The TF Diabetic

Blog
About

Challah

March 15, 2011 at 10:24 AM | Posted in Baked goods, Jewish observance, Recipe | Leave a comment

Every other Thursday, I bake challah. I haven’t devised my own recipe. I use Maya’s delicious low-sugar recipe from Chai Time. I make half her recipe, because how much bread does a household of one diabetic and one pre-diabetic consume in a week? Not even half her recipe, made into two lovely loaves. Not even all of one of these loaves, in fact.

I don’t put the egg wash or sesame seeds on. I like my crusts soft, not crunchy. I used Maya’s video on You Tube to learn how to braid the loaves. A childhood spent braiding lanyards at day camp prepared me well for the 6 stranded braid of challah. See how pretty? You can see the braiding better before the loaf rises and is baked.

I have found that I need to increase the amount of flour slightly over what Maya specifies. Maybe I just use less dry a flour. I also want to point out that, in my Bosch, this dough remains very soft and sticky until until the kneading is done. Even then it’s a bit stickier than regular bread dough. It clings to the center of the bowl where the drive shaft is and wraps around it instead of forming a distinct ball of dough. I let it knead for 10 minutes, and by then it has lost enough stickiness to be shaped, but just barely. I made the mistake once of adding enough flour to make it form that ball, and the results were not good. The dough must be stickier than regular bread dough, or the braids don’t merge into one loaf of bread, they stay separate and the bread slices break into segments. Definitely sub-optimal.

I have had excellent luck placing the braided loaves on parchment paper on a 10″x15″ cookie sheet (jelly roll pan, actually) covered with a warm damp cloth to rise and then baking it on that pan.

From a diabetic point of view, leaving out most of the sugar and using Splenda instead is a waste of Splenda. It’s not the 2 tablespoons of sugar in that bread making your blood sugar rise. It’s the white flour. This is just plain not an ideal food for diabetics. Practice strict portion control, okay?

Maya’s Challah, halved

1 Pkg. Dry Active Yeast or 2 1/4 tsps of loose granulated dry Active Yeast
1 TSP *Sugar
1 cup Warm Water
4 cups Flour
2 TSP Salt
2 TBSPS Sugar or **Splenda
⅓ cup Oil
3 Eggs – beaten
Optional: Saffron water or yellow food dye can be used to make the Challah dough a golden color if that is desired.

1. Place yeast, 1 tsp sugar and 1 cup warm water (warm from the tap) in small mug or cup. Mix with a fork and let sit while you prepare the wet mixture. In about five minutes, it will foam up. This is done to make sure the yeast is good, will become active and make the bread rise.

2. Place salt, Splenda or sugar, oil and eggs in bowl. Add saffron water or food dye. I use twelve drops of yellow food dye.

3. Add foamy yeast mixture.

4. Add a cup of flour at a time until dough can be turned out of bowl onto kneading surface.

5. Sprinkle flour on kneading surface and place dough onto it. Begin kneading. The dough will feel very sticky. Knead flour into dough until dough can be handled without sticking to your hands and is smooth and elastic to the touch.

6. Place kneaded dough in a bowl, cover with a dishtowel and put in a warm, draft free area (I place my bowl into the microwave and close the door. Just don’t turn it on! ) Let dough rise for two hours.

7. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

8. Punch down risen dough. Take your fist and punch it down the middle of the dough while it is still in the bowl. The yeast, if it has worked, has caused a lot of gas to build up in the bread and it should have doubled in size. Knead the dough once more for a few minutes.

9. Braid the loaves. This recipe makes two small loaves. For a six-strand Challah, (pictured above) cut the dough into two halves first, then cut each half into six equal lumps.

10. Put braided loaves on oiled baking stone or in loaf pans. I prefer the stone so that the bread keeps its original long, oval shape.
Cover and let braided loaves rise for one hour.

11. Beat one egg. Brush both loaves with egg. Moisten finger with egg wash, dip it in sesame seeds and then press sesame seeds onto each section of the Challah. The egg wash makes for a beautiful golden Challah and the sesame seeds make it very pretty. Some choose to use poppy seeds instead.

12. Place in 350 degree oven and bake for 30 minutes until loaves are golden brown. Check it before removing from the oven. Some days it takes a little longer to bake through.
____________________________
*For those who wish to make this sugar free, the sugar used to proof the yeast is “eaten up” by the yeast in the proofing process. One’s blood sugars will not be affected.
**I prefer to use the granular Splenda since our family does not eat sugar.

Egg/Sesame Seed Decoration
1 egg
2 TBSPS sesame seeds or poppy seeds

Brownies

March 7, 2011 at 6:28 PM | Posted in Baked goods, Cookies, Recipe, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

I know you want them. I want them, too. This recipe makes a more cake-like brownie than I prefer, but it’s better than no brownies. And it’s not horrible for your blood sugar! I use xylitol, so no sugar spikes there. I cut the 8×8 pan into 12 brownies, so there are exactly 2 teaspoons of white flour in each brownie. That small amount won’t do truly horrible things to your blood sugar, either.

The key is portion control. After the brownies cool I put each one into a snack size ziplock baggie and freeze them. No delicious brownies calling my name from the counter! These are neither low-calorie nor low-fat brownies. They are low-carb brownies. Substituting ingredients, like using margarine or imitation vanilla, really degrades the result. I don’t advise any changes except possibly using real sugar for consumption by non-diabetics. So here you go, almost guilt-free brownies:

Brownies

1 cup xylitol
½ cup butter, softened
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 ounces unsweetened baking chocolate, melted
½ cup flour

1. Preheat oven to 350° F and butter 8×8 pan.

2. In a mixing bowl, cream butter and xylitol until light. Add the eggs and vanilla and beat well.

3. Add the melted chocolate slowly, stirring constantly, and mix well.

4. Add the flour and mix well.

5. Pour into prepared pan, spread the batter out evenly, and bake for 35 minutes.

Chicken Mushroom Barley Stew

March 4, 2011 at 2:07 PM | Posted in Poultry, Recipe, Soups and Stews | Leave a comment

Roast a 4 to 5 pound whole chicken, seasoning well with fresh rosemary, garlic powder, paprika, salt and pepper. Serve the leg quarters for dinner. Refrigerate the remains, including all the juices.

The next day, make chicken pot pie using one half of the breast and both wings. Do not use the juices, but you can remove the fat now that it has hardened.

On day 3, remove the other breast meat from the chicken and refrigerate. Dump the chicken carcass and congealed juices into the crockpot with enough added water to barely cover. Simmer on high at least 2 hours. Remove the carcass and strip all the meat. Throw out all the skin, bones, tendons, and icky stuff. Chop that breast meat you saved earlier, and put all the meat into the crockpot. Chop half a large onion and add it. Slice 2 stalks of celery and 3 carrots into nice bite size pieces and add them to the crockpot, stirring well. You now will need to add more liquid, so add 2 cups of hot water and 2 chicken bouillon cubes. Coarsely chop 8 ounces of fresh muchrooms and add those, too. Season with 2 bay leaves, ¼ teaspoon of thyme, ½ teaspoon of marjoram and salt and pepper. Add ½ cup of pearl barley and cook until everything is tender, another 2 to 4 hours.

My husband said “This is soup like Grandma used to make, except Grandma never made soup this good.”

If your chicken was a bit small, and you used all the back meat as well as the wings in the pot pie, you may need to add a can of chicken meat to the stew to bring it up to the male meaty standard of dinner food. Using canned chicken won’t matter in the end result, because it’s the simmering of the bones that makes the broth so delicious.

Makes roughly 2 quarts, so save some for tomorrow. The barley will absorb even more broth as it sits, making the stew even thicker.

This is a good dinner for diabetics. Barley has a glycemic index of 35, much lower than the pasta or noodles so often used in soup. It’s high in vegetables, too, with their low glycemic indexes and even lower glycemic loads.