Bonus: Sweet and Sour Shortcakes (new Style)

I love strawberries and even though they are technically out of season in Louisiana isn't going to stop me from eating them. And I found out today that one of the theme carnival I've wanted to jump on board of was having the theme of strawberries this month, I had to join in. I have no idea what I'm doing but I'm going to try, right?

No form, no fashion but still frakin' fabulous!

So one of the staples of my kitchen is an amazing recipe by Linda of Gluten Free Homemaker. She's also the one who's doing the carnival. It's for a Focaccia bread/hamburger bun and I've been using ever since the first moment I found it. I even commented on it so you can see how long I've been using it and making it. I average at least one batch a week, I believe and use it for everything, sandwiches, pizza dough, etc, etc, etc. This was my first batch ever. Before the Muffin Rings came in the mail from wonderful Amazon. Not very pretty, but oh so very tasty when I hadn't had any kind of bread in about two months.

But the reason for this particular recipe stems from the fact that one of my signature dishes from before I was GF was a Sweet and Sour Shortcake Recipe. I needed a sweet bun, but one that could absorb the flavor of the vinegar and such. Things simmer and stew in the back of my brain forever if I have the time to let it. I mentally cook something about twenty times before it ever reaches the stove if it's not an impulsive thing. The cake I'm planning on for my best friend's wedding has already gone through about four incarnations and she's not even technically engaged yet.

You know how when you're sick, things sit and stew in your brain becoming all sorts of delirium, especially when you're REALLY sick? Well combine that with my generally stew-y nature (Hmm...stew sounds really good right now, but...oh wait, tangent again ) I should either never be allowed to cook while sick, or I should always cook while sick because the fact is, I can't follow a recipe worth a darn when I'm sick but I usually come up with a pretty sick (as in really good) screwup that works amazingly well for what I'm trying.

This is what happened when I brutalized Linda's recipe one steamy March night in Louisiana when I was feeling a bit loopy. See, when I'm sick, my brain remembers more of my culinary training than I do and I don't have any silly hangups about doing things the 'right' way and just do what seems intuitively right. Linda's recipe is amazing but what I wanted that night was a sweet bun designed for yummy fillings that made my sweet tooth happy. I have mentioned the ball of yarn, right? The one that tells me things? I listen to it far too often.

So in listening to that ball of yarn...I present

Sweet and Sour Shortcakes (New and Improved)

Ice cream and Cream Sweet and Sour Shortcakes

Difficulty: Sweetly simple with a Sour Twist (Aka not too hard but a lot of steps in some ways)

Time: 2 Hours total. Most of which is resting and baking.
Feeds: 8 Healthy Portions

Mise en Place

For the Biscuits and cream: 

Mixer (preferably stand) with Paddle and whip attachment

Mixing bowl (No bigger than medium needed)
Bowl Scraper/Spatula
Muffin Rings (For a more rustic look, you don't have to have them)
Double Half Sheet pans (Or a pan with a airpocket to help control uneven heating)
Parchment paper
Ice cream scoop (#3 is my preferred size but can also just spoon it out)
Oven
Optional: Half Sheet pan lid or pan topper ( I'll explain below)
Optional: pot of boiling water
Optional: Pan rack
Optional: Towel
For Sauce:
1 Good sized Sauce Pan
1 Heat Safe Spoon with deep pockets
A gluten Free cooking spray

Ingredients
1 1/3 cup Brown Rice Flour
2/3 cup Sweet/Glutinous Rice Flour (No Wheat Gluten, it has Rice Gluten. Different)
1 cup Tapioca starch though you can sub about half for potato starch (Not flour) for taste
2 tsp Unflavored Gelatin (I've also just thrown in a pack, it doesn't matter too much)
1 Tbsp Xantham or guar gum
1 Tbsp Instant Active Yeast
1/4 cup Sugar
1 1/2 Tsp Baking Soda
1 cup water
1/4 cup water mixed with 1 Tbsp Chia seeds (Black or White, don't matter)
4 Eggs
1/4 cup Olive Oil
1 tsp Vinegar (Don't miss this part. It's pretty important)
~~~
1/2 cup Whipping Cream
2 Tbsp Sugar
Cap of Vanilla
~~~~
~4-6oz Balsamic Vinegar
2-3 Tbsp Sugar
2 lbs Strawberries


First, Add all the dry ingredients together in the mixer bowl and set to slowly mix the flours; The brown rice, sweet Rice and Tapioca plus the gelatin, gum, yeast, salt and sugar and the baking soda. Normally this recipe doesn't have baking soda, its leavening comes from the yeast, but I found that a little bit of baking soda actually gives me more of a crumbly inside that I want to help absorb all the yummy sauce.

Hold its own shape.Very soft dough.

In a separate bowl add the water, the chia water, the eggs, olive oil and vinegar. Mix it up pretty well and turn on the mixing bowl to a bit higher of a speed and add the wet ingredients. Keep it at about half speed for several minutes 2-3 usually works but if it's warmer, maybe 4 until it looks like this below. I actually tried to not add the gum into it because I'm trying to steer away from gum usage but it was just falling apart so I added at the end and mixed for like another minute beyond that. Preheat the oven to 400 F.

Letting the dough rest for a moment or two, it's time to get out the pans. I have NEVER run into an oven outside of a commercial oven that actually cooks evenly so I prefer to double pan all of my pans when it actually matters. Baking biscuits, cakes and breads do matter so they get the double pans. I place a piece of parchment up on it and place the muffin rings on it. I get between 9-10 biscuits for this amount of dough.

Then I place the pan lid over them. This doubled pan is also where the pan rack, boiling water and towel come in. After the lid is over the biscuits, I place the boiling water in a third pan which has a rack in it to place the doubled pans so I can just slide it off come baking time. This helps to control the amount of time I have to let it sit and it's almost a perfect 15 minutes every times for rising just the right amount I need.  Place the towel over the top to keep extra heat in (have I mentioned I'm a control freak yet? I like things to be able to be replicated even in my sick-y mind. I think I'm so much a control freak that it's permeated my entire being and so my sick brain knows I'll beat it up if I can't repeat something it did. *grin* Anyhoose) You don't have to do this, you can just let it rest, I just find this does its job consistently which I like.

Slide just the double pan into the oven and turn down the heat to 375 or 350 depending on how brown you like your top. With the additional sugar in my recipe versus Linda's the bottoms brown kinda easily so you don't want it at quite 400. It should take about 15-20 minutes. Her recipe calls for about 15 minutes, but since our temp is lower, we still need it to cook. At 20 minutes it should be very lightly brown. See?

Just enough to coat the bottom

Let them rest and cool to room temperature fully. This will take about 20-30 minutes. Then it's time to cut up the strawberries. There's no real way to get strawberries the same actual size so I just cut off the top so it's flat, turn the flat side to the cutting board and cut it into slices in a vertical cut. It'll take a while, about ten minutes. Once that's done, I put the vinegar into a pan, (and yes, I know acid to a metal for long term is bad but this won't be long it just cooks the items better.)

Don't want to add too many strawberries

While that's going on, I go ahead and whip the cream, sugar and vanilla together to get a heavy slog as my mum and her dad call it. Letting that sit for just a few moments, I throw a bit of sugar into the vinegar while it's heating up. Just use about a low medium heat (a 3 on an 8 heat stovetop) and stir it using the heat resistant spoon. When you can't hear the sugar scraping along the pan, it's ready. Toss in your strawberries (most pans will only fit about 1 lb at a time but you can reuse the sauce, just adding a bit more vinegar and sugar to re-situate it).

Left with fork edging. Right with knife.

 
Cut open the cooled biscuit bread with a fork for a nice English muffin like texture so it can soak up some of that wonderful sauce as well. The flat is not bad by any stretch. But I love to soak up sauces and rough edges do that better.

If using just the whipped cream, I put some of the strawberries and sauce on the cut biscuits then slap on some slog and voila, all done. But if I'm doing Ice cream like A prefers (him and his sweet tooth), then I put the ice cream on first, then top it with some cream and then slather it in Strawberries with a bit of sauce. Normally we share with our neighbors but they weren't home so our dessert today had a few more strawberries than normal. That's ALL strawberries under the cream in this picture.

Anyways, a great big Thank you out to Linda for the wonderful start to my Living Fully way of life. And I'm sorry for murdering your recipe. Actually, I'm not, it's still awesome...just different.

 This post links to Gluten Free Wednesday Strawberry Carnival

Birthday Strawberries and Things to Come!

Hey, Hey, it's my birthday and what better day to reboot "Just a Sweet Geek" than today (Plus it's easier to remember the anniversary). I have a lot of things in mind for this blog now that I've rebooted it and my life by living Gluten Free. I leave for China in a week but already have backlog recipes to share with whoever stumbles upon this humble blog. I haven't been doing gluten free as long as many people out there who blog about the experience but I'm getting more proactive about it all.

A lot of recipes fill that midpoint of not fancy but not simple that are common for people living GF. I'm going to try to fill in the ends. The super simple stuff that people don't think about like techniques that can still be used with gluten free living and the fancier end things that people think are too hard for gluten free living. That isn't to say I won't do any middle ground. I'm all over the board with my recipes and I hope you'll enjoy them too. Now, I'm not going to say something is Gluten Free, it will be in the labels but the idea of Living Without has never appealed to me. Instead, I try to focus on what other ways I can eat things and be healthily happy so instead I'm just going to list the recipe so that it will seems natural to have it the way it is and there's no sense of deprivation.

Structure is a nebulous thing with me; I love it, but no one else seems to understand the logic but here's the breakdown. I'm going to give you the mise en place; the stuff you need to do what you need to do for the recipe so you can make sure you have it or a close substitute. Then the ingredients so you can have them together. Then the instructions. With my commentary of course. Then I'm going to try and figure out a way I can just link you to the flat recipe so you can print it out easily since that's the hardest thing to do with blog recipes I've found.

This first one though is a simple strawberry recipe. I live in Louisiana and we LOVE our strawberries down here and I've done all sorts of weird but yummy things with them. We're just ending our strawberry season but here's a good idea anyways. So I have a recipe for you that won't take more than about oh....ten or so minutes of active work time.

Deep Fried Strawberries with Chocolate Sauce
Difficulty: Super Easy just need to keep an eye on things
Time: About 10 prep, and 10 active
Makes: About 2lbs if you really WANT to eat that much. Generally you'll have leftover batter.
Mise en Place:

• Deep Fryer or deep cast iron pan with oil (Peanut or Canola is best if you're not allergic)filled up and heating to at LEAST 350 but closer to 360 is preferable.
• Chopsticks
• Medium Mixing Bowl
• Plate lined with paper towels
• Small mixing bowl
• Spoon and/or Fork

Ingredients:

• 1 lb Strawberries (Freeze Fresh ones for at least two hours before hand (Stems removed))
• Alternative: Already frozen and hulled strawberries
• Alternative: Frozen Hulled Strawberries with a little bit of cream cheese inside the hull.
• 1 egg yolk
• 1/3-1/2 cup brown rice flour
• 1/3 cup Soda Water
• 1/6 cup Cornstarch
• 2 TBSP Honey
• 1/2 cup Chocolate
• 1/2 cup heavy cream

While your oil is heating up, take the 1/3 cup of brown rice flour and put it in the medium mixing bowl. Add the cornstarch and stir with a spoon or fork. Add the egg yolk and the Soda Water and continue mixing with the honey. If the mix seems too thin you can add more rice flour. You're wanting the consistency of a slightly thick pancake batter. It will bubble up with the soda water reacting to everything.

For the Chocolate Sauce: Mix the chocolate and the heavy cream together and heat in the microwave for 20 seconds at a time, stirring then reheating until everything is melted and homogenous (mixed to the same throughout). If it still seems too thick, you can add a little more cream and mix. Might need to reheat if you want to use it over the strawberries while still warm but not too much heat at once.

For the Strawberries: Once you have the consistency and the oil is heated, you bring out the frozen strawberries. Throw no more than a few in at a time into the batter, coating them well. Now take the chopsticks and pull the strawberries out being very careful not to drip. (Less cleanup that way). Drop them carefully into the oil and let them fry. If using a deep fryer, be careful and don't let them on the heating coils inside the oil or they'll end up with burn marks. I try to hold onto the strawberries as long as I can with the chopsticks and use a basket between the strawberries and the heating coil. Once it is a nice soft brown (with brown rice flour they'll be a little darker) usually about 2 minutes or so, I use the basket to pull them out and place on the plate with the paper towel to dry. This part will take practice because  how long the strawberries take depends on the size of the strawberry. Sometimes they'll have a cold center or you might have to get the batter darker.

Oh, and don't forget to smile and say "Strawberries" when you get your picture taken. Gets a gorgeous smile every time!

This post links to Gluten Free Wednesday Strawberry Carnival