Sweet and low...
Wednesday, November 8 pm
So, I am happy to say that I recovered from the food/product identification test and did quite well, mixing up things that were quite close like millet and quinoa and the cannelini bean vs the lima bean.
Also, I survived the day-long conversion baking journey. We worked in teams of two and we choose the brownie to convert. Other teams had cupcakes and cookies. We started with a traditional "Ghirardeli Award Winning Chocolate Brownies" that is delicious and quite hard to beat and then made the recipe six times, changing one thing at a time and building on this, with the goal of getting to a healthy and delicious vegan recipe (no eggs, butter or milk) and learning the effects of substituting ingredients on taste and texture. We were provided guidelines on conversions using different flours (i.e. with whole wheat flours), oils (i.e. with coconut oil, canola oil, extra virgin olive oil), sweetners (i.e. with maple syrup, barley malt, rice syrup, agave, stevia, juice concentrate, date sugar, maple crystals, sucanat), leaveners, the properties and uses of cocoa and carob, how to replace dairy (i.e. with nut milk, banana milk, oat milk, rice milk, tofu whipped cream, sour cream), eggs and butter, and the common mistakes in baking in general. This is a fascinating process with sometimes no major differences in taste and texture, sometimes recipes even greatly improved by making them more healthy and vegan, and interesting substitutions that work quite well, i.e. replacing 1 egg with 2T flour and 2-3 T of water/liquid for cookies. However, the substitutions are usually not equal so you have to be careful (i.e. 1 cup maple crystals = 1 cup of white sugar but 3/4 cup maple syrup minus 1/4 cup liquid (in the entire recipe) = 1 cup white sugar) and baking is a sensitive endeavour at the best of times for a number of reasons. From my limited experience to date, one thing you can try if you want to make your baking more healthy is to simply use whole wheat pasty flour vs. white pastry flour and maple sugar crystals vs. white refined sugar as they are equal and observe and taste how this works in terms of taste and texture.
By the mid point of baking, we were all feeling light headed and spacey from tasting the various baked goods and it was hard to stay focused and keep to the tasks at end. Each group was forgetting things in their recipes. Even the people that had limited sweets were feeling lightheaded and fuzzy, and the teacher said that it was because we were breathing in all the fumes of the natural and baking sweet ingredients and this has an impact as well...who knew there would be such a thing as the dangers of second hand baked good fumes? One teacher told us that sweets affect vegetarians in particular as their diets make them particularly sensitive to it. To offset this affect, the best thing to do is to minimize sweets, especially refined white sugar (other subsitution sugars have less sucrose, are more natural and therefore give you less radical up and down spikes in your system and behaviour, though no sugar is good in excess), make sure you have balanced plates of food, and balance "expansive"foodstuffs, which include sweets, with "contractive" foodstuffs.
The expansive and contractive theory is based on the macrobiotics system using the principle of yin-yang, classifies food into expansiveness and contractiveness, and encourages balance between the two. For example, if you get a headache from too much expansive food such as ice cream or alcohol, you can quickly tip by the imbalance by taking in something contractive such as salty food or cheeses. This is why the teacher made us a big pot of miso soup and vegetables while we were working and encouraged us to eat is so that we could balance our systems. I also ate miso soup in the morning for this reason... decided I needed all the help I could get and didn't want to get sick, which I started feeling yesteday after baking class. Macrobiotics is one of the many systems they expose us to so we can understand a variety of systems and use one or a mix of systems to our benefit and the benefit of others. I was feeling exhausted after the class after too much sugar, and therefore made some more simple miso soup and vegetables to continue to balance and nourish my system. By the end of the evening, I started feeling more normal again and ready to head into another day of baking tomorrow, which will be all about baking cakes and every person will be making a cake. Tonight, I went to buy my cake decorating set of pastry bags and numerous tips as we start on cake decorating on Friday. I'm not much of a baker so I don't know how this will go but I like art and may enjoy the decorating part. However, with this course and trying so many things for the first time, you just never know what will happen.
So, I am happy to say that I recovered from the food/product identification test and did quite well, mixing up things that were quite close like millet and quinoa and the cannelini bean vs the lima bean.
Also, I survived the day-long conversion baking journey. We worked in teams of two and we choose the brownie to convert. Other teams had cupcakes and cookies. We started with a traditional "Ghirardeli Award Winning Chocolate Brownies" that is delicious and quite hard to beat and then made the recipe six times, changing one thing at a time and building on this, with the goal of getting to a healthy and delicious vegan recipe (no eggs, butter or milk) and learning the effects of substituting ingredients on taste and texture. We were provided guidelines on conversions using different flours (i.e. with whole wheat flours), oils (i.e. with coconut oil, canola oil, extra virgin olive oil), sweetners (i.e. with maple syrup, barley malt, rice syrup, agave, stevia, juice concentrate, date sugar, maple crystals, sucanat), leaveners, the properties and uses of cocoa and carob, how to replace dairy (i.e. with nut milk, banana milk, oat milk, rice milk, tofu whipped cream, sour cream), eggs and butter, and the common mistakes in baking in general. This is a fascinating process with sometimes no major differences in taste and texture, sometimes recipes even greatly improved by making them more healthy and vegan, and interesting substitutions that work quite well, i.e. replacing 1 egg with 2T flour and 2-3 T of water/liquid for cookies. However, the substitutions are usually not equal so you have to be careful (i.e. 1 cup maple crystals = 1 cup of white sugar but 3/4 cup maple syrup minus 1/4 cup liquid (in the entire recipe) = 1 cup white sugar) and baking is a sensitive endeavour at the best of times for a number of reasons. From my limited experience to date, one thing you can try if you want to make your baking more healthy is to simply use whole wheat pasty flour vs. white pastry flour and maple sugar crystals vs. white refined sugar as they are equal and observe and taste how this works in terms of taste and texture.
By the mid point of baking, we were all feeling light headed and spacey from tasting the various baked goods and it was hard to stay focused and keep to the tasks at end. Each group was forgetting things in their recipes. Even the people that had limited sweets were feeling lightheaded and fuzzy, and the teacher said that it was because we were breathing in all the fumes of the natural and baking sweet ingredients and this has an impact as well...who knew there would be such a thing as the dangers of second hand baked good fumes? One teacher told us that sweets affect vegetarians in particular as their diets make them particularly sensitive to it. To offset this affect, the best thing to do is to minimize sweets, especially refined white sugar (other subsitution sugars have less sucrose, are more natural and therefore give you less radical up and down spikes in your system and behaviour, though no sugar is good in excess), make sure you have balanced plates of food, and balance "expansive"foodstuffs, which include sweets, with "contractive" foodstuffs.
The expansive and contractive theory is based on the macrobiotics system using the principle of yin-yang, classifies food into expansiveness and contractiveness, and encourages balance between the two. For example, if you get a headache from too much expansive food such as ice cream or alcohol, you can quickly tip by the imbalance by taking in something contractive such as salty food or cheeses. This is why the teacher made us a big pot of miso soup and vegetables while we were working and encouraged us to eat is so that we could balance our systems. I also ate miso soup in the morning for this reason... decided I needed all the help I could get and didn't want to get sick, which I started feeling yesteday after baking class. Macrobiotics is one of the many systems they expose us to so we can understand a variety of systems and use one or a mix of systems to our benefit and the benefit of others. I was feeling exhausted after the class after too much sugar, and therefore made some more simple miso soup and vegetables to continue to balance and nourish my system. By the end of the evening, I started feeling more normal again and ready to head into another day of baking tomorrow, which will be all about baking cakes and every person will be making a cake. Tonight, I went to buy my cake decorating set of pastry bags and numerous tips as we start on cake decorating on Friday. I'm not much of a baker so I don't know how this will go but I like art and may enjoy the decorating part. However, with this course and trying so many things for the first time, you just never know what will happen.
posted by Caroline at 8:10 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home