Tuesday Tips – Preserving Your Gluten-Free Flours

Did you know that flour can go bad? Whole grain flours are especially at risk, as they contain more natural oils and fats that can become rancid. And any flour is at risk of getting small bugs in it, as it is impossible to completely remove the insect eggs from the flour. Ew. You already know that it’s cheaper to buy flour in bulk, and if you’re making your own gluten-free flour mix, you’ll end up with several pounds each of a bunch of different flours. (I counted one time and discovered that I had eleven different kinds of flour in my house at one time. I may have an obsession with collecting gluten-free flours.) That’s a lot of flour to use up, and the likelihood of it going bad in my house is pretty high. It’s no savings to buy in bulk if you have to throw half of it away due to an invasion of pantry moths.

The quick tip for this Tuesday is to freeze your flours. Yes, our favorite kitchen tool here at Food Allergies on Ice is the solution once again! Keeping the flour very cold helps to keep the oils from becoming rancid, and keeps those tiny insect eggs from hatching. It’s also a dry, airtight space which helps the flour stay dry (obviously important!) and prevents bug invasions. (You know, in case the kids leave the back door open and a bunch of flies come in. Again.) Of course, you can use this trick to preserve gluten-containing flours as well.

One caveat to the freezer trick, though: make sure your flours come up to room temperature before baking with them or your recipes may not turn out as well. Here’s what I do: my bulk flours are in a box in the freezer. I pull out the box and mix up 2 kg of my All-Purpose GF flour mix at a time. That’s enough for a week or two of baking and it stays in an airtight container on my kitchen counter. The box of bulk flours is returned to the freezer for safe keeping until the next time.

Pretty simple, but this simple trick will help you save money and make tastier food. I call that a win!

Produce – Preserving the Harvest

It’s a busy season for our food-allergic household. While fruits and veggies are naturally free of gluten and most allergens, we find that much of the grocery store produce is contaminated with corn*. So, we try to purchase as much as possible from our local farmers’ market, in addition to growing our own fruits and vegetables. That means, of course, that we need to preserve the fresh food now so we’ll have it over the winter.

The best website I’ve found to help with this is the National Center for Home Food Preservation. This comprehensive website is hosted by the University of Georgia, and is a collaborative project between universities in the Cooperative Extension System. I’ve found their information to be far more reliable and trustworthy than just reading a random blog that looks like it was made in 1980 and purports to have the secret to making apple jelly just like Grandma used to do. Those websites are fun to read for the folk wisdom they contain, but when it comes to food safety, I’ll trust Cooperative Extension instead, thank you very much.

So far this year, I’ve frozen peaches, grape juice, tomatoes, broccoli, green beans, sweet peppers, hot peppers, and chard. I’ve canned grape jelly and applesauce, and dried tomatoes and some fruit leather, too. As the season moves on, I’ll be working on squash, more apples, and rose hips. Because this is all locally grown produce, I’m able to ask the growers directly about their food, ensuring that it is is allergen-free for my family.

Not everyone has time to grow and preserve large quantities of food like we do, but nearly everyone can take advantage of the great prices on in-season produce and put up a batch of something. Check with gardening friends, too. Someone may be more than willing to share their abundance with you. Last year, I had baskets of squash to give away. This year, I have way too much broccoli, and I’m so sick of it, I’ll give it to whomever wants it! Friends of mine had so many apples, the weight of the fruit was breaking the branches, so they were more than happy to share with us, to the tune of nearly 200 pounds of apples! (There were still many more apples on the tree!)

So if you’ve noticed that things are a little slow at the blog lately, rest assured that I haven’t been slacking. I’ll be back to posting more allergy-friendly recipes just as soon as the frosts hit, and this year’s harvest is safely stashed away.

* Produce is often coated in corn-based wax to preserve it or sprayed with corn-derived ethylene gas to help ripen it.

Squash-Tastic

This lovely blossom will be a yummy squash in a couple weeks!

It’s that time of year again when the garden is yielding up more squash than you can shake a stick at. Squash is pretty easy to grow, and produces a lot of food, so it’s a good crop for the novice gardener.  Last year, I was given nearly 50 yellow squash starts for my garden, and as a result, I had an abundance of yellow squash for much of last summer. By the end of summer, I had mastered the art of hiding squash in a number of creative recipes.

• Sliced thin, lightly salted, and dehydrated into squash chips (a tasty low-carb snack!)
• Dredged in a mixture of flour, salt and herbs and fried
• Sautéed in oil with tomatoes, white beans, caramelized onions, garlic, bell pepper, etc.
• Steamed with broccoli and lightly seasoned with herbs for a side dish with grilled chicken
• Boiled with potatoes and cauliflower and mashed into “mashed potatoes”
• Roasted with potatoes, carrots and bell pepper
• Lightly brushed with olive oil and grilled
• Julienned into a squash/carrot/radish coleslaw-like salad
• Chopped into lettuce salad
• Shredded and in baked into muffins and pancakes
• Added to soup
• Mashed and added to spaghetti sauce
• Lacto-fermented (aka pickled) in brine
• Peeled into thin strips as a low-carb, grain-free pasta substitute
• Shredded and mixed into meatloaf and chicken patties

I think the only thing I didn’t do is stuff them, and that was only because I didn’t let them get that big. I also sliced and shredded a bunch for the freezer so we could enjoy squash all year long.

This year’s garden has less squash, but overflows with broccoli instead. I’m sad to say that it is not proving to be nearly as versatile.  I’d be happy to hear your suggestions for using up broccoli or squash in the comments!