a couple of pods next to the seeds from 25 pods)

Black Peppercorn (2 1/8 ounces or 62 grams)

Whole Cumin Seed (1 1/4 ounces or 36 grams)

Whole Coriander Seed (1/2 ounce or 15 grams)

Cinnamon Stick (3, 3 inch sticks)

Whole Cloves (4 to 6 cloves)

To give you an idea of what this amount of spice looks like, here is the full amount:

Gfzing.com Garam Masala spice picture 3 — Garam Masala spices before grinding. Clockwise from top left: Cinnamon and Cloves, Cardamom, Cumin (in cener), Black Pepper, Coriander.

Sahni generally recommends toasting the spices in a dry skillet for 10 minutes, stirring all the while, then cooling and grinding to a powder. Jaffrey’s instructions generally omit the toasting process and go right to the grinding. Jaffrey sometimes omits the coriander and adds nutmeg.

By volume, Jaffrey’s recipe from Indian Cooking uses 3 times as much black peppercorn as Sahni’s recipe from Classic Indian Cooking. Other proportions are very similar in both recipes.

Why buy stale old spice mixtures ready-made when you can easily make your own pungent gluten free garam masala using whole spices, toasted (or not) and ground up?

Homemade Thai Red Curry Paste

0 · Oct 17, 2010 · Leave a Comment

One reader asked if we had looked at recipes for making homemade Thai curry paste. Well, we have. We used the following useful sources :

Seductions of Rice by Jeffrey Alford & Naomi Duguid 1998

Saveur Magazine

Thai in Minutes by Vatcharin Bhumichitr 2004

Thai Cuisine with Jasmine Rice from Eastland Food Corporation

Thai Culinary Art by Srisomboon Bhandhukravi 1993

Terrific Pacific Cookbook by Anya von Bremzen & John Welchman 1995

Thai Red Curry Paste recipes use a basic list of ingredients, and all the recipes seem to include chilies, coriander, cumin, peppercorn, garlic, lemongrass, galangal, a fishy element like shrimp paste or fish sauce, and salt. Most also include shallots, kaffir lime leaf or zest, and either cilantro leaf or root. A few add nutmeg, paprika, or cardamom.

Dry chilies are usually seeded and soaked. Dry spices are generally toasted in a skillet before grinding. Garlic and shallot are peeled and chopped before making in to a paste. The bottom 3 inches of lemon grass stalk is cut off, the toughest leaves removed, and the whole piece is then smashed with the flat side of a cleaver before the lemon grass is minced.

Shrimp paste or fish sauce must be investigated for gluten free status before using. Shrimp paste is a dry product that is dry roasted before use.

Ultimately, all the ingredients are ground to a homogeneous paste.

Based on the following table, you can see that Thai Red Curry paste is made using a fairly standardized set of ingredients, easily customized by the home cook to make a “signature” gluten free blend.

Thai Red Curry Paste Comparisons from gfzing.com

Make sure that all of your ingredients are gluten free!

Making Your Own Homemade Curry Powder

3 · Oct 15, 2010 · 7 Comments

It is as easy to make homemade gluten free curry powder as it is to grind coffee!

With a little trial and error you can create your own signature gluten free curry powder! We use a 30 year old coffee grinder to make ours from whole spices. Once you make your own, you won’t be able to go back to using store-bought curry powder. Also, your friends will want your recipe.

The Spices:

Make sure that whatever spices you add to your curry powder are gluten free. And, the fresher the spices, the better the flavor.

The Coffee Grinder:

Some recipes will advise you to buy a separate coffee grinder for making spice mixtures like curry powder, but we use one coffee grinder for everything – we have been doing it for decades. After using the coffee grinder for grinding spices, you can clean the coffee grinder using a toothbrush to loosen up ground spices and wipe the grinder clean. If your coffee grinder is white plastic, the turmeric may turn the plastic yellow, but when you then revert to grinding coffee in the grinder the flavor of your coffee will not be altered.

What amounts to use?

At gfzing.com, we have analyzed a few recipes for homemade curry powder and provide the following table of formulas from some of our favorite cookbooks. Note that the biggest variation occurs with the turmeric and the pepper. Turmeric has a surprisingly strong taste, so experiment with it a little to decide how much to use.

Our favorite curry powder recipe comes from Robin Reilly’s excellent book Gluten-Free Baking. We add a whole dried cayenne pepper to her mixture because we like our curry powder spicy. Robin Reilly uses a combination of roasted coriander seed, fenugreek seed, cumin seed, black mustard seed, cardamom seed, cinnamon stick, with added ground turmeric, ground mace, nutmeg, and cloves. We add a whole dried cayenne pepper to her recipe, then grind it in two batches in the 30 year old coffee grinder. After grinding the two batches, we mix the stuff together thoroughly and store it in a half pint Mason jar.

Another similar curry powder formula is to be found in Better Than Store-Bought by Witty and Colchie, originally published in 1979. This is a unique cookbook which shows how to make a large variety of items from scratch.

A third example of homemade curry powder lives in another excellent do-it-yourself cookbook called Gifts of Food, by Susan Costner, published by Consumer Reports in 1984. Again, the list of spices is pretty much the same – varying amounts are used.

In this table, we compare these 3 recipes, demonstrating that indeed, the list of spices is pretty much the same but the amounts differ. Fiddle with these spices and develop your own signature gluten free curry powder! Package it up nicely, and give it as a gift!

Homemade Curry Powder comparisons — Homemade Curry Powder - comparisons from Gfzing.com

Try the curry powder in these recipes:

Chicken Sticky Rice

Curried Cream of Root Vegetable Soup

Curried Tofu Meatballs

Creamy Lentil Soup with Curry and Chipotles

Rich Lamb and Cornish Game Hen Curry

Pineapple Fried Rice

Homemade Hot Cocoa Mix

0 · Apr 29, 2010 ·

Hot cocoa mix from GfZing! is easy to make at home. Here’s how to make an instant cocoa mix that will spice up your breakfast. Make sure that each individual component of the mixture is gluten free – the cocoa, the spices etc.

In a jar that holds 750 ml, place:

3/4 cup sugar (or the equivalent sweetening amount of a gluten free sugar substitute)
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon instant espresso
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper (optional to add spiciness – you can grind up one dried cayenne pepper and add that)
1/4 cup finely ground skinned almonds (optional – this adds a gritty texture)
3.2 ounces of nonfat powdered dry milk (the amount to make one quart)

Shake this mixture up until it is completely homogeneous.

Use 3-4 Tablespoons of the mixture with 1 mug of hot water to make your cocoa.

Homemade Lemonade

0 · Jun 24, 2008 · Leave a Comment

This is a very refreshing recipe for lemonade, including only sugar, water, fresh lemons and soda water! It is posted in honor of Russell, who likes to cook.

For each guest, fill a 12 ounce glass with ice.

Add 1/3 cup of simple syrup (made from equal parts of sugar and water, boiled until the sugar has dissolved, then cooled.)

Squeeze the juice of one lemon in to the glass.

Fill the glass to the top with soda water (sparkling water, seltzer water)

That’s it! This is a very refreshing gluten free and alcohol free drink to serve to guests.

You can add shredded lemon zest (just the yellow part of the rind) to the sugar and water for the simple syrup, to add more lemon flavor if you wish.