Another Damn Cooking Blog

Sorry for all of the exclamation marks, but I’m pretty excited about this crust. As I said before when I made this apple pie, I’ve tried many pie crust recipes. Some of them were other people’s, and some were my own less than genius concoctions. (Almond flour and coconut flour with coconut oil and soy milk? Sure! Why not. What could go wrong?) A pretty expensive experiment, but nothing good was ever made by not taking chances. Expensive, expensive chances.

I was loathe to try this recipe, because 1) it seemed too easy to be good, and 2) I have had some bad luck with garbanzo based flours. But I made socca last night, and there was no beany aftertaste, so I thought, what the hell.

I wasn’t going to waste real roasted pumpkin on this recipe, so I used canned and went ahead with my old trusty pumpkin pie recipe. (It’s basically sugar, salt, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, eggs, milk, and pumpkin. You can find it anywhere, including on the back of your pumpkin can. I’ll be making a bit of a fancier pumpkin pie next week, but I didn’t want to waste any more ingredients on this pie in case the crust ended up tasting like burnt hummus dipped in vinegar.)

I found this crust on The Recipe Renovator. She has a video and everything.

The ingredients:

• 1⅓ C. (150 g) GF flour mix (I used Bob’s Red Mill All Purpose)
• ⅓ C. (75 ml) vegetable oil
• 1 t. (2 g ) xanthan gum
• 4 T. (60 ml) milk  (cow or soy or whatever you want)

Follow the directions and watch the video on her site.

After I made the crust, I took the extra dough, sprinkled it with sugar and cinnamon, and baked it to see how it would taste. (A little trick I learned from my mom.) It bummed me out a little to smell the first 10 minutes of the bake, because there was a definite beany smell. When it was brown and crisp, I took it out and hesitantly tasted it. No beany taste. Woot! It is flaky and great.

It doesn’t taste like butter and wheat flour (or what I think I remember that tasting like). My goal is to get so close to “real” crust that I don’t have to make two different pies for GF and non GF. So, the quest continues.