Easy cheesy gluten free quick bread

If you can tolerate dairy this is a super-easy delicious foccacio-style bread made with self raising flour, grated mozzarella cheese and yogurt.  The middle is soft, the outside crisp, and my resident dairy eater kept going yum yum as he ate this with the spiced lentil and carrot soup we had for supper.

Ingredients
200g grated mozzarella cheese
300g gf self raising flour (40% urid, 40% tapioca, 20% cornmeal, with 1tsp baking powder to 100g flour)
yogurt /water to mix

Mix the cheese and flour together and then add yogurt until you get a soft dough.  Pat into shape on a baking tray and bake for 20minutes in an 175C oven.

Eat hot or cold.  Freeze left overs if you don't expect to eat it within a couple of days.

Blueberry frozen yogurt - high fibre!

I have a lot of dried blueberries left over from baking fruit cakes.  I've been experimenting with frozen yogurts, made with milk I pre-treat with lactase to reduce the lactose in yogurt still further.  This fro-yo was made by cooking the blueberries in water until they were soft, blitzing in a blender, sieving and then mixing with the yogurt.  This makes a high-fibre, no added sugar frozen yogurt.

Ingredients
200g dried blueberries
200ml water
500ml yogurt
1 tbsp vodka

agave syrup to taste if needed

Cook the blueberries in the water until they are soft.  Blitz - it will produce a very thick puree.  Sieve to remove the blueberry seeds.  Leave to cool.

Stir the cooled puree into the yogurt with the vodka.  If you don't want to use any alcohol you will need to remember to get the yogurt out of the freezer a few minutes before you want to use it.  The alcohol acts as an anti-freeze, making it scoopable straight from the freezer.  Check the flavour.  If you want it a bit sweeter, add some syrup.  I use agave for its slow release (low GI) qualities.

Icecream guides recommend that you leave the mixture in the fridge for a few hours before putting in the ice-cream machine.  Process until the mixture is thickening and then put in a plastic tub in the freezer.  Remember to label!

Gooseberry and elderflower frozen yogurt - lactose free

On with the frozen yogurt experiments.  I made two litres of the treated milk yogurt, so have enough for four flavours.  Flavour three is based on the last of my home-grown gooseberries from the previous house.  I have elderflower cordial in the fridge, so rather than adding sugar syrup I added the cordial.  I used Genepi Grad Tetra Bigallet liqueur, bought from a lovely shop in Bourg St Maurice when we did our campervan skiing trip earlier this year.  This liqueur is 50% Vol., so only used 1.5tsp for the whole batch.  It still made the mixture soft scoop straight from the freezer, so even less is necessary at these concentrations.

The flavour is light and zingy, and the colour a subtle pale green.  It would be very good served with almond tuille.

Ingredients
400g yogurt - mine is lactase-treated channel island full fat milk
300g english gooseberries, cooked and sieved to remove the seeds
100ml elderflower cordial
1.5tsp Genepi liqueur

After tasting the mixture, and before freezing, I also added 4 tsp of sugar.  Decide for yourself if the mix is sweet enough; it will depend on how sweet your gooseberries are.

Mix gooseberry puree with other ingredients.  Pour into ice-cream maker.  When beginning to firm, transfer to freezer safe container and freeze until wanted.

Caramelised apricots and caramel frozen yogurt - lactose free

More adventures with my Channel Island yogurt where I pre-treated the milk with lactase.  This time a simple caramel frozen yogurt, made with a couple of tablespoons of soft brown sugar, cooked gently until it just began changing colour, a desert spoonful of Pineau des Charentes, picked up on a visit to some friends in western France, and a teaspoon of vanilla.  Let the caramel cool before adding the alcohol or it will evaporate, leaving a pleasant taste but not retaining its anti-freeze qualities.  Cool, mix with 500g yogurt and freeze in an ice-cream maker.

I bought some reasonable looking apricots but they were not as sumptuous as I wished - apricots really need to be picked ripe off the tree in the sunshine.  Cut each in half, sprinkle more of the brown sugar in wide pan and place the cut apricots on the sugar.  Cook gently on both sides.  The juice from the apricots will give the caramel sauce a lovely zingy flavour.

Serve with a scoop of the frozen yogurt and a little of the caramel drizzled over.

I only have white crockery - terrible for photographing very pale ice-cream!  I should have put this in a glass and photographed against a coloured background, but I ate my desert before I put the photos on the computer.  Tastes much better than it looks.

Lactose-free / reduced lactose yogurt

lactose-free yogurt with berry compot

I have been experimenting with making my own reduced-lactose yogurt.  I got lactase drops from Bodykind; I am sure there are many other suppliers but these had both the lactase and the glutenzyme I wanted.

The lactase is very easy to use.  You just put four drops per pint ( I used six for the litre) into the milk, stir it, and leave for 24hrs in the fridge.  The milk tastes a little sweeter when the lactase has broken down the lactose into its constituent smaller sugars.  I have used treated milk to make yogurt, a drained yogurt that is like a soft cheese, and paneer.  The end results in each case were very similar to those made from untreated milk, with just the faint extra sweetness.

If you want to make yogurt treat the milk first and then add the yogurt starter.  The lactase doesnt work in an acidic environment (which I learnt by reading after I had tried it) so you just end up with normal yogurt if you put the lactase in at the same time as the spoonful of yougurt.  Yogurt has less lactase in it than milk but still enough to cause me colic.

The Wikipedia aricial on lactose intolerance is interesting and clearly written.  It is worth reading for its comments on which products have most lactase.

I ate enough yogurt last night to have expected problems this morning ( sorry- but I don't have a lab to test, have to use my own body). My enjoyment of the channel island milk yogurt with mixed berry compot last night was not marred by pain this morning.

You might wonder why I don't just buy the ready made lactose-free milk.  I don't like to be limited to one type of milk, TT likes milk from Jersey and Guernsey cows, and if you want to make icecreams, soft cheese, pannecotta, yogurt etc then being able to start with the right type of milk is useful.  The lactose free milk is semi-skimmed, and for the potatoes dauphinoise I intend to make next a creamier milk is better.  Once you have the lactase drops you can do what you like, and as the lactase free milk is more expensive, getting the drops and keeping them in the fridge works out about the same I think (not actually calculated, but it is close enough).

I have tried the lactase-free cheeses available in the supermarkets.  I find the cream cheese a pleasant addition, but the 'hard' cheese is a bit flavourless.  I have been tending to make pizzas using blobs of the cream cheese and a bit of parmesan.  This gives a complelety different style of pizza to mozzarella, but it is pretty good and means I don't have to constantly calculate how many mouthfulls I can eat without suffering.  Whilst the parmesan is the standard reggiano, the longer cheeses are matured the less lactose they have in them, so going for a highly- flavoured aged cheese you reduce the amount of lactose you eat.

I have some cheese making culture in my freezer, which I bought for making fromage blanc.  I'll be using that on my treated milk shortly as well.  Maybe a cheese making course?