Baking in Maputo

Country: Mozambique by Lisette

17-02-2013

Apple crumble!

I am so fond of cooking and eating home-cooked food that I wonder at times if I should not start a food-blog. Especially now I am advised to eat gluten-free. With more time on my hands than I had in Toronto, it makes sense to spend more time in the kitchen.

Regularly I find myself in more than one supermarket or vegetable markets to find that particular ingredient that is needed for tonight’s dinner.

Luckily we live in a neighbourhood where it’s not hard to find Indian and Middle Eastern spices. But to find Mexican salsa or cauliflower, I have to go out of my way. Even more so when it comes to gluten-free food products.

As those following me on Facebook know, we got a new oven in January and within days I started grilling chicken and baking nachos and spring rolls. (Yes, spring rolls do not need to be deep-fried!) Last week I baked an apple crumble with sweet apples bought in Swaziland.

Gluten-free bread.

And more importantly, I got all the ingredients and made my very first gluten-free bread! Ok, I’ll be honest most of the ingredients were pre-mixed and there was no kneading involved. Which made me happy for a first try and knowing I’m not such a fan of kneading and getting dough under your nails. Making cornbread with broccoli and cheese is more my style!

Now, the stakes are higher. I promised Marlow to make him a rye bread. There’s only one store that I know where you can get proper bread and the price is ridiculous high. Out of principle, we never bought the bread.

Looking at the list of ingredients, it doesn’t seem to be too difficult to buy it all. Yeast, molasses, bread and rye flour, cocoa powder.. am sure it’s all easy to find. And so it was, except molasses that Marlowe tried to find everywhere. We decided to substitute it with brown sugar.

Everyone warns me the consistency of the dough will be different. Hmm, having never baked bread before that does not mean anything to me. Marlowe is thankfully helping me, as he’s the wizard when it comes to making dough. I have just never enjoyed getting sticky stuff on my hands and under my nails!

Turns out our rye flour has good quality, but our regular flour is awful. We added extra flour and Marlowe started kneading. Then I understood the comment about the consistency, gluten-free bread is much wetter.

Looking good… First rise worked, second rise worked.. In the oven it went! Apprehensively, we kept checking up on the bread. It sounded hollow when tapped as directed by the recipe, just looked darker and smaller.

The taste is surprisingly scrumptious for the first try! We vow that our next try will be with good quality flour, and perhaps extra yeast if we need to add more flour to get the right consistency. Looking forward to our next baking adventure. What will it be?