I mentioned in my previous post that I've been reducing the amount of starch in my daily diet and that's meant eating a lot more salad. There's a lot to be said for salad: so long as you don't mind paying the extra money for boxed or bagged salad greens, preparing a big heaping helping of salad for a meal is a matter of a few minutes. And, heck, slicing up a head of romaine lettuce into small pieces isn't exactly time-consuming either, though the pre-prepared salad greens tend to keep quite a bit longer. But salad is nothing without some sort of dressing, even if it's just a bit of olive oil and vinegar.
Normally I've relied on bottled salad dressings though my experience with store-bought dressings has been decidedly mixed. Vinaigrettes and Italian dressings tend to be safer buys, although many of them contain thickeners and stabilizers such as xanthan gum that impart a somewhat unpleasant tacky or mucilaginous quality to the dressing. Creamy dressings, especially ranch dressing, are far less trustworthy for multiple reasons. I love the idea of a creamy dressing far more than I like the usual execution. Almost every ranch dressing I've ever tasted, for instance, has had a nasty aftertaste. Also--and I admit this is perhaps a purely personal preference--a creamy dressing should still be somewhat fluid. It should flow over the lettuce, not glop onto it in big, quivering blobs. (I'm sure there's a bit of design to making dressings so thick and mayonnaise-like: it's harder to pour on just a little bit of them.) Furthermore, creamy dressings are I've noticed far more likely to be loaded with sugar. Especially prone to oversweetening is a dressing that I genuinely like when it's done well: Thousand Island.
It's easy to fake up a sort of Thousand Island dressing with off-the-shelf mayonnaise, ketchup, and pickle relish, but...really, you can do better than that. Here's my recipe. As usual I must acknowledge that it's largely based off recipes from another source: Alton Brown's "Good Eats" recipe for mayonnaise, used with little modification, and a Food Network Thousand Island recipe, from which I departed more freely.
Ingredients
1 large egg
½ teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon mustard powder
a pinch of white sugar
2 teaspoons lemon juice (as usual I just use the bottled stuff)
1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar
1 cup canola oil
1 clove garlic
¼ cup sriracha sauce
3 tablespoons ketchup
¼ cup finely chopped pickled cucumbers and daikon (these were homemade)
2 tablespoons of the pickling brine
black pepper
Directions
Crack the egg and separate the yolk from the white. (I use the method of carefully transferring the yolk between the two halves of the broken shell, letting the white spill out over the edges. You can catch the unused white and freeze it for later use but in this case I confess I flushed it.) Transfer the yolk to a small bowl and add the salt, the mustard powder, a small pinch of sugar (probably you can omit this altogether), 1 tsp of lemon juice and 1½ tsp of vinegar. With a small wire whisk mix the ingredient thoroughly until a smooth paste is obtained.
Place the cup of oil in a container that allows for easy dispensing of small amounts; a measuring cup with a spout is a good choice. (Alton Brown uses a squeeze bottle and that probably is better.) Start whisking the mixture in the bowl vigorously and start dribbling the oil into it in a very thin stream at first, with a careful eye to make sure that a large amount of unmixed oil never persists before being whisked in. After maybe a quarter of the oil is added it's safer to pour a bit faster but when the oil is half gone stop. Add the remaining 1 tsp of lemon juice and 1½ tsp of vinegar, whisk these in well, then resume whisking in the oil until it's all added. You should have now a bowl of mayonnaise, light yellow in color, smooth and homogeneous, somewhat more fluid than commercial mayonnaise perhaps but still thick and rich.
Smash the clove of garlic against a cutting board with the flat side of a chef's knife and then mince the pulp as finely as possible before scooping it into the bowl. Add the rest of the ingredients: the diced pickles, the hot sauce, the ketchup, and a few grinds of black pepper. Whisk these in thoroughly. At this point you can consider the dressing done if you like a thicker salad dressing but, if you wish to have a more fluid dressing, whisk in the pickling brine a little at a time until you achieve the desired consistency.
The resulting dressing is so much more flavorful than anything you'll get from a bottle; the hot sauce gives it a sharp tang that brings out the other flavors. Probably the ketchup can be replaced with the same quantity of plain tomato sauce for an even lower-carb dressing (but I used what I had immediately to hand.) Obviously commercial pickles or dill relish may be conveniently substituted for the chopped homemade pickles.
My diet has tended to extreme starchiness over the years; I can consume massive quantities of pasta and bread in the course of a day and I've been known to eat a flour tortilla with nothing on it but a little butter. As a result I am overweight. Hence I've been striving to reduce the amount of starch in my diet, not necessarily in any sort of extreme Atkins-ish way and certainly not by going over to an exclusive diet of beef and bacon as some foolish persons do, but rather by choosing dishes that don't require a lot of starch in the first place: salads instead of sandwiches, vegetables as a side dish instead of pasta.
Still, it's hard to live with less bread; I'm one of those persons for whom almost any foodstuff is improved by placing it between two pieces of bread or wrapping it in a flour tortilla. (Flour, always, never corn. Corn tortillas are mealy and gross.) When the Atkins craze was at its height there were a couple of brands of sandwich bread advertising themselves as "low-carb"; both were expensive and both were not very good to eat and in any case neither is sold in the markets here any more, now that the fad is dead. There's one brand of low-carb tortilla that's not awful and can still be found but again it's expensive and in any case, while tortillas are nice, they're just not as tempting and versatile as a loaf of bread.
How hard could it be, I've thought, to make low-carb bread? One can shave a few grams of starch per serving off by using a whole-grain cereal flour; using coarse rye flour, for example, is somewhat higher in fiber and lower in starch than whole wheat flour. But other flours made from legumes or from "pseudo-cereals" such as quinoa are even lower in starch. They're widely used in gluten-free baking, in which I have next to no interest, and in any case "gluten-free" and "low-carb" are two different goals. Gluten-free flour mixes tend to rely heavily on rice and potato flours which are just as starchy as wheat flour. My hope was to come up with some mixture of a high-protein non-wheat flour, such as soy flour, with enough gluten flour to hold the bread together in a semi-normal fashion.
I've found that the easiest and cheapest of these flours to get locally is gram flour, which goes by a bunch of other names; it's a fine meal made from ground-up chickpeas. At a nearby international grocery store I can get it in four-pound bags for a little more than a dollar per pound, which isn't bad and much much cheaper than buying those horribly overpriced little sacks of Bob's Red Mill flours. I've found gram flour of two sorts at that market, a coarser whole-grain variety and an extra-fine variety called besan flour. I've tried both in bread recipes. Neither worked.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time giving recipes that resulted in utter failure but I'll describe generally my approach to trying to use these flours if only so some reader will know what not to do in future. My hope was that a mixture of the gram flour with wheat gluten flour in an approximately 6:1 to 8:1 ratio could be used directly to replace wheat flour in a bread recipe.
I tried this first with a very simple white bread recipe that's given me excellent results in the past when made with wheat flour; basically it's just warm water, salt, yeast, and flour. For this I tried the coarse gram flour. The resulting dough was completely intractable and abominably sticky; attempting to knead it in my stand mixer with the bread hook only plastered the stuff against the sides of the bowl and no real kneading action ever took place, even with the addition of more gluten flour in an attempt to make the dough more cohesive. Worse, it scarcely rose on standing in a warm oven. I suspect I know why: in the absence of any added sugar to a bread dough the source of sugar for the yeast's fermentation comes from the starch in the flour, slowly broken down by amylases produced by the yeast. But the low-starch gram and gluten flours didn't give the yeast enough to work with so the resulting dough never rose.
Therefore for my second try I thought I might have a better chance with a bread recipe with added sugar to encourage the yeast to rise. Furthermore I hypothesized that the fine-ground besan flour would yield a more tractable dough than the coarse gram flour I had tried earlier. This time I chose to modify a recipe intended for a rye bread. Most rye bread recipes I've encountered add brown sugar or molasses (or both), partly for flavor but also because the denser, stickier rye doughs seem to need a bit more help in rising. The results? Only very slightly better. The dough had at least enough tenacity that it stayed more or less in a mass that the dough hook could actually work on instead of just getting mashed against the sides of the bowl to stay there, but it showed an incredible ability to swallow up many cups of the besan flour without much diminishing in stickiness. An ordinary wheat flour dough will undergo a rather sharp change in consistency as more flour is kneaded into it, losing its stickiness and pulling away from the sides of the bowl rather than tending to cling, and forming into a ball that can be handled easily. This besan flour dough never behaved that way. Adding more and yet more besan flour, with a little sprinkling of gluten flour as well in the hope it would help, did gradually lessen the stickiness of the dough but even at best it still clung tenaciously to the bowl. Eventually in frustration I scooped it out with a spatula and into a bread pan as though it were a very thick and heavy "batter bread" and let it rise. To my surprise it actually did rise a bit but by no more than about half of its original volume--really you want it to double. The resulting bread was actually somewhat bready in texture, if very dense, but then I realized that making bread with chickpea flour was doomed to fail for a much more fundamental reason: the loaf tasted foul. The optimistic description on the Bob's Red Mill bag talks of its "nutty flavor" and there was some nuttiness there but also a very unpleasant earthy taste. The mouth feel of the bread was all wrong, too; it seemed to cling to and coat the tongue like clay. In any case, just as inedible as the previous loaf.
I suspect my mate Misha is correct. She pointed out before I started on these gram flour experiments that thousands of well-paid professionals have worked on the problem of making an edible low-carb bread and failed miserably. What hope did I have?
