gluten-free gravy

Of all the questions I have received about Thanksgiving this week, the number one topic — by far — has been gluten-free gravy.

People, it is easier than it seems.

Let us walk you through it.

First, make sure you have a good stock (chicken or turkey, if you eat meat), homemade if possible. If not, be sure to splurge on a good-quality stock. Make sure it's gluten-free.

Next, have some butter. Unsalted, please. You want to control how salty your gravy is. (And if you can't eat butter, we've had some real success with Earth Balance buttery sticks. I have fooled Danny a few times with these.)

You'll need some kosher salt.

And one or two gluten-free flours.

We like sorghum flour. And sweet rice flour. Lately, we make a combination of the two. That's to make a roux.

If you want to make a slurry, try cornstarch.

To make a roux, simply combine equal parts butter and gluten-free flour. I'll let you watch the video to see how. It won't be quite as stiff as a gluten roux, but it will be close. Cook the roux until it is the color of a brown paper bag. Set it aside.

Heat up the stock to near boiling. In small portions, about 1 tablespoon at a time, add the cooked roux into the stock.

(In the past, Danny had you build the roux and then add in the liquid, the way you do with traditional gravy. But this step of adding the roux in, bit by bit, works better with gluten-free gravy.)

Whisk. Vigorously. If you whisk and whisk while you add in the roux, you will not have lumpy gravy.

If you want to use a slurry, mix cornstarch and water until you have a gooey paste. Add this into the hot stock, a little at a time, until it thickens, whisking vigorously. Wait a few moments between each addition, so you don't end up with cement.

Wait to season the gravy with salt and pepper until the very end.

And that's it.

Really. That's it.

Well, here's a video, in case you are confused. (We've shown you this before, but it might be worth watching again.) And a recipe.

To quote Danny, "Gravy good." It's worth learning how to make it well.

Feel free to write with questions.

the Chef shows you how to make gluten-free mushroom gravy from Daniel Ahern on Vimeo.

GLUTEN-FREE GRAVY

1/4 cup unsalted butter
1/4 cup sweet rice flour
2 cups chicken stock (or juices from the roasted turkey)
salt and pepper to taste

Melt the butter in a pan on low to medium-low heat. When it has completely melted, sprinkle in the rice flour in small handfuls. Stir and stir. When you have added all the flour and the mixture has become coherent, let it cook in the pan for two to three minutes, stirring all the while. When it has cooked, it will be solidified and have a tinge of brown. Take the roux off the heat and let it rest for a moment.

Heat the stock on high heat. Slowly, in small amounts, add in bits of roux, whisking the mixture vigorously until all the liquid has been absorbed in the roux. Continue to do this, in small dribs and drabs, until the stock and roux have expanded and liquified into gravy. This will take awhile, perhaps ten minutes or so. Be patient. When you have reached the consistency you desire for the gravy, add salt and pepper. Taste the gravy, and season according to your taste. Take it off the burner and serve it, immediately.

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cranberry cocktail for Thanksgiving

You probably have cranberries in your home right now, don't you? Lots of them, if you are anything like us. Danny made the cranberry relish this morning, a casserole dish piled high with bright red puree, with bits of white apple stained pink from standing in the same pot as those berries. Tart and mouth-puckering, with a hit of sweetness at the end to save it from being sour, cranberry relish is one of the best parts of the meal.

Our relish this year, if you're still not sure what to do with yours:

2 apples, juiced (or 2 cups fresh apple juice)
1/2 cup sugar
24 ounces cranberries (the Ocean Spray ones come in 12-ounce packages)
2 slightly sweet apples, peeled and diced
1/2 vanilla bean, slit open
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 small pinch clove
1 small nub of ginger
1/4 cup golden raisins

Combine all the ingredients in a large saucepan. Cook, stirring occasionally, on medium-high heat until the cranberries have popped and everything has begun to gel. Spoon into a casserole dish. Let cool.

See how easy it is? You don't have the buy the stuff in the can after all.

So, if you have whole cranberries in the house, how about a cranberry citrus cocktail for the big day tomorrow?




Cranberry Cocktail

1 quart cranberry cocktail
2 cups apple cider
1 quart sparkling soda water
1/4 cup simple syrup (or agave nectar)
2-inch piece fresh ginger, grated
2 navel oranges, zested and juiced
2 lemons, zested and juiced
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
pinch cinnamon
1 lime, cut into small wedges

Infusing the liquids. Combine the cranberry cocktail, apple cider, sparkling water, and simple syrup (see note below). Pour 2 cups of the combination into a blender, along with the grated ginger, orange juice and zest, lemon juice and zest, vanilla extract, and cinnamon. Blend on medium speed for 2 minutes. Strain the grated ginger out of the liquids.

Finishing the cocktail. Mix the gingered liquids with the other liquids. Pour them into a punch bowl. Serve with ice.

We will be serving this without alcohol tomorrow. However, if you wanted to make this with more punch, I'd try vodka.

To make simple syrup: Combine 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water in a small saucepan. Bring the mixture to a gentle boil on medium heat. Keep a pastry brush with a bit of water next to the pot and wet down the sides of the saucepan if the sugar creeps up. When the sugar has completely dissolved, the syrup will be clear. Turn the heat down to the lowest setting, cover the pan, and allow the syrup to simmer for 5 minutes. Set it aside to cool.

This will give you a little over a cup of simple syrup. You can use this to flavor coffee or teas easily, as well making candied nuts or desserts that call for liquid sweetener. We have also made agave nectar-simple syrup before, successfully.

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pumpkin mash

Pumpkins deserve more attention than the pies.

This year, we're making a pumpkin mash, inspired by Marcus Samuelsson's recipe. Locally grown pumpkins, roasted sweet potatoes, garlic and shallots, a hint of sweetness. What could be wrong?

We had this idea, inspired by a question on Twitter. What about a savory pumpkin custard? Sounds good to me. I might try making the pumpkin custard recipe on the back of the Libby's can. (Yep, we're still using this.) Instead of evaporated milk, I might try some evaporated goat's milk. Substitute all the sweet spices with garlic and sage, a bay leaf, some Parmesan cheese. It could be great.

(It could be awful, too. Without making it, how will I know? I don't think it will stink, however.)

If we had more sweet potatoes in the house, we'd be making our friend Jess's sweet potato crisp for the big meal. (I'm thankful I was able to read her piece before the day.)

Enjoy it all, whatever you eat.



Pumpkin/Sweet Potato Mash, adapted from The Soul of a New Cuisine

8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter
3 shallots, peeled and sliced
4 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced thin
3-inch-piece ginger, peeled and sliced
2 cinnamon sticks
1 tablespoons brown sugar
5 sprigs fresh thyme, stems removed and fine chopped
2 pounds sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 2-inch cubes
2-pound pumpkin, peeled, seeded, and cut into 2-inch cubes
2 cups chicken stock (or vegetable stock)
2 cups milk (cow's milk, soy milk, or rice milk)
pinch nutmeg
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 chives, fine chopped

Preparing to mash. In a deep pot on medium heat, melt the butter. Add the shallots, garlic, ginger, cinnamon sticks, brown sugar, thyme leaves, and cook, stirring, until the sugar melts, about 3 minutes. Throw in the sweet potatoes, pumpkin cubes, chicken stock, and milk of your choice. Bring them all to a simmer. Reduce the heat and cook until the potatoes and pumpkin yield to your fork, about 30 minutes.

Making the mash. Drain the pumpkin and sweet potatoes, saving 1 cup of the liquid. Throw away the ginger and cinnamon sticks. In a large bowl, mash the sweet potatoes and pumpkin. Pinch in the nutmeg and salt. Taste. Season more, if necessary. Splash in a bit of the cooking liquid and stir, for an even texture. Before serving, sprinkle with the chives.

Serves 6.

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gluten-free pie crust

I love making pie.

There's no need to tell you more about this. I've written about pie so many times before on this site. Each year, I've created a pie crust that has come closer to my Platonic ideal of pie crust, the flaky butter wonder of a crust that holds pumpkin filling or summer blackberries or raspberries right off the vine. No one has complained. No one could tell these pies were gluten-free, really. But I wanted more.

In the past few months, while working on recipes for our cookbook, Danny and I felt like we cracked the code. These days, we feel — we're making real pie.

It feels good under my hands.



If you're growing serious about gluten-free baking (or baking of any kind), you must buy a food scale and start baking by weight. Please do.

This pie you see before you? We put it together by ounces (or grams), not by carefully scooping and leveling off with a knife. It's so much more precise this way. When I give a recipe in cups, you might substitute brown rice flour for sorghum. Did you know that brown rice flour weighs more than sorghum? (158 grams to 127 grams.) Your pie crust will be denser than mine. You'll blame the recipe.

That's why the recipe you'll see below gives the measurement in ounces for each flour. If you're going to substitute flours, just use the same amount of ounces. That way, you can adapt this recipe, easily. Whatever combination of flours you use (or even a mix, which is fine!), just make sure you sift in a total of 16 ounces. You won't have exactly the same pie, but you'll have some mighty fine pie.



One important step, something that slows me down and forces me to focus on the process, is to mix all the flours together before I add anything else. See all those different colors? Those flours have different textures. Do you want one bite of your pie to be a lump of teff, and another to taste like potato starch?

Mix them until they are one flour. (This is fun. I promise. There's a kind of magic to this, watching the individual flours disappear into the greater whole.)



Now, no one will ever solve the "what fats make the best pie crust" debate. All butter? All Crisco? All lard? All oil?

In this house, we have switched, after nearly a lifetime of all butter. It's half leaf lard, half butter. The flake, the taste. With this crust, and this combination, it is hard to go wrong.

Leaf lard, however, is vastly different than the lard you buy packaged in the grocery store. It's slowly rendered fat from around the kidneys on the pig. It's high in everything that is good in lard, particularly the taste.

If you can't find any near you, buy some fat from a pig farmer at your local farmers' market. If you want to learn how to render your own lard, check out this post from Ashley at Not Without Salt. Beautiful.



My dear friend Tita taught me a good trick for pie, something she learned because she didn't plan ahead. Making a pie one day, she realized that all her butter was in the freezer. So, she pulled out a stick and grated the frozen butter into the dough. Worked like a charm. The butter just kind of melted into the flour, in a good way.

We've done this with every pie since. Most of the time, I use a Microplaner, so the butter is super fine. But it clumps up a bit. Here, we used the regular grater. And it worked out just fine.



So much of making pie is by sensory experience. The lard and butter should be cold, the water should be cold, and the dough should feel good in your hands.

After I add the cold lard and butter into the dough, I work it all together with my fingers, sifting and feeling, rubbing and letting it fall back into the bowl, until it feels done. Until the flours and fats have mingled, and it all feels like a sandy beach after a light rain.

I love this part.

Now here, recently, I have changed my mind. For my entire life, I have made pie dough entirely by hand. But through a fluke happening, when a dough felt too dry, I turned on the Cuisinart food processor. I'm convinced.

Tonight, I read a comment on the NY Times Dining blog, about Julia Child's conversion to the Cuisinart: "Julia comments that both her editor, Judith Jones, and her colleague, Simca, each bought a food processor immediately after seeing one in action and quotes Judith as saying 'If only for the pie dough...it's worth the price to me.'

Me too.

And so, after sifting and slowly watching the dough turn sandy, I move it all into the food processor, where I whirl it up and drizzle in the liquids. The dough is always more complete this way.



The finished dough looks like this. Not too dry or flaky. Moist without being wet. If you put your finger in it, there will be an indentation, but your finger will not come out sticky. Just right.



I love crimping pie dough. It's one of my favorite forms of meditation.



These days, it is easier and easier for me to remember: none of this has to be perfect.

If the pie dough falls apart, just stitch the dough back together in the pie pan with your fingers. There's no gluten in it. You can't overwork it.

If the dough isn't entirely what you want, you can make another pie.

If all gets a little burnt, or the bottom crust falls apart, chances are that people will still eat it.

This is all about the process and sharing it together.

It's pie.






Gluten-Free Pie Crust
plus a recipe for Cranberry Pie, from the wonderful Kate McDermott

Danny and I both feel privileged to know Kate McDermott. Wonderfully wise and kind, Kate also has the hands for making pie. Her Art of the Pie class offers her wealth of experience and gentle nudgings on how to make world-class pie. Everyone who takes it loves that afternoon and carries away the memory of making the best pie of their lives.

If you can eat gluten, sign up for one of her classes, right now.

Kate and her husband, Jon Rowley (one of our favorite people, especially for Little Bean), came over to our home this summer to work on gluten-free pie crust. You see, Kate can't eat gluten. Or dairy. She teaches other people how to make pies, but she can't eat them anymore. We've been determined to come up with pie crust that would make Kate happy. We've been happy with it, then happier every time we make it.

I'm humbled to report that Kate, (and Jon) last night enjoyed this gluten-free, dairy-free pumpkin pie we made them. Tonight, Jon wrote about that top photograph, on Flickr: "I had a piece. Excellent." That's high praise from Jon.

Instead of making you wait for our cookbook, we want to share this today. (However, you should understand that we'll never be done tweaking. It's yours to play with now.)


Gluten-Free Pie Crust
1 1/4 cup (5 ounces) almond flour (this is not the same as almond meal)
2/3 cup (2 ounces) gluten-free oat flour
2/3 cup (2 ounces) tapioca flour
1/2 cup (2 ounces) teff flour
1/2 cup (3 ounces) potato starch
1/4 cup (2 ounces) sweet rice flour
2 teaspoons xanthan gum
1/4 teaspoon guar gum
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
5 tablespoons butter, cold (or non-dairy butter sticks)
4 tablespoons leaf lard, cold (see note below)
1 large egg
6 to 8 tablespoons ice-cold water

Cranberry filling
4 cups fresh cranberries
1 1/4 cups sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
pinch salt
3 tablespoons cold unsalted butter


Mixing the dry ingredients. In a large bowl, mix the almond flour, oat flour, tapioca flour, teff flour, and potato starch. I use a whisk here, and slow down as I mix them, repeatedly, until they have become one flour. Add the xanthan and guar gums and the salt. Mix well.

Adding the fats. Add small pieces of the ice-cold butter to the flour mixture, not much bigger than a pea. (Or, if you'd like to do as you see in the photos above, freeze your butter beforehand, then grate the frozen butter into the flours. Move quickly.) Afterward, add the leaf lard in small portions, of equal size.

Making the sandy dough. Use your hands to scoop up the flours and mix in the fats. Go slowly. Rub your hands together. Feel the fats work into the flours with your fingers. I like to lift and rub, scoop and let them all fall through my fingers. You'll know when you are done. You'll feel done. The flours will look sandy now.

Finishing the dough. Combine the egg with 3 tablespoons of the water and whisk them together. Here's where you can go two ways. If you want to do everything by hand, then do so. Add the eggy water to the dough. Work the dough together with your hands, or a rubber spatula, or whatever feels right. When the dough feels coherent, stop.

Or, you can do what I have reluctantly realized makes gluten-free pie dough even better than making it by hand: finish it in the food processor. Move the sandy dough to the food processor and turn it on. As the dough is running around and around, drizzle in the eggy water. Stop to feel the dough. If it still feels dry and not quite there, then drizzle in a bit more water. If you go too far, and the dough begins to feel sticky or wet, sprinkle in a bit of potato starch to dry it out. Again, after you make pies for awhile, you'll know this by feel alone.

Making the crust. Wrap the pie dough in plastic wrap (or in a bowl) and let it rest in the refrigerator for 15 minutes or so. Take it out and roll out the dough between two pieces of parchment paper. This means you won't work any extra flour into the dough. Roll it out as thin as you can. Thinner. Thinner. Come on, you can do it — thinner still. Carefully, lift the top piece of parchment paper and turn the dough upside down on the top of a pie plate. Rearrange until it is flat.

If the dough breaks, don't despair. Simply lift pieces of the dough off the counter and meld it with the rest of the dough. Remember, there's no gluten, so you can't overwork the dough. Play with it, like you're a kid again. Place the pie dough in the pie plate and crimp. When you have a pie dough fully built, you are ready to make pie.

Put the pie pan in the refrigerator while you preheat the oven to 325° and make the filling.

Making the cranberry filling. Put 3 cups of the cranberries in the food processor and pulse until they are coarsely chopped. Transfer them to a bowl. Add the remaining cup of cranberries. Pour in the sugar and cornstarch. Stir. Toss in the nutmeg and salt. Stir. Taste to make sure the filling matches your expectations of tartness and sweetness.

Bring the pie pan out from the refrigerator. Fill the pie pan with the cranberry filling. Put several pats of butter over the top.

Roll out the remaining pie dough between two pieces of parchment paper. Remove the top layer and lay the pie dough over the cranberries. Pinch the edges of the two doughs together, then crimp the pie dough.

Brush with an egg wash, if you want a golden crust. Make a few small slits in the top crust.

Bake until the crust is golden brown and the cranberries starting to bubble out of the slits on top, about 40 minutes. Remove from the oven and let the pie cool.

Please eat pie.

Makes 1 pie, with enough crust for bottom and top.

Some good sources for leaf lard:

-- your local butcher
-- a pig farmer at your farmers' market
-- Dietrichs Meats, a Pennsylvania Dutch butchers that sell products online

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gluten-free dinner rolls

Baking gluten-free seems daunting at first, doesn't it?

I had grown used to scoop and dump. Soften the butter, rip open the bag of white flour, turn on the KitchenAid. I barely had to think. My body remembered the movements of baking for me. Cookies came out crunchy and chewy, the wish come true, nearly every time. Baking, I knew.

And then I had to give up gluten. As much as I embraced it, I didn't know how I would ever bake again. What the heck is xanthan gum? Can't I just use rice flour? How do I combine these flours? Wait, now there's coconut Flour, chia seed flour, and grapeseed flours? Which one do I use? I was confused. Everything felt new.

Now, I know what a blessing this is.



Have you ever noticed how your brain sort of sleeps when you do something you know really well? We may be good at it, but we're not really looking at it. "In other words, it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself."

Learn something new and you'll see the world new too.

I have never learned so much as I have these past four years. My mind has been alive with ideas, always kicking, sometimes singing, sometimes stumbling over themselves. Going gluten-free, and especially learning to bake gluten-free, has awakened me.

There are so many flours to play with, most of which render the kitchen counters a floury white mess afterward. If there's no chance of being neat with potato starch — it emits a white poof as soon as you open the package — then there's no chance of being perfect. Might as well play.



Now, four years later, I'm still at beginner's mind. The first year was exuberant but the recipes didn't always work. After I met Danny, I learned so much about how food works that I grew more capable. I expect more out of the baked goods now. Life keeps introducing new flours — these rolls rely on almond flour, not almond meal, the one I normally use — and new techniques. I still don't know what I'm doing.

That makes the first taste of these dinner rolls — the 6th batch we created, the ones that have a light pull-apart inside, a soft crunch, a taste of something familiar and entirely new — all the sweeter.



Gluten-Free Dinner Rolls, a work in progress, inspired by this recipe

We love these rolls. More importantly, Little Bean loves these rolls. She's talking up a storm these days, babbling and exploring the world with sounds and syllables. Her favorite word at the moment, however? "Bread!" In the mornings, she reaches her hand toward the kitchen counter and stretches toward the latest batch of these rolls. Little kids are the most honest critics. If a food isn't good, they just spit it out on the table. The fact that she loves them so? We think you will too.

One of the keys to these rolls is this particular combination of flours. We have worked and changed them and tried other groupings. You're not going to go wrong with other flours, but this one is the best combination for us. You'll see that I have put the ounces behind each measurement, in case you want to substitute other flours. Part of the key to the success of these rolls is the almond flour. Elana, from Elana's Pantry, has inspired me to start playing with it more. High in protein and fluffy in texture, almond flour makes gluten-free baking far more fun. Elana just put up a useful guide to why she uses almond flour, which you should read too.

I know that many of you might ask about substitutions. I don't know. I tried some, and I found that flaxseed and water worked as a good egg replacement in one batch. I've seen soy milk powder and goat's milk powder at our local grocery store. The original recipe calls for instant potato flakes, but I just like quinoa flakes better. There are options. Feel free to leave questions here and maybe other readers can answer them. You won't make the same rolls with different ingredients. However, once you make these rolls, they're yours. If you can eat each of these ingredients, please do try this recipe exactly as written. Then, feel free to play!

2 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast
1 cup water, heated to about 110°
3/4 cup (3 ounces) almond flour
1/2 cup (3 ounces) millet flour
1/3 cup (2.25 ounces) potato starch
1/2 cup (2.25 ounces) tapioca flour
1/3 cup (2.25 ounces) sweet rice flour
1/3 cup (2 ounces) cornstarch
1 1/4 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons xanthan gum
1 teaspoon guar gum
1/4 cup nonfat dry milk powder
1/2 cup quinoa flakes
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 large egg
handful of sesame seeds

Activating the yeast. Combine the yeast and a pinch of sugar. Turn on the hot water in your faucet and run it over the inside of your wrist. When the water feels the same temperature as your skin, you're ready. Pour the cup of water into the bowl with the yeast and sugar and stir gently. Set aside the bowl in a warm place and allow it to bubble to double its size, about 15 minutes.

Making the dough. Pour the almond flour, millet flour, potato starch, tapioca flour, potato starch, sweet rice flour, and cornstarch into the bowl of a stand mixer. (You can also mix this by hand, if you don't have a stand mixer.) Mix on low speed to combine the flours. Add the salt, sugar, xanthan gum, guar gum, dry milk powder, and quinoa flakes. Mix everything together until the dry ingredients are combined well and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Add 6 tablespoons of the softened butter, the egg, and the yeasty water. Mix until everything has combined well, about 3 minutes on medium speed.

The dough will be soft, softer than a traditional roll dough would be. Do not add flour to compensate. The dough at this stage should have the consistency of cookie dough.

Waiting for the dough to rise. Put the dough in a warm place in the kitchen, covered, and allow it to rise to twice its size, about 1 hour. If you have a cold kitchen where you know dough rarely rises, set the bowl on a wire rack, and the rack over a large bowl of hot water. Replenish the hot water every 30 minutes or so. Or, you can heat the oven to 200°, put in the rolls-to-be, put a pan of ice cubes on the rack below the rolls, close the door, and turn off the oven. They will rise well that way too.

Shaping the rolls and rising again. Grease a large cake pan or casserole dish, lightly, on the bottom. Grab a hunk of the dough, about the size of the palm of your hand (like a golf ball on steroids), and roll it into a ball. If the dough is sticky, use a little sweet rice flour to grab it. As best you can, roll the ball of dough and shape it until each piece is smooth and whole. Repeat with the rest of the dough. Set the baking pan in a warm spot and allow the rolls to rise again (see the photographs above to see this process).

Baking the rolls. Preheat the oven to 375°. Melt the butter. Brush the top of each roll with the melted butter, then scatter the sesame seeds over the top. (An egg wash would make the top of the rolls shiny, but I prefer the taste of butter here. Up to you.) Slide the pan into the oven and bake until the rolls are firm and browned on top, about 20 minutes. (You can also take their temperature — about 180° internally.) Take the rolls out of the oven and let them cool, about 10 minutes. Remove and put them onto a wire rack. As soon as you won't burn your mouth, eat a roll.

Enjoy.

Makes about 12 rolls.

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