Faux Phô

We all miss certain foods, and while I eat other things when I am away from the kids occasionally, I do miss the variety at home. I think it is good for the kids to become accustomed to different styles of food so that one day, when they are able, they won't be scared to try something a bit different.

I've always liked Vietnamese food, but The Boy never did. The best he would ever eat was spring rolls. He didn't like spice and he wasn't even a fan of rice. But that never stopped me trying, and failsafe isn't going to stop me now either.

A purist would be disgusted with this (as they probably would with any of my adapted recipes) as a genuine one would be a fabulously rich, long cooked beef broth fragrant with spices punctuated with chilli, fresh basil and lime, but it's the best I could do with the ingredients on offer. And it did hit the spot; it is phô at heart.

A few little notes about what I have done here...

I have used some beef stock, but it was left from when I cooked the boeuf à la ficelle which only had the beef in it for about 15 minutes. It was a very mild stock and in my mind I would definitely still classify that as low amine. If you don't have this a chicken stock would work, but it really does want the flavour of a meat stock.

Do you need the alcohol? You could leave it out, but it would really effect the flavour of the dish. The whiskey adds body and fullness and the gin gives the hint of herbs and spice. If it really isn't your thing use a higher quantity of stock than I have.

To slice the beef really finely it is easier if it is partly frozen and you have a very sharp knife. I bought a large roasting piece, put it in the freezer for a few hours, sliced off what I needed for this and put the rest back in the freezer for my roast another day.

Sprouts and sauce ready to add to the Faux Phô - the beef cooks quickly in the broth

Faux Phô
Ingredients

• 2 cups beef stock
• 1/4 cup gin
• 1/4 cup whiskey
• 2 Tbsp vegetable stock paste
• 5 1/2 cups water
• 3 tsp salt
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 4 shallots, sliced on an angle (white and most of the green)
• 1 Tbsp brown sugar
• 350g beef topside (or similar) finely sliced
• 200g packet of wide rice noodles, prepared as directed on the packet
• 2 cups mung bean sprouts
• Citric "lemon" juice
• Pear ketchup
• Magic sauce

Method

1. Place stock, gin, whiskey, stock paste and water into a large pot. Bring to the boil and simmer for 10mins. Strain the stock, discard the solids and return the liquid to the pot.
2. Bring back to the boil and add salt, garlic, sugar and half the shallots.
3. Divide the noodles between four large, deep soup bowls (or big pasta bowls). Divide the beef and remaining shallots between the bowls placing it on top of the noodles.
4. Ladle the boiling stock into the bowls and serve.
5. Have sprouts and sauces on the table for each person to add to their taste

Variations

• Salicylates - have sliced fresh red chilli and thai basil with the condiments, you could also add five spice to the broth (all very high).
•  Amines - Make a good slow cooked beef broth for your base.

While eating this The Boy's words were "This looks like something the Cook and the Chef would make".

I'll take that, thank you.

Sauce of Wonder

I have spent quite a bit of brain and kitchen power trying to come up with a decent Asian style sauce. One that could be drizzled onto phô or could be added to a stir fry and actually stick to the noodles. A sauce that stood up against a hoisin or oyster sauce. Thick and rich, not too sweet and not too salty.

I've finally done it.

I wanted to call it "Sauce of Wonder", but thought that was a buit pretentious so I enlisted my husband's help to name it. He suggested translating it to Vietnamese - nước sốt kỳ diệu. Not really a name that will come easily to most, and not really easy to search for. I translated it back to English and it is "Magic Sauce". I kind of like that. It has a nicer ring to it that "Hoisin Substitute". Plus it has been a while since I've had hoisin and this may be nothing like it.

Magic Sauce
Ingredients

• 1/2 cup Golden syrup
• 1/4 cup gin
• 1/4 cup syrup reserved from tinned pears
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 tsp carob syrup **
• 1 tsp tapioca starch

 Method

1. In a small saucepan place all ingredients except one teaspoon of the carob syrup and the tapioca starch. Gently bring to the boil giving an occasional stir.
2. Simmer until the bubbling starts to look frothy, take off heat and add combined carob syrup and tapioca. Stir through and place back onto heat. 
3. Bring the mixture back to the boil. When it looks frothy again it is done.
4. Let cool (don't be tempted to taste it before it has cooled a lot as it will be incredibly hot) and store in a sealed container in the fridge.
5. Add to phô or stir-fry. Or use as a BBQ marinade for meat.

** If you don't have carob syrup then you could substitute something else. I haven't tried, but I think that half a teaspoon of carob powder mixed with two teaspoons of boiling water would have a similar result or the same amount of instant decaf coffee might too.

Bread Success!

Some of you who follow my facebook page may have seen me cheering and sharing a dodgy phone photo of some bread I made the other day. In the real world making a successful loaf of bread is no big deal unless you are seriously challenged in the kitchen, but making an edible loaf of failsafe, gluten, dairy, soy, nut, egg *and* gum free bread is a different story. When I cut open that little roll and had a bite I honestly did a dance of joy.

After a few early attempts at my own gluten free bread I had given up in favour of packet mixes and more recently had been using Kersten's recipe with reasonable success. Our latest restrictions (no gums) meant that I had to ditch that recipe too, and start getting creative.

As a gluten eater I am highly critical of gluten free bread, but I devoured the whole roll with nothing on it and then waited very impatiently for the loaf to cool so that I could slice it and see how it turned out. The crust was soft, the bread bent, and it didn't have that gelatinous texture that I've come to expect from gluten free bread.

How do you think it looks?

I made some (flat) rolls a day later and took them along to a failsafe picnic. There was loads of food, so I didn't bother to get them out until the end when some of the other mums wanted to try. They passed that taste test too (or those lovely ladies were being very polite). The other big test was my daughter who has never willingly eaten gluten free bread. She ate an entire roll with her dinner last night and that is all I really need. There is nothing worse than slaving in the kitchen and no one wanting to eat it.

So after trawling through the internet for inspiration I decided to use a 'Gluten-Free Girl' recipe as my starting point, but that's where the help ended. Now I'm incredibly chuffed to present to you my very own bread recipe.

Bread!
Ingredients

• 2 cups warm water
• 2 Tbsp psyllium husks
• 5 Tbsp boiling water
• 1 Tbsp sugar
• 3tsp yeast
• 1 Tbsp failsafe oil
• 100g brown rice flour
• 100g sorghum flour
• 170g white rice flour
• 170g tapioca starch
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp baking powder

Method

1. Put the psyllium in a small bowl or cup and pour the boiling water over them. Give it a quick stir and set aside.
2. Pour the water, sugar and yeast into a big bowl (preferably in a mixer, but this should be fine by hand) and leave while you measure out the rest of your ingredients.
3. Add the oil, the psyllium sludge and the dry ingredients and mix for a few minutes until it is all very well combined and smooth, like a thick cake batter.
4. Tip into an oiled bowl and cover with glad wrap and leave stand somewhere warm for about an hour. It will rise in that time and become a lot more like dough and less like batter.
5. While it is resting preheat your oven to 190°C
6. Tip into a greased loaf tin (my tin is 20cm x 11cm) or using wet hands roll balls for rolls use pie tins for large rolls, muffin trays for dinner rolls or place them in a slice tin for flatter hamburger style rolls.
7. Bake the loaf for about 50 mins and rolls for about 25mins.
8. Cool on racks.

As this is a very new recipe I haven't had a chance to try different things with it or check how long it lasts. The rolls I made yesterday were slightly dry today, but still edible. The loaf I made the other night was sliced and went straight into the freezer and toasted beautifully for dinner tonight.

The next steps for me are to play with different flour (as I realise sorghum isn't the easiest to find) and to experiment with other styles of bread. But I couldn't make you wait any longer for this recipe. If you try anything that works leave a comment, it would be great to hear what things you can come up with. My next thought is brown sugar scrolls or white baguettes.

Take Two

This elimination road has been a very long a windy one and baseline has been very hard to hang on to. What started with me telling my boy that we would cut out food for a few weeks and slowly add things back has actually been over two years and nothing new has been added, but more has been taken away. Because baseline has been hard to come by it has been really difficult to pin point exactly what causes these reactions even when we were being super strict.

The sudden realisation that citric acid was looking like the culprit sent me into a spin. It seems that the way it is made means that it is contains glutamates which lead me to some more research which bands them into a group called excitotoxins. And now we seem to have our missing link. A few weeks of reduced excitotoxins and we have a new found baseline that has actually been sustained for more than a couple of days. For our family this is brilliant, for my cooking adventures it has been quite traumatic. Now we are trying to minimise citric acid, gelatin, corn, extracted pectin, anything with malt in the name and all vegetable gums.

So now I am relearning to cook gluten free and without gums. There are quite a few recipes floating around the internet for this type of cooking, but trying to find things that are failsafe is nigh impossible. People use ground chia or flax - Not failsafe, but there is also a few that use psyllium which is failsafe. So now the conversions begin. I apologise to those who avoid eggs as I am going to be using them a bit more now.

The first conversion is the iced biscuits recipe. I just made this a triple batch straight up as the dough still freezes well, so this makes a good quantity of biscuits.

Iced Biscuits - Take two

• 300g nuttelex
• 1 1/2 cup caster sugar
• 3 egg, lightly beaten
• 1/2 tsp vanilla (optional)
• 2 1/2 cups white rice flour 
• 2 cups tapioca flour
• 3/4 cup sorghum flour (if you can't find this brown rice would work fine too)
• 2 Tbsp psyllium husks
• natural sprinkles (optional)
• bamboo skewers (soaked for half an hour and with the sharp end cut off if you prefer)

Royal Icing

• 1 egg white, lightly whisked
• 1 1/2 cups pure icing sugar, sifted

Methid

1. Cream nuttelex and sugar together. Add eggs and Vanilla. Beat to combine. Sift flour over mixture. Stir to combine (or if you have a stand mixer use a slow speed until dough comes together) Place dough onto plastic wrap. Knead gently. Shape into a disc. Wrap in plastic wrap and chill in fridge for a couple of hours or until firm. If after this time your dough is still to sticky add flour one tablespoon at a time until it is less sticky (this is still a little softer than the other ones) little things like the size of your eggs can make this adjustment needed.
2. Preheat oven to 170°C. Line baking trays with baking paper. Roll dough out between 2 sheets of baking paper until 5mm thick (don't get carried away and roll it too thin as the biscuits will be too hard). Use whatever shaped cookie cutter you have to cut shapes form the dough. Press remaining dough together and repeat.  Place on baking trays leaving a little space around them. If you are putting them on stick, carefully slide the skewer at least halfway into the dough. Bake for approx 12 mins (depending on the size of you shapes) or until slightly golden on the bottom edge. Stand for 3 minutes. Cool on a rack (biscuits firm up when they are cooling, so don't think they are not done because they are soft straight away).
3. Make icing. Place egg white in a bowl. Gradually add icing sugar, whisking until smooth. Spread over cookies. Top with sprinkles. Set aside for 20 minutes or until set.

These taste good! The texture is slightly different, but I've finally had a gumless baking success. The next thing I need to get my head around is bread, just when I had finally got a good handle on making Kersten's recipe...