Doughnuts totally fit into the category of sweets you might consider only eating when you make them yourself. I understand Michael Pollan’s thinking when he states something similar in Food Rules; beyond the fact that it’s not really possible for me to eat a good doughnut anywhere (they’re either gluten-full or GF cake doughnuts, meh), they are sort of a pain in the ass to make.

I’m not going to make them all the time, so it doesn’t really matter that they have zero nutritional value (dropping in a frying pan and dipping in/injecting with sugar don’t do any nutritional favors either).

This recipe is slightly advanced, but I have faith in you beginners. Please ask me any questions you encounter along the way. You could omit the electric mixer and mix by hand (just have a really good rubber spatula on hand to make sure all ingredients get incorporated well in your bowl). I’ll give you fair warning, whether you’re hand or stand mixing, the dough is really sticky! If you’re a novice fryer, read the homemade tortilla chips post for some extra frying tips.

Most importantly, plan ahead: Have your eggs, milk and half-and-half at room temp before you start!

Gluten free yeast doughnuts

yield 12 doughnuts, based loosely on Emeril’s doughuts

1. Proof yeast in a small mixing bowl by combining:

• 1 packet active dry yeast
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1/4 cup of warm water (110 degrees)

Stir to dissolve clumps of yeast and set aside.

2. Mix flours in large mixing bowl:

• 1-1/2 cups white rice flour
• 1 cup arrowroot starch
• 1/4 cup sorghum flour
• 2 Tbs sweet rice flour (also called mochiko)
• 2 Tbs cornstarch
• 2 tsp xanthan gum

3. In a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, beat until thick and pale yellow in color:

• 3 eggs (at room temp)
• heaping 1/3 cup sugar

4. Set mixer on low speed and add

• yeast mixture (now puffed up)
• 2 Tbs melted butter
• pinch salt
• 3/4 cup whole milk, room temp
• 1/4 cup half-and-half, room temp

5. Add the flour mix 1/2 cup at a time. Mix on low speed until all ingredients are completely incorporated. Increase speed and beat for 5 minutes on high; the batter will be thick, light and thread-y.

6. Prepare a large baking sheet by greasing well it with vegetable oil (or another innocuous oil, not olive). Take off any rings on your fingers and grease your hands, finger tips, backs of hands with the oil, too.

7. Use a spoon and drop large dollops (about the size of a racquet- or hand-ball) of the batter directly onto the greased baking sheet. Don’t mess with them until after you scoop out all the batter from the bowl. About half way through dolloping, the batter will start sticking to your finger tips, don’t fret. Carry on as best you can.

8. Re-grease your hands and shape your doughnuts as big or small as you’d like. Don’t touch them too much, just smoosh them down with the flat part of your palm so they’re about a half-inch thick. If you want traditionally shaped, hole-in-the middle doughnuts (make sure your finger tips are entirely greased, nail and all) and poke a hole in the middle of the dough flats. Spread out the hole with your fingers. This part may be frustrating since you might need to re-grease a few times. Be as patient with the dough as possible. [It’ll be so worth it later.]

I made holes in half of the dough rounds and then left a few alone for filled doughnut adventures.

7. Cover the dough with a greased piece of plastic wrap (this will prevent the dough from sticking to the wrap) and let the dough rise until it has doubled in size, which will take 1-2 hours.

8. When dough has doubled, prepare a frying pan with enough vegetable (or neutral) oil for the doughnuts to be completely suspended. Fry until golden brown, about 3 to 4 minutes, flipping occasionally for overall browning. Carefully remove the doughnuts from the oil and drain on a paper towel-lined plate.

9. Fill, glaze and try not to eat them all in one sitting. We filled the rounds with variations of creme anglaise, lemon-lime curd, all kinds of sweet spreads and preserves and even a little whipped cream. We glazed using my friend Grace’s suggestion: 2 Tbs honey warmed into a looser liquid, add 1/2 cup powdered sugar and enough water (or milk) to make it a syrupy paste. Dip or spoon glaze over doughnuts.

(My Betty Crocker icing injector thingy didn’t work out great for this task since our filling wasn’t as thick as desired. I certainly didn’t mind dipping my doughnut in globs of deliciousness.)Enlist feline support if necessary.p.s. Next day doughnuts can be turned back into just-out-of-the-fryer bliss after a little trip into the toaster oven. Be sure to use a sheet of tin foil underneath if you’ve already glazed them.

I have a special place in my heart for the September issue of Tigress Can Jam Monthly.  Peaches were my first, all-by-myself sealed jar project, completed one year ago this September! Happy anniversary to me.

Boy, do I wish I’d known about the whole dip peaches in boiling water trick to skin them. I also wish I had someone there to tell me “RELAX, those miniscule bubbles in the jam are not botulism spores, not possible (put your feet up and have a margarita).”

Enough about me, Tigress has granted me the great honor to present you, fellow canjammers, with not just peaches, but the entire family of stone fruits.

Stonefruits belong to the genus Prunus which includes apricots, cherries, peaches, nectarines and plums.

Stone fruit seeds are a curious lot. Pips (my favourite word for seeds) are protected by a cyanide-producing enzyme that also produces benzaldehyde, which gives almond extract its distinct aroma. Almonds are the seeds of a stone fruit species (Prunus amygdalus), but the ones we’ve domesticated aren’t as bitter (nor are they highly toxic) like wild almonds. (Harold McGee let me in on these fine little morsels, pun intended.) I suppose this is why some recipes ask us to toss our stone fruit kernels into our boiling vats of yum, to take advantage of free almond extract. [Boiling the seeds also makes them safe for consumption.]

Stone fruits may come as no surprise to many of you. I’ve seen your summer-infused blog posts. You’re champing at the bit with your plum jams, your peach chutneys, your luxurious halved peaches doing the backstroke in syrupy glaze. Well, here’s the signal, the e-high-five to keep it up.

Start your browsers folks, blog posts with your stone-fruitful recipes must be posted between Sunday, Sept 12th and Friday, Sept 17th to make the round-up, with midnight Friday the 17th being the cutoff.

p.s. I know, I’m a dork, but you can’t talk stone fruits without involving Van Morrison.

Small Batchin’: Tomato Vanilla JamDisclaimer: For those of who own and operate math skills in an expert fashion: Don’t read this. You might very well be insulted. For the rest of us who need a refresher on 8th grade algebra (or the art of ratios), please do read on.

Early on in my canning career, I realized small-batch (and sometimes super-small-batch) is my preferred jar style. Hence, I needed to get tight with numbers since winging it and approximating can get you killed in canning-land.

You don’t have to be able to do mental math (though it can be helpful), all you really need is a calculator. Knowing equivalents or having easy access to a chart with info like how many teaspoons are in a Tablespoon, etc. is extremely helpful, too. I’m going to demo recipe reduction with Christine Ferber’s Ripe Tomato with Vanilla recipe (from Mes Confitures).

As written:

• 4 lbs tomatoes (3.5 net, which means seeded and cored)
• 4.25 cups granulated sugar
• Juice of 1 small lemon
• 7 oz Green Apple Jelly (another recipe in her book, which I, of course, don’t have on hand)
• 2 vanilla beans

The linchpin in recipe reducing is to figure out how much of the featured produce you actually have. I realized (after 6 months of using recipe receipts, the produce scale at my co-op, and other drastic measures) that I needed to own a kitchen scale if I was truly to become Small Batch Kickass (thanks Julia). I bought one, and now I weigh the hell out of all fruit and veg I encounter.

Back to the recipe…

I had 1lb 12oz whole tomatoes at the start, which reduced to a measly 1/2-lb after the seeding and coring process. I based my reduction on the net value (1/2-lb), regardless of Ferber’s dreamland wherein you only lose a tiny portion of the volume after draining the juicy suckers.

1-2-3 Reduce!Here’s where you pull out your calculator:

Divide .5 by 3.5, the answer is: 0.1428…

This is your core ratio; you (we) are making 15% of the original recipe. You now go through each ingredient listed and multiply by .15 (I rounded up to make things neat). [If you’re nervous about making such calls, then by all means just multiply each ingredient by the exact number you see on your screen, 0.1428…]

• Sugar: 4.5 x .15=0.675 cups sugar [that’s a half cup and about 1 Tbs]
• Lemon: 15% of one whole lemon juiced is about 1 tsp. [A whole lemon produces about 2 Tbs of juice, halved is 1 Tbs (in which there are about 3 tsp) so 15% of the whole (2 Tbs) is roughly a tsp)
• Jelly: 7 x .15=1.05 oz jelly [luckily I had a jar of Julia’s jelly on hand, this recipe isn’t it exactly, b/c my jar didn’t have star anise, but you get the point] I know from the equivalents chart that my half-pint jar is 8oz (or 1 cup), and if I need 1 oz, that’s and 1/8th cup, which is 2 Tbs.
• Vanilla beans: 2 x .15=0.3 of a bean. I sliced my vanilla bean in three and threw 1/3 in the pot.

If you get confused during the multiplication process, remember to check in with and assess the measurement (italicized for emphasis above) for perspective and try to reason through it (like with the jelly portion). Spices get a little crazy in the reducing process, i.e. reducing a Tbs of something. Usually ‘a pinch’ suffices (and let’s face it, you’re not going to hurt yourself or others with dried spices, so pinch away)!

Gooo small batch; now you’re cooking!

I’m not going to lie; you gotta want to make ketchup. I see it like Mr. Izzard’s description of certain career paths:

Not to liken ketchup-makery exactly to the life path and career choices of taxidermists or beekeepers, but I’m just sayin’ it’s not an “oh, whatever” kind of thing. There’s some work involved.

It’s totally worth it though. After we made a standard red ketchup at our Canvolution party a couple weekends ago (and I proceeded to spoon my portion right out of the jar) I was hooked on homemade ketchup. When orange heirlooms appeared last week in our CSA (farmshare), I figured why not shake things up in my limited ketchup experience.

Julia, our August hostess, granted me a new ninja name, Small-batch Kickass. I gleefully accept.

In line with my reduction-ist history, I made do with what I got from the CSA and added a few extra heirlooms from my co-op to make about half of what the recipe calls for.

Orange Tang Ketchup

Reduced and modified (slightly) from Linda’s Hot Orange Ketchup recipe in The Joy of Pickling

yield four sealed quarter-pint jars plus some change in a half pint fridge jar

CSA ‘maters; beauty-queen cherries thrown in for visuals (not used in ketchup)1. Prepare your tomatoes for the puree process. I started with:

 3lbs 6oz whole tomatoes

Slice an ‘X’ into the bottoms with a steak or paring knife.

2. Bring a pot of water (I used a 6-quart pot) to a full boil and then dip your X-marked tomatoes into the water for about 20 seconds. This helps loosen their skins so you can peel them easily. Peel carefully since they’ll be hot.Peeling tomatoes is cathartic after a long day at the computer.3. Core the tomatoes (aka remove the hard, middle portion of the tomato where it was attached to the vine).

4. I don’t have either of the tools Linda says are helpful (a food mill or Vita-Mix) for tomato pureeing, so I had to get crafty. (Please read the section in her book about the best way to prepare tomato puree should you happen to have either of these cool tools.) Here’s my improvised food processor method that worked out just dandy:

Chop the skinned tomato into a few large chunks and toss them into a food processor; I did it in two batches. Also, I’m a seeds-in kind of girl, but I bet you could strain most out using a mesh strainer as you pour the puree into the cooking pot.

Pour puree directly into a large, heavy-bottomed stainless steel or enameled cast-iron pot. I ended up with about 5 cups of tomato puree.

5. Prepare rest of veggies and throw them directly into the tomato puree pot:

• 4 or 5 assorted hot peppers, seeded and chopped (I used two of the yellow ones above and each of the other varieties) [You might consider gloves for this task, I’ve made one too many enchilada sauces to do it bare handed any longer]
• half of a medium-sized yellow onion, chopped (or 5 oz if you’re weighing it out)
• 7 garlic cloves, chopped

Simmer tomato puree and veggies for 15-20 min, until the veggies are tender.

6. While tomato and veg puree is simmering, prepare spice bag (or use kitchen twine to tie a scrap of cheesecloth around the following):

• 1 lemon zested in strips
• 1.5 tsp mustard seeds
• 1.5 tsp coriander seeds
• 5 whole cloves
• cinnamon stick broken into a few pieces
• 2 thin slices of fresh ginger

Set aside.

7. When veggies are tender, remove tomato puree and veg mixture from heat. Ladle out cupfuls of the mixture into your food processor (or blender) until you hit the ‘liquid fill line’ marked on most processor bowls. Trust me, you’re going to want to do this in shifts (or you’ll shoot pureed tomato juice and bits around the kitchen). I did it in three batches.

8. Return the new and improved puree to the pot and add:

the juice from your zested lemon, strained

3/4 cup white wine vinegar (I didn’t plan well, so I added 1/2 cup cider vinegar to my measly 1/4 cup, bottom-of-the-bottle white wine vinegar)

1.5 tsp pickling (or 2 tsp Kosher) salt

spice bag you prepared above

9. Simmer ketchup until it thickens up. The smaller the batch, the faster it will thicken. Mine took about a half hour, but my burner was up too high in the beginning (oops). Low and slow is the general rule for thickening. Stir occasionally to incorporate all portions of the mixture and keep bottom from scorching.

10. Remove spicebag and ladle hot ketchup into hot jars leaving 1/4” headspace and seal with two-piece lids. Process for 15 minutes in a waterbath.

Alternatively you could stash it in the fridge if you’ve had enough of the stovetop for the evening. It’s high in vinegar and should keep fine for a few months.

Aaaaand the taste…It’s not hot, by any means. There’s no sugar in it, so it won’t taste like your standard ketchup, but this tangy condiment adds a tasty vinegary zest to whatever you dare dollop.