Campers, it's been a frantically busy weekend chez Fractured Amy. We received an honored houseguest; perpetrated several new cooking experiments; evaluated three untried gluten-free products; held a marathon macaron-making session; and engaged in several spirited philosophical debates on the subject of food and what makes it good. I also enjoyed my first meal out as a gluten-freedom fighter.
But first things first. Breakfast!
The Most Important Meal of the Day is something with which I like to pamper weekend visitors, especially when they have driven many hours and arrived very late the previous night. Since the guest in question was my dear Toad (foodie, adventurer, and famously good sport), I decided to risk making gluten-free pancakes from one of the hitherto untried factory-produced concoctions purchased during my excursion to Whole Foods a couple of weeks ago.
Frankly, given the outcome it's amazing she didn't get straight back into her Smartie Car and peel out of the driveway with a squeal of her wee tires, leaving a billowing plume of dust and g/f cooking mix in her wake, never to grace my humble abode again.
Where to begin? The episode, which I have dubbed the Pancake Pileup, began with a box of gluten-free pancake and waffle mix, an innocent-seeming melange of white rice flour, evaporated cane juice, potato starch, baking powder (non-alluminated, as if that could make any difference), tapioca starch, vanilla, salt, and the dreaded xanthan gum. The box was a cheerful yellow and purple striped affair, with a primitive yet appealing representation of a munchkin on the front, pigtails a la Pippi Longstocking, hungrily surveying a stack of syrupy, perfect-looking flapjacks. Cognizant of American companies' world-famous litigiousness, I shall not reveal the Pileup's brand name, although I can say without fear of corporate repercussions that it rhymes with Gluten Free Screams.
With the table set, the griddle heated to a toasty 350 deg F, condiments at the ready, and the Kid Squid poised expectantly with knife and fork in hand, I opened the box. An overwhelming smell of sweetness poured forth together with a visible zephyr of sugar dust. Coughing delicately, I proffered the box to Toad for a second opinion and was rewarded with an unequivocal 'Good God' accompanied by the sort of nose-wrinkling reserved in B-movies for the discovery of a three-month-old corpse.
The texture of the mix was considered and found to be unpleasantly gritty between the index finger and thumb. The rice flour, perhaps? It turned out Toad has an aversion to rice flour - an unfortunate revelation this late in the game.
Determined to see the thing through to its bitter end, and with no obvious breakfast alternative, we decided to press on.
We added the required volumes of milk and oil and stood back for the stipulated five minutes, rather curious to see what would happen next. What happened was the xanthan gum (who knows how much was included amongst the other ingredients, but I'll wager it was way more than is either desirable or healthy) did its thing and transformed the mix into a glossy, shiny, sticky bowlful that looked and smelled a lot like commercial angel food cake batter.
Unfortunate, but not a deal-breaker. We persevered.
I lightly oiled my beautiful Wolf griddle as is my custom. The instant a pancake-sized spludge of batter hit the the hot plate, I knew we were in serious trouble. It sizzled and sputtered alarmingly, in the way things tend to do just before they burn to a crisp. I quickly grabbed my greasy-spoon-sized pancake-flipper and attempted to ease it under one of the flapjacks so I could turn it over. Despite my doughty efforts, the cake stuck to the griddle stubbornly and I was forced to scrape away at it in an un-ladylike manner. Able to free one edge, I attempted to turn the pancake over - whereupon it promptly tore in two around its equator. Clearly, xanthan or no, it lacked the structure needed to hold itself together. I managed to get the remaining three pancakes turned over, sort of, although two of them were no longer round and they all split horizontally to some degree. The griddle began to look like the scene of a bad accident and the batter bits that had failed to release under my spatula commenced smoking. The sound of nervous laughter was heard from somewhere off-screen.
Still, we were determined to give our breakfast a chance. I put the most likely specimen on a plate for the Squid's delectation: Toad and I (unwilling, just on the offchance, to dirty another plate unnecessarily) picked pieces straight off the griddle for sampling.
At this point, Moleskine clearly heard somebody exclaim, 'What the hell is this?!' but failed to record the identity of the outraged party. It could have been any one of us, since we all subsequently agreed that the Gluten Free Screams pancakes were gummy, sticky, gritty, and slimy. They left in our mouths a molar-coating residue and a metallic, over-sweet aftertaste. Believe me when I say mere words cannot begin to do justice to their epic awfulness.
The Squid spit his into the trash. Toad and I, being of a more dignified frame of mind, went off quietly to brush our teeth. Upon our return to the scene of the crime, we reviewed our method and donned our reading glasses to confirm we'd followed the manufacturer's directions, whereupon we congratulated ourselves on being two reasonably intelligent adults who had done exactly as they'd been told. There was no concealing the unfortunate fact that the pancakes themselves were a) at fault and b) most definitely off the menu. Permanently.
It took us quite some time to clean my beloved Wolf cooker of the Pileup's residue, which had turned to cement during the post-tasting hullabaloo. We scraped the rest of the uncooked batter into the trash can, afraid to pour it down the sink and risk clogging up the plumbing for all eternity, forever and forever.
Next up: startlingly, breakfast goes from bad to worse.
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