Cruel and Unusual Geography

With half of our household on a gluten-free regime we can’t use “proper” (i.e. wheat) flour for baking cakes and biscuits as we’d like. We’ve tried a number of commercial alternative flour mixes with variable results, and have come back to making our own. Here’s what I use:

For each cup of flour in the recipe, use ⅓ cup tapioca flour, ⅔ cup rice flour, and 1 teaspoon of Xanthan gum.

I prefer the brown rice flour. It handles and tastes the same, but has more fibre and vitamins.

The secret ingredient is really the Xanthan gum. It may seem expensive, but you only use a little at a time and it really does make all the difference. Without it gluten-free flours are sticky and unpleasant to handle, biscuits run out flat, and breads are dry and crumbly. While Xanthan gum won’t make the gluten-free flour behave or taste exactly like wheat flour, it brings it close enough to make recipes work.

Important tip: mix the Xanthan gum with the other flours before adding to any wet ingredients, or it just won’t mix in properly.

Here’s a spectacular flourless chocolate cake that’s suitable for all sorts of allergies. This is obviously no good for dairy-free or egg-free diets, but almost any other allergy can be accommodated by choosing appropriate chocolate. We tend to use Kinnerton for its nut-free guarantee, but also have enjoyed Trade Aid chocolate in the past.

It’s great to come across a recipe where we have all the ingredients, it’s not too complicated, it’s allergy-friendly, and it is just so decadently rich!

Chocolate Valentino by Chef Wan from his book, Sweet Treats

450 grams of semisweet chocolate, roughly chopped
140 grams butter
5 eggs, separated

Melt chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl set over a pan of simmering water. Stir until smooth. Cool.
Grease a 22cm springform pan. Beat egg yolks and stir into cooled chocolate.
Beat egg whites until stiff peaks form. Gently fold a quarter of the egg whites into the chocolate mixture. Fold in remaining egg whites.
Pour batter into a pan and bake for 25 minutes at 190°C or until done. Cool.

Note: The Valentino is a heart-shaped version of this cake. Bake a Valentino in a heart-shaped pan. This is a very dense chocolate cake.

If, like me, you don’t have kitchen scales, 140g is about half-way between a quarter and a third of a 500g block of butter, or just a tad less than the third 50g mark on the packet.

Here’s something I really want to try: black garlic. It’s a garlic root that has been “aged”, apparently by a fermentation process similar to that used for pu-erh tea.

Black garlic. I want some.

It doesn’t appear to be available in New Zealand yet, but I’ll be keeping my eyes open!

With the days getting noticeably shorter and the Ya Ya House of Excellent Teas no longer selling their excellent Aztec Hot Chocolate, here’s a recipe for a spicy hot chocolate from my sister:

Take a pinch each of cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg, mix to a paste with chocolate powder and hot water, and top with hot milk.

I find most commercial hot chocolate powders to be too sweet, so usually mix my own out of cocoa and sugar in maybe a 3:2 or 2:1 ratio.

When I wrote about the recent peanut desensitisation trials in the UK I said

This is the first real breakthrough in the search for a cure for food allergies.

I should clarify that.

There is no cure. At the moment there is no sign of a cure. What the British trial demonstrated is that it is possible to raise the threshold of sensitivity — where a child had previously reacted to a very small dose of the allergen, they could now tolerate a lot more before a reaction was triggered. However, the allergy remains. If they eat enough of the stuff they can still have an anaphylactic reaction.

What the desensitisation treatment does is remove the worry of what can happen through accidental exposure, and that’s an excellent thing.

Previously considered too risky, a peanut allergy desensitisation programme has been successfully trialled in the UK.

Desensitisation — a process where the patient is injected with increasingly large doses of the substance they are allergic to — is often used to treat allergies such as bee stings and hayfever. No trial for peanut allergies has ever been successful, though, because of the high risk of a catastrophic (and potentially fatal) anaphylactic reaction when the substance is injected.

In this case, the doctors put down their syringes and gave the desensitisation treatment orally — the children ate very small amounts of peanut. After a course of treatment where the amount of peanut given was slowly increased over time, children who previously had anaphylactic reactions to very small amounts of peanut could safely consume several peanuts at once. One child who had an anaphylactic reaction while being assessed at the start of the study was able to eat 10 peanuts by the end.

This was an initial trial with only four children participating (there’s a larger trial under way), but the results give hope to all of us who in one way or another are living with the risk of anaphylaxis always at the back of our minds. This is the first real breakthrough in the search for a cure for food allergies.

Needless to say, this is not something you should try at home.

Background

Food allergy is an increasingly common issue, due in part to greater publicity but also to an increasing incidence of reactions. Sufferers must strictly avoid all contact with the food to which they are allergic. In many cases this is very difficult, and special allergen-free food must be purchased.

In severe cases sufferers carry adrenaline auto-injectors (“Epi-pens”) with which they can inject themselves should a severe reaction occur. While relatively easy to use, these are expensive and have a short shelf life.

Support organisations are staffed by people with experience and knowledge of food allergies and are a good source of information and resources.