Flax-Coconut Pancakes

I used to make pancakes almost every weekend. Stacks of simple buttermilk cakes dripping with maple syrup was a Sunday morning thing. Then, I think I developed pancake-guilt. I decided even weekend breakfasts should be a little healthier at least most of the time. If a pancake has some fruit in it or whole wheat flour or nuts, I feel better about serving it. So, of course I had to try the Flax-Coconut Pancakes from the March issue of Food and Wine. The recipe is from Elisabeth Prueitt of San Francisco’s Tartine. She too likes the idea of a healthier pancake, and she’s recently been using grains other than white flour since developing gluten-intolerance. For myself, I’m not concerned about the gluten content in baked goods, but I was happy to pull out my bin of various flours and starches and use some ingredients other than white flour. And mostly, these pancakes sounded like they’d be delicious with the coconut flour in the batter and the coconut oil on the griddle. I pushed the coconut flavor even further by adding some unsweetened, grated coconut. For serving, I couldn’t resist the usual drizzle of pure maple syrup, but I topped that with some chunks of fresh mango as well.

The recipe follows the typical pancake-making procedure but uses a few more ingredients. Brown rice flour, white rice flour, sugar, potato starch, tapioca starch, coconut flour, flaxseed meal, baking powder, and salt were combined in a large bowl. In a smaller bowl, eggs, milk, and melted coconut oil were whisked before being poured into the dry ingredients. I added a half cup or so of grated coconut and a little more milk to prevent the batter from being too thick. I spread melted coconut oil on a hot griddle with a silicone brush, and then the pancakes were cooked for a few minutes per side. Just like any other kind of pancake, when the surface bubbles, it’s time to turn the cake.

The pancakes had a subtle, warm, tropical flavor from coconut in three forms which was fitting with the mango chunks on top. The coconut and flax make these heartier than plain buttermilk pancakes, but most important, I was pancake-guilt-free serving these for a weekend breakfast treat covered in maple syrup.

Granola Bars

Clearly, I use hiking as an excuse to make homemade granola bars. Last year, I made fruit and nut energy bars which we took with us while hiking in Arizona, and just recently I tried the granola bars from the Flour book for a state park hike closer to home. It's hot here, and it's dry, and it doesn't seem like either of those conditions will be changing any time soon. So, we ignored all of that and went to Pedernales Falls State Park for a hike, a picnic, and some splashing through very little water. As you can see in the photo below, the riverbed was nearly dry in places courtesy of our ongoing drought. It made it easy to walk up and back from one side to the other in several places along the river, but it also made for disappointing splashing after our hike. At least we had plenty of water with us for drinking and plenty of snacks. This version of granola bar is a layered affair with a quickly-made jam between a crunchy bar and a seed-filled topping. Overall, they're a little more tender than other granola bars I've tried, and they taste more like an indulgent treat than a healthy snack.

About that jam, all that's involved is adding water and sugar to a mix of dried fruit, bringing it a boil, and then letting it sit for about an hour. Once the dried fruit softened, the mixture was pulsed in a food processor to make a chunky jam. Dried apples, cranberries, and apricots were suggested, but I didn't find dried apples at the grocery store, so I used dried mango instead. The jam can be made in advance and stored in the refrigerator. When the food processor was cleaned and ready to go again, the base of the bars was made in it with flour, oats, brown sugar, coconut, salt, cinnamon, and butter. After being pulsed together, two-thirds of that mixture was spread in a nine inch by thirteen inch baking pan, and it was baked for about 30 minutes. For a crisper base layer, you could go for a longer baking time. The baking pan was removed from the oven, and the bottom layer was topped with the jam. The remaining granola mixture was refrigerated while the base layer baked, then, when cool, it was broken into chunks and mixed with flaxseeds, sunflower seeds, and hemp seeds. There was supposed to have been millet, and I was sure I had some millet in one of my grain and flour bins at home, but since it wasn't actually there, I used hemp seeds instead. That crumb mixture was sprinkled on top of the jam, and the pan went back into the oven for an additional 50 minutes.

Even though these bars were full of healthy oats, seeds, and fruits, they tasted far more decadent than you would expect. The jam layer and crumb topping helped disguise the bars' granola-ness too. Our hike might have been in unrelenting heat next to a nearly dry river, but there were no complaints about the snacks that day.

Breakfast Biscotti

Last week, I mentioned that I was baking for the Austin Bakes for Japan bake sale which was held on Saturday. As I wrote about that, I hoped there would be a good turnout, I hoped we’d have a lot to offer at each sale location, and I really hoped the fundraising would be a success. All of those things happened and exceeded our highest hopes. There were beautiful baked goods overflowing the tables at all five locations of the sale, and people kept coming to visit the sales, choose treats to take home with them, and leave behind donations. The positive response and generosity of the community were stunning. Kathryn was our leader of the efforts to organize this event, and all of her hard work resulted in the bake sale going perfectly. The other team leaders who helped with planning as well as overseeing bake sale locations were Carly, Rachelle, Shelley, and Stephanie. As of the end of Saturday, the fund raising total was over $11,400, and because the online giving page is still active, the total is now over $11,700. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this event and for all the wonderful generosity.

So, this being a bake sale, I had a perfect excuse to pull out some recipes and bake several things in a couple of days. Timing was an issue since I couldn’t bake everything at the very last minute, and that’s how I decided on biscotti for one item. They’re cookies that last well, so I baked them two days before the sale. I remembered there were several good biscotti versions in Chewy, Gooey, Crispy, Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies, and that’s where I found this recipe. As with all the recipes in this book, this one included an upgrade option for tweaking the main ingredients. It’s a kind of healthy type of biscotti with whole wheat pastry flour, oats, walnuts, and dried fruit, and the upgrade was the addition of sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, hemp seeds, and flaxseed meal. There were also additionl tips and an overview of biscotti making. For instance, in the US we have adopted biscotti and made it our own. So while the traditional Italian biscotti or cantucci are very dry and crunchy and usually flavored with anise, our American biscotti are slightly cakey in comparison with lots of additional flavors.

This breakfast biscotti recipe is of the American style, and this was an easy cookie dough to prepare since everything was just whisked and then stirred together. All purpose flour was combined with whole wheat pastry flour, baking powder, and salt. In a separate bowl, brown sugar and oats were mixed. Then, milk and butter were heated until the butter melted, and that was added to the oat mixture and left to stand for a few minutes. Eggs and vanilla were added followed by the flour mixture, and then I added toasted chopped walnuts, dried cranberries, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, hemp seeds, and flaxseed meal. The dough was transferred to a silpat-lined baking sheet, and using wet hands, I formed it into a long, rectangular shape, not too wide. By using wet hands to shape the dough, it will become shiny as it bakes. I needed the biscotti to fit into the cellophane bags I had already bought, so I made the shape about four inches wide. The first baking was at 325 degrees F for about 35 minutes. The pan was removed from the oven and left to cool, and the oven was turned down to 300 degrees F. Once cool enough to handle, the baked dough was transferred to a cutting board and cut into half inch or so slices. The slices were set on a baking sheet, on their edges, and the second baking was for 25 minutes. I always worry biscotti might not be completely crunchy, so I moved the cookies around on the sheet and gave them five more minutes in the oven just to be sure.

My biscotti anxiety exists because I’ve tried a few recipes in the past that just didn’t work quite right, but there was no need to worry here since this came from Alice Medrich. Her tips such as using wet hands to shape the dough and standing the cookies on their edges for the second baking as well as the timing and ingredients all worked very well. The biscotti were deliciously crunchy and the nuts and seeds added to that effect. Since I packed them all up for the bake sale, I’m going to have to make another batch just to enjoy at home.

Oat Bran-Applesauce Mini Muffins

The Lenten season is well underway, and that means different things for me today than it did when I was a kid. Growing up, my family and I always observed Lent and the traditional rules of not eating meat on Fridays and giving something up for the 40-day period. Some people gave up candy or ice cream or whatever, but in my family, we always gave up eating between meals. 40 days of no snacks also pretty much meant 40 days of no candy since it wasn’t easy to pass off a pile of jolly ranchers as dessert. These days, things have changed. I don’t eat much meat in the first place, so telling myself I’m not going to eat meat but will eat fish on a Friday doesn’t mean much. Also, since the real idea is to simplify and be a little less decadent, sitting down to a meal of lobster just because it’s Friday is missing the point. As for not eating between meals, I let that go years ago when I couldn’t determine what might be a meal and what might be a snack depending on what I was doing each day. So, I just give up popcorn which kills me every year because I have a serious popcorn problem. And, rather than focusing solely on giving something up, I like to take on something good as well. This year, I’m cooking even more vegetables than usual and spending even more time with my healthy eating types of cookbooks. I recently picked up a copy of Power Foods which showcases 38 of the big players among nutrition-packed fruits, vegetables, proteins, and grains with recipes for every meal of the day as well as snacks. So far, I’ve only cooked from the breakfast chapter, but I see many healthy dishes for Lent and the rest of the year coming from these pages.

The little, oat bran-applesauce muffins looked like a perfect way to have a healthy, grab-and-go breakfast on hand. They’re mini muffins, so you can have one for a tiny breakfast if you’re not that hungry or grab a few on a morning when you need more energy. With no refined sugar, they’re sweetened only with applesauce, dates, and some honey. They were made by reducing applesauce with chopped, pitted dates to cook off some liquid while plumping the dates. Once cool, that mixture was combined with wheat bran, buttermilk, one egg, two tablespoons of honey, some grated fresh ginger, and vanilla. The dry ingredients were whisked together, and those were flour, ground flaxseed, baking soda, salt, ground allspice, and rolled oats. The dry ingredients were stirred into the applesauce mixture, the mini muffin cups were filled, and the muffins baked for about 20 minutes.

The ginger and allspice smelled lovely as the muffins baked, and I thought those flavors were even better after the muffins had sat for a day. Yes, they do contain wheat bran and flaxseed and no actual sugar, but the dates and applesauce give them sweetness and keep the texture very tender. I have several other pages in the book marked, and I predict it will still be getting a lot of use beyond these 40 days.

Flax and Sunflower Seed Whole Wheat Bread

Of the bread baking books I’ve read, they all tend to stick to techniques and recipes for fermenting, proofing, shaping, and baking bread dough of various types. Each one offers a slightly varied approach or unique tips for these processes. I just recently read my review copy of Chad Robertson’s Tartine Bread, and there was something different and kind of ingenious about this bread book. After all the the interesting tips and information about making a wild yeast starter and crafting dough and the different types of breads and how to bake them, there’s a section full of suggestions for using day old bread. Seeing several dishes made with bread made the thought of having a house full of home-baked loaves even more delightful. The various, seasonal kinds of bruschetta, sandwiches, uses of breadcrumbs and croutons, and the delicious photos of all those things give you one reason after the next to bake more bread. So, I just had to decide which bread to make first. The beginning of the book is devoted to describing how to make a basic country loaf, and then all of the other breads are some sort of variation on it. I was distracted at first by the brioche dough and the beignets made from it, but I chose to begin with a whole wheat bread packed with flax and sunflower seeds. If you don’t have a sourdough starter in your possession, Robertson suggests a simple enough way of making one, and he recommends feeding it with half white and half whole wheat bread flours. My starter is always fed with white bread flour, so I began by separating some starter and feeding it with the recommended mix of flours for a day before beginning this bread dough.

There were two key elements to the bread making process in this book. One of those was the baking method which I’ll explain more below, and the other was the goal of achieving a not so sour taste in the bread by only using a scant tablespoon of the mature starter when making the leaven. The night before the dough was to be made, one tablespoon of starter was mixed with warm water and white and whole wheat flours and left at room temperature until the next morning. For whole wheat dough, the leaven was then added to more warm water, all-purpose flour, and whole wheat flour, and it was mixed and left to rest for about an hour. Robertson explains that a whole wheat dough requires a longer rest after mixing that a white flour dough. After resting, salt was added, the dough was transferred to a clean bowl for the three hour bulk fermentation, and it was left until the turning began. Every 30 minutes, the dough was folded or “turned.” For the flax and sunflower seed bread variation, one cup of sunflower seeds was toasted, and one cup of flax seeds was soaked in boiling water. I would have expected the seeds to be added with the salt before the bulk fermentation began, but instead they were added after the second turn or one hour into it. Now, soaking the flax seeds causes them to become a little sticky and mixing all those little seeds into the dough takes a bit of squeezing and folding and mixing by hand. That seemed like a lot of working of the dough at that point of the bulk fermentation, so I may try adding them earlier next time. The next steps involved dividing the dough in two and giving both pieces a bench rest, and then each piece was shaped into a boule, rolled in one cup of raw sunflower seeds, and placed in bowls lined with towels that had been coated with all-purpose and rice flour for the final rise. I placed mine in the refrigerator for about twelve hours before baking. And, the baking involved that other interesting technique I mentioned. Rather than introducing steam in the oven with a spray bottle of water or by pouring water into a pan placed on the oven floor, a cast iron pan with a lid was used. The pan was heated in the oven with its lid, the dough was placed in the hot pan and carefully slashed, the lid was placed on top, and the bread began baking at 450 degrees F. After 20 minutes, the lid was removed, and the bread finished baking.

Because this was a rather wet dough, the lidded cast iron pan captured all the steam escaping from the dough as the bread baked and resulted in a crackly, crisp crust. My only disappointment was the lack of the open, holey crumb that I saw in other breads in the book. I suspect that was due to the bread being dense with seeds and the working of the dough in getting those seeds into it. Still, it was a nutty, flavorful bread that worked perfectly for sandwiches or simply toasted and slathered with butter. Now, I have more bread to bake so I can turn back to that last chapter of the book with all those ways of using it.

I’m submitting this to Yeastspotting where you’ll find some seriously well-made bread.

Flaxseed Waffles with Berries and Honey Cream

On Monday, on Eat me daily via eater.com, I read that Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines are getting frightfully slim. However, Saveur is doing great. I can’t imagine Gourmet magazine going out of business even though I’ve never subscribed to it. For that matter, my subscription to Bon Appetit was free and it just ended. I do buy single issues from time to time, so I hope they survive, and I’m thrilled that Saveur continues to succeed. Speaking of magazines, these waffles were in the January issue of Bon Appetit. Once again, it’s a recipe that’s billed as healthy, isn’t really, but you should make it anyway because the waffles are delicious.

The recipe calls for whole flaxseeds, and I always have flaxseeds on hand since I put them on my breakfast cereal. However, I always grind them and never use them whole. The beneficial nutrition in flaxseeds is more easily absorbed when they’re ground, so that’s how I used them here. The batter also includes whole wheat flour in combination with all purpose flour. I changed up the proportions and used three quarters cup of each. There are also two tablespoons of malted milk powder which I thought was interesting, and it did add a nice flavor. The batter was mixed and left to rest before firing up the waffle iron.

I hadn’t made waffles in ages, and it was fun to pull out that too rarely used machine again. I poured in the batter, spread it evenly, and enjoyed the waffle aroma as they cooked for a few short minutes per batch. Then, cream was whipped with honey, and fresh berries were rinsed and stemmed. Just because I can’t resist, a drizzle of pure maple syrup found its way around the berries, over the whipped cream, and into the square waffle dents where it’s meant to pool. You can make the waffles in advance and re-heat them in the oven. I actually like the crispier texture they achieve after a few minutes in the oven. We had some extras which went into the freezer for a future, big, weekend breakfast.