flour & the bee: a high nutrient baking blog

Flour. It is more than just the fine white powder billowing from a pastry shop at four in the morning. Not all flour is white. Not all flour is bad. Flour can be brown and hearty whole wheat or rye. It can be a long forgotten grain like spelt, kamut or einkorn. It doesn’t have to be grain at all; utilitarian almond flour, silky tapioca flour, sophisticated hazelnut flour, or bold buckwheat flour. It can be a cereal or a pseudo-cereal, a nut or a seed. It can be soaked, sprouted and(or) soured. Flour is defined by what you do with it. Take flour back! Let’s bake again.

[flourandthebee]

at Frisco, Colorado

[flourandthebee]

In the Seed-to-Sour Kitchen today: bison bone broth; garlic herb #marrow butter; #fermented garlic; all this fluffy garlic #compost is going into my new #vermiculture bin #urbanhomestead #wormfarm (at Frisco, Colorado)

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Sea Salt & Caramel Cheesecake for the Harvest Dinner tonight @ Vinny's! Thanks to Jumpin' Good Goat Dairy for the goat cheese and Beeyond the Hive for the honey #grainfree #paleo #paleobaking #glutenfreebaking #wapf

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The Banana Bread Muffin and it's chocolate chippy cousin en route to Abbey's Coffee Shop in Frisco #grainfree #dairyfree #nutfree #paleo #paleobaking #glutenfreebaking #wapf

[flourandthebee]

Health inspection: passed! With flying colors. We are now a licensed retail food establishment!

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The Cheesecake Challenge: Complete

This is goooooood. It is super rich. I had about three bites and had to stop. But then it was so good that I went back and have another three bites and now I'm really going to stop. 

I'm calling it Coconut Sugar Cheesecake to account for the color, a lovely taupe. I used the filling recipe from The New Best Recipes cookbook by Cooks Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen and the only ingredient that I had to sub was the sugar. The texture is perfect, though this test batch did get over cooked. I'll test the internal temperature at 1 hour 15 minutes next time instead of the recommended 1 hour and 30 minutes which resulted in a huge crack down the center of the cake. No worries, I cut around it and now have six beautiful cheesecake bars to give to Peta and lots of little slivers left for myself and Ben, who apparently loves cheesecake too! Learn something new everyday.

The crust was the real challenge. After settling on the cookie crumb recipe (which was incidentally almost identical to the Cooks Illustrated crust recipe except that Cooks used store bought graham crackers and mine had you make your own paleo cookies from scratch) I ended up burning the crumbs in an effort to get them crispy (the oven was off! what the heck!). So, I was back to square one! But just as I began to despair I saw out of the corner of my eye the perfect solution waiting for me on the kitchen counter. Left over Snickerdoodles!!! I through them in the food processor and without any additional ingredients they made the perfect cheesecake crust. And the final product has just a hint of cinnamon to make you wonder, in the words of Jerry Seinfeld, ""Oh This is so good. What's in it?" The answer invariably comes back, Cinnamon. Cinnamon. Again and again."

[flourandthebee]

Coconut Sugar Cheesecake #grainfree #nutrientrichsweetener #paleo #paleobaking #glutenfreebaking THIS IS NOT A CASHEW AND ZUCCHINI CHEESECAKE. THIS IS THE REAL DEAL.

[flourandthebee]

Burned cookie crumbs = plan b = even better than plan a!

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The Paleo butter cookies for my cheesecake crust. Added some cinnamon to make them more graham crackery

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On second thought, this one looks better and I want to do a baked cheesecake.

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Here is an option from a reliable source. Her cheesecake is one of those frozen cashew ones, but i like the theory behind this pecan based graham flavored crust. The fact that it's raw makes me want to do a no bake cheesecake and that means (can you guess?) gelatin!!

[flourandthebee]

The Cheesecake Challenge

My fantastic employee, Peta, is leaving next week to return home to the Czech Republic. She will no doubt be moving to Summit County in a year or so to run my bakery/dessert café for me, but for now we must say goodbye.

Many weeks ago, Peta asked if I could make her a cheesecake and I have been putting it off ever since. A few pintrest searches for "paleo cheesecake" have turned up many imposters, mostly made of soaked cashews and demanding to be frozen until the moment of consumption; not my idea of a successful paleo recipe. 

When pastured dairy is allowed in most interpretations of paleo, why no dairy cheesecake? Well, first of all, it's hard to find a pastured cream cheese in stores. Kalona makes one, but I've only seen it online (like a rumor) never on a store shelf. They also make a pastured sour cream that could make a nice cheesecake. My local raw dairy doesn't do cream cheese, but they do creme fraîche and that would work very well. And then there is goat cheese, which Peta is adamantly against, but may work for my purposes later down the road (except when she moves out her to work for me and once again demands a cow's milk cheesecake, then I'm hosed.) So there are options. But I'd have to track them down and, frankly, I'm out of time. So I bought 16 oz of my favorite cream cheese: Nancy's Cultured Cream Cheese. It's not pastured but it is really tangy and flavorful from the cultures, a far cry from Philadelphia. So, with this, I will experiment with a new recipe idea that I hope will join the pantheon of "signature" recipes... enter, the cheesecake bar.

If this works (and that's a big if) I'll need to adapt it to one of the pastured dairy options before taking it "global". But first things first. Without a good paleo cheesecake lead, I'll have to piece one together (yay! my favorite challenge). The first step is the crust. I know I've seen paleo "graham cracker" crust recipes so I'll turn to pintrest for guidence here.

(stay tuned for the next installment)

[flourandthebee]

14er Trail Mix Blondies. The "Quandary": how to make a hearty, portable hiking treat. Load up a Blondie with nutritious goodness.

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Finished Rhubarb Jam

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Making high nutrient jam: what do you do when you have too much free fruit? Make jam of course. And how do you get it to set when you're not using sugar? Our favorite high nutrient super ingredient: gelatin!!!

[flourandthebee]

Apricot Honey Jam. IT'S MADE WITH HONEY! NO REFINED SUGAR! And local organic apricots from Uncle John's farm stand. #paleo #glutenfree #norefinedsugar #nutrientrichsweetener #bunintheoven #breakfastsatbito

[flourandthebee]