Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Trial and Error

GF cooking/baking is sort of a challenge, no matter if you have been doing it for 5 days or 5 yrs.

You are never sure how a recipe will turn out, even if you have made that recipe a time or two before. And trying a new recipe is like an adventure , where you have a limited "road map" to help guide you to the end.

ingredients

The mixing, weighing ( yes, weighing) of the dry ingredients, making sure that your milk and eggs are at the right "room temp" before you add them to the dry mix.

Making sure that you mix the batter long enough to activate the xanthun gum to insure proper binding.

Gabriel helping make the pancakes
And that everything mixes together nicely, but that you don't over mix either.

So when Gabriel asked me to make pancakes, which I had not done in over a month, I decided I wanted to make buttermilk pancakes.

No, problem I thought, I have made buttermilk pancakes a time or two before and since I am pretty comfortable with taking a gluten filled recipe and converting it in to a GF recipe I felt I was more than up for the challenge of making GF buttermilk pancakes for my son.

G.I. Joe cooking the pancakes
After I had weighed, measured and mixed all the ingredients G.I.Joe decided that he wanted to cook the pancakes, which was more than okay with me :)

nice and golden brown
But, what should have been a simple task turned out to be a BIG PAIN!!

G.I.Joe made two separate attempts before he just trashed the batter and the 8 pancakes he had "cooked".

in they trash they went


The first set cooked up really nice on the outside, but did not want to cook on the inside and after almost 10m of cooking them he took them off the griddle and turned up the heat to 400F then set about making another batch.

The second batch cooked faster on the outside, but we had the same problem on the inside, nothing but raw dough. G.I.Joe cooked these for about the same length of time and ended up pretty much burning them  then gave up and tossed them into the trash, also, and the unused batter into the sink.

unused batter
Needless to say we did not have pancakes that morning.

I often hear that baking is a science and cooking is an art form and well I have to say that NOW I finally understand what that means.

And even though I did not get the end results I was wanting I did learn that the way I had combined the ingredients was not the proper way and so next time I will know what NOT to do.


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