Because what is an online recipe without a huge chunk of text at the beginning that allows someone to claim copyright over the whole page?
I've been eating gluten-free recently, after my mother finally convinced me it would be a good idea. I used to keep at it with the regular bread because hey, I look as healthy as a horse, right? Nothing could possibly be going wrong! It's not like I've been constantly worried that I'm suspiciously skinny for the amount of food I consume and slightly hungrier every year! I like my sammiches dammit!
But Mom always brings up the fact that when I was a little bitty baby I wasn't getting enough nutrition from my food until the doctor had her give me rice and eggs in place of bread. So there had to be something to the whole thing. I had to give in eventually, just to try it.
The immediate result was that the horrid gas pains I'd been dealing with for the last 20 years went away. And then when I had a small helping of wheat pasta, they came back for a day.
Well. That settles that.
Except now I have to figure out how I'm going to make sammiches without regular bread. So, I figure, get some gluten-free bread from the grocery store. Surely there's a brand that works for me, right?
Wrong. Grocery-store gluten-free bread is bland bullshit. It has negative taste. The only good gluten-free bread I have ever tasted was from Trader Joe's, and even that stuff is only good when it's toasted.
So, I think, well, I've got this kitchen here, I've got a bowl, I've got some gluten-free flour because my mother bakes gluten-free cookies. I bet I can do some bread! There's got to be a decent recipe out there!
And there was. And I made it. It took two hours but I made the thing. It was the first time I'd made a genuinely decent gluten-free bread after some efforts two years ago, and the first time I even got yeast to actually rise. I was so proud of myself.
And then I sliced the bread and learned first-hand the practical difference between ordinary and gluten-free bread. Because the critical component of the word "gluten" is "GLUE". Glue-ten is literally the stuff that makes bread stick to itself. It's why you have to toss in xanthan gum to a gluten-free recipe in a bid to replicate gluten's effect. And when it comes to slices of bread, you want them to stick together even when they're thin slices...
Which these kind of did. They also kind of didn't. The core mostly stayed intact but the crust broke off on a lot of slices. With ordinary bread, they actually add gluten during the industrial baking process specifically to prevent packaged sliced bread from turning into a pile of crumbs during shipping. (This is in addition to the high levels of gluten in American hard red wheat, which may be why American bread can punch people in the stomach when they would otherwise be fine with European soft white wheat).
In its fresh form, the bread was quite good; the day after it retreated into the same blandess as I have witnessed with the grocery-store variety. And the recipe takes two whole hours to make! So I thought, surely there is some other way of making gluten-free bread? Could I perhaps use oats?
And I was in luck! There was a very simple recipe for oat bread online. Three ingredients: whole oat flour, plain whole milk yougurt, and baking powder. Combine those three, slap the dough into a bread tin, bake for a while, and you get...a short loaf of dense bread that is somehow even more bland than the previous recipe.
Ugh! What am I to do! Forget the bread! I'll just make...crackers! Gluten-free crackers! That's got to be easier! Here's a recipe for almond-flour crackers! This ought to be okay! There are fewer ways for crackers to go wrong! And then I can just eat crackers with cheese! Here we go!
The good news is they didn't go wrong. The bad news is these "crackers" wound up with the precise consistency and crumbliness of a cookie. Except without any sugar, and tasting entirely like almonds. I had made a bunch of sugarless almond cookies. An intruiging taste, to be sure...but atrocious with cheese. Excellent with dark chocolate though. Yes, folks, I have invented a Fancy-Schmancy S'More.
But never mind that, I'm getting to the bit with the oat cookies. I mean crackers. They're supposed to be crackers. But as for how the recipe turns out even when done right...
Well first of all, here's the recipe itself. I have adapted it slightly from a recipe I found online, by removing the coconut sugar and cinnamon. I want to eat these things with cheese, dammit! Not chocolate this time! Also I added a tablespoon of water.
Chord's Oat Flour Cracker-Cookies
Ingredients
1 Cup whole oat flour
1/4 tsp salt
3/4 tsp baking powder
3 tbsp butter, softened
4 tbsp water
Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 400 degress farhenheit.
2. Combine dry ingredients in large bowl.
3. Add butter and mix with flour using a pastry cutter until butter is completely mixed
4. Add water and mix with flour until you have a moderately sticky dough.
5. Roll dough into ball.
6. Place saran wrap on top of ball and use rolling pin to roll dough very thin (1/8 inch or thinner).
7. Score flattened dough in a grid of 1-inch squares, for easy breakage.
8. With a fork poke two sets of holes in each square
9. Place in oven and bake for 10 minutes.
10. Remove from oven and allow to cool before serving.
Results:
Maybe I have to bake these for twice as long as I thought, because these things come out with the very same cookie-consistency as the earlier attempt with almond flour. Given all I have said about my escapades with gluten-free breads, it is almost as if any attempt to get non-gluten flour to do the things glutinous flour can do will only ever be moderately successful.
That being said, they go quite well with any cheese.
UPDATE: I have just learned that some cultivars of oats actually contain gluten. GOD FUCKING DAMMIT.