sweetener

Dollars to Donuts II- Chocolate Donuts

April 18, 2012 by KerryAnn 16 Comments

For information on the pans and techniques for making these donuts, see our first post in this series, Dollars to Donuts. This recipe is grain-free and nutrient dense. There is one egg and over one tablespoon of fat in each donut, and the recipe has a low-sweetener option. I prefer making the low-sweetener variety using Nu Naturals Stevia. I get my stevia from Iherb.com. You can get a discount on your first order with coupon code KED184.

Chocolate Donuts

1/2 cup coconut flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/3 tsp salt
1/3 – 1/2 cup rapadura/sucanat and 1/4 tsp stevia or 1 cup rapadura (2 cups if your family has not adjusted to low-sugar)
6 eggs
1/2 cup coconut milk, dairy milk or water
1 Tbs vanilla extract
1/4 cup coconut oil, melted
1/4 cup butter, melted (or additional coconut oil)

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Generously grease your pan, if you are using stoneware, and set aside.

Sift together the coconut flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt. If you are using powdered stevia, sift this in as well. Set the bowl aside. In a separate bowl, whisk together the rapadura, eggs, milk, vanilla and oil. Whisk the wet into the dry ingredients. Add a little extra water or milk, if needed, to get the batter to come together and be wet enough to pour. Quickly pour into the greased pan- I made this easier by transferring the batter to a pyrex measuring cup so I could measure and pour without blobbing the batter all over the little divet-thingie in the pan. The coconut flour will absorb the fluid as it sits, so get it into the pan so it is easier to work with. Jiggle the pan a little to get the batter to level out.

Bake for 20-22 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean for a stoneware mini-bundt pan. For a traditionally-sized donut pan, the baking time would be reduced to 15-18 minutes.

Glaze- I make my donuts to be very low sweetener, then mixed a little powdered sugar with some cocoa, vanilla extract and enough unsweetened almond milk to make a glaze and drizzled it over.

This post is part of Monday Mania, Traditional Tuesdays, Tasty Tuesdays, Slightly Indulgent Tuesdays, Grain Free Tuesdays and Show Me What Ya Got.

Coconut Milk Yogurt

March 14, 2012 by KerryAnn 39 Comments

Finally, the recipe so many folks have been asking for. Coconut milk yogurt with all real food ingredients! The CTF Facebook page has been excitedly waiting for this one while seeing my multiple posts and pictures on the progress of the recipe.

This recipe is from the Menu Mailer, Volume 4 Week 29. Please consider supporting our blog by making a purchase of a Menu Mailer subscription or buying some of the issues of the Back to Basics Menu Mailer series. Mailers contain the recipes, shopping list and prep schedule for 6 meals and one dessert every week. We add extras such as this coconut milk yogurt as we develop the recipes. The Mailer runs as low as $1 a week. You can receive a free Menu Mailer that was published in January, 2011 if you sign up for our mailing list.

Coconut milk yogurt from the recipe as written, unstirred, incubated 20 hours.

The slightly tan color comes from using rapadura as the sweetener to feed the beneficial bacteria. If you need a white yogurt, use honey.

[Read more…] about Coconut Milk Yogurt

Baby Steps- Transitioning to Traditional Foods in March

March 3, 2011 by KerryAnn Leave a Comment

Last year on the forum, we started a Baby Steps section to help people new to traditional foods. Each month, I will be posting those baby steps to the blog in case you’re wanting to start your own Traditional Foods journey.

For March, our theme is to begin reducing sugar intake now that we’ve upped the vitamin and mineral content of the meals.

Dollars to Donuts

February 21, 2011 by KerryAnn 16 Comments

We recently had a day that needed a special breakfast but I was having trouble coming up with the right thing to fix. I started brainstorming out loud with my better half, from across the room. We both buried ourselves into Google on our respective computers, looking for a good recipe to try. The word ‘donut’ fell out. We both smiled. We have had donuts only a couple of times since we went gluten-free. I have purchased the Kinninnick donuts twice from the salvage for special occasions, when we could get a box for $1. But I don’t like to use them often, because they contain ingredients that aren’t real food.

The ingredients in Kinninnick vanilla donuts are

Icing (sugar, water, glucose, vanilla), Sugar, White Rice Flour, Tapioca Starch, Water, Whole Eggs, Sweet Rice Flour, Palm Fruit Oil (non hydrogenated), Frutooligosaccharide, Yeast, Pea Protein, Egg Whites, Xanthan Gum, Fruit Concentrate (dextrose, dextrin, fibre), Salt, Rice Bran Extract, Cellulose, KinnActive Baking Powder (sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium bicarbonate, pea starch, mono calcium phosphate), Glucono Delta Lactone, Sodium Bicarbonate, Nutmeg

Last time I checked, I wasn’t able to grow lactone or pyropho… pyra…… in my back yard. Yeah. And, for sake of comparison, here’s the ingredients in a Dunkin’ Donut:

Donut: Enriched Unbleached Wheat Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Iron as Ferrous Sulfate, Thiamin Mononitrate, Enzyme, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Palm Oil, Water, Dextrose, Soybean Oil, Whey (a milk derivative), Skim Milk, Yeast, Contains less than 2% of the following: Salt, Leavening (Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Baking Soda), Defatted Soy Flour, Wheat Starch, Mono and Diglycerides, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Cellulose Gum, Soy Lecithin, Guar Gum, Xanthan Gum, Artificial Flavor, Sodium Caseinate (a milk derivative), Enzyme, Colored with (Turmeric and Annatto Extracts, Beta Carotene), Eggs; Crunch Topping: Sugar, Coconut, Yellow Corn Flour, Caramel Color, BHT (antioxidant); Glaze: Sugar, Water, Maltodextrin, Contains 2% or less of the following: Mono and Diglycerides, Agar, Cellulose Gum, Citric Acid, Potassium Sorbate (Preservative), Artificial Flavor; Apple Filling: Water, Sugar Syrup, Corn Syrup, Evaporated Apples, Modified Food Starch, Contains 2% or less of the following: Natural Flavors, Citric Acid, Sodium Benzoate and Potassium Sorbate (Preservatives), Salt, Cinnamon, Malic Acid, Nutmeg.

I don’t think I need to say much about that list, it speaks for itself. And Krispy Kreme won’t even give an ingredient list online that I could find. Just a statement that they don’t use trans-fats in their shortening blend. Ahem.

So I set out to make healthy donuts my kids would love. [Read more…] about Dollars to Donuts

Whoopie Pie

February 9, 2011 by KerryAnn Leave a Comment

This cute little guy is the whoopie pie that is in the Valentine’s Day Menu Mailer. He’s about 2 inches tall, a portable treat that’s perfect for little hands. They are gluten and dairy free, and they can easily be made egg-free by using an egg replacer for the cookie. The whoopie pies are for the kid in all of us. The frosting is thick but is low in sugar. I am thrilled that I finally figured out a method to make frosting that doesn’t require white powdered sugar or dairy to thicken it, and this recipe only contains a small amount of powdered rapadura for the sweetener. Another method is used to thicken the frosting.

The Valentine’s Day meal has a beef recipe, two side dishes and two desserts. The main meal is an Asian-inspired steak, pilaf and vegetable dish. The steak was just as good cold on a salad the next day as it was hot. This recipe is now my personal go-to recipe for all cuts of steak, we enjoyed it so much.

The other dessert is called Chocolate Euphoria. It is an ingenious custard that will only take a few minutes to make and doesn’t require the oven or a water bath. It’s a great finish to a meal where you’re hosting company because they’ll think it took you a lot of time, effort and fuss to make it. You can smile and thank them for the compliments instead of telling them it only took about 15 minutes to make!

The Mailer also contains four other dinners and one breakfast. You can purchase the mailer here.

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KerryAnn Foster runs Cooking Traditional Foods, the longest running Traditional Foods Menu Mailer on the internet. KerryAnn has over nine years of traditional foods experience and is a former Weston A. Price Foundation chapter leader. Founded in 2005, CTF helps you feed your family nourishing foods they will love. Each mailer contains one soup, five dinners, one breakfast, on dessert and extras. You can learn more about our Menu Mailers at the CTF website. For a free sample Menu Mailer, join our mailing list. You can also join our forum to chat with other traditional foodists and learn more.

Strategies for Hidden Veggies III- Waffles

January 18, 2011 by KerryAnn 6 Comments

In the first two posts in this series, we examined how to replace flour in a baked good recipe with a vegetable. This time we’ll learn how to replace a liquid with a puree while still soaking the flours in order to make the baked good traditional foods.

In the same vein as the books that promote purees, many baked goods can have some mashed banana, applesauce, sweet potato, pumpkin, butternut squash or the like added to the recipe in place of the water or milk. The problem with many of these recipes is that the vegetable or fruit takes the place of the milk or water, and it’s then difficult to convert that recipe to being soaked. To overcome that problem, I carefully choose recipes that call for enough liquid to work with. I then soak the flour with the minimum amount of liquid needed to get it wet and add the rest that the recipe calls for in fruit or vegetables. This is made much easier if you are baking gluten-free goodies, since most of the recipes call for at least a small amount of starch. Since starches do not need to be soaked, this frees up extra liquid in the recipe to convert to a vegetable or fruit and still have the finished product turn out with the correct texture. Since starch makes waffles crispy, this is the perfect recipe for conversion.

I use this strategy most often when there’s just a little applesauce left in the bottom of the jar, or there’s one lone banana that needs to be used.

I tip my hat to Sue Gregg, whose cookbook is the first place I heard about grinding grain in the blender with liquid so you don’t have to have a grain mill to have the benefits of freshly-ground flour. I used her method to make pancakes for a long time until I could afford a grain mill.