Honey Kefir Bread

A little while back I saw a link to this post by The Restless Chipotle on making Honey Buttermilk Bread.  I pretty much avoid breads due to wheat allergies.  Yeah, I cheat once in a while.  So sue me.

There were a few things I needed to tweak for it to work for me. First, because of a rash on my hands (probably from cheating on the wheat products  - but those cookies were good!) I couldn't knead the dough. So it had to be doable in the bread machine.

Second, I didn't have any buttermilk, but I do make my own dairy kefir so I decided to substitute that instead. I purchased my kefir grains from Cultures for Health. They are very helpful, my first attempt at kefir didn't work and they replaced the grains and gave me some excellent advice which ultimately enabled me to get homemade kefir going.

If your kefir is thick you may want to thin it down a bit with some milk to where it has the consistency of buttermilk.

Back to the bread. It's a simple recipe, nothing exotic, and you can go from Zero-Yum in about 3-1/2 hours. Add the following ingredients to the bread pan in the order listed. This is for a 1-1/2 pound loaf.

1 Cup Kefir
2 Tablespoons Coconut Oil
1/4 Cup Honey
1 Teaspoon Salt
3 Cups Flour

Now stop and smooth the flour out over the liquid ingredients to form a barrier between these last two ingredients and the liquid.

1/2 Teaspoon Baking Soda
2 Teaspoons Dry Yeast

At this point you turn on the bread machine and go take a nap.  :-)  All bread machines I am aware of have a 3 hour cycle.  In 3 hours your bread should be ready, tap it out of the bread pan onto a wire rack and allow to cool 20 minutes before slicing.

It will still be warm, slather on some butter and enjoy!

Rum Based BBQ Sauce

If you ever have looked, almost everything these days has corn syrup in it.  I don't eat corn because of food allergies. So onto the internet I went, looking at various recipes.  I found one by Steven Raichlen on his Barbeque! Bible website titled RumBullion BBQ Sauce. This was last Tuesday. I bookmarked the page so I could return to it closer to the weekend and make the sauce.  I knew I was going to have to tweak it because he uses soy sauce and I would have to either use corn syrup free ketchup or make my own.  No biggie.

So when I went back to his page on Friday, he had redesigned his website and the link took me to his home page. I used his search feature. No Luck.  Went through page after page of recipes on his site. No Luck.

This wasn't working out as planned.

So back to Google I went.  I typed "RumBullion" in the search box and got several results. None on the first page had the recipe.  But on the second page I found a Boston Globe article with an adaptation of the recipe.  It looked close enough to what I remembered of the original that I went with it.

Here is what I came up with:

1/4/cup Dark Rum
1/4 cup Honey
1/4 cup Granulated Sugar
2 Tablespoons Brown Sugar
1 Tablespoon Molasses
3 Tablespoons Worcester Sauce (Lea & Perrin's is gluten free)
Juice of 1 Small Lemon
Juice of 1/2 Small Orange
1 Tablespoon Distilled Vinegar
1/4 Teaspoon Hickory Liquid Smoke
1 Teaspoon Garlic Powder
1 Teaspoon Onion Powder
1/2 Teaspoon Cinnamon
1/2 Teaspoon Nutmeg
1/2 Teaspoon Sea Salt

1 Cup Tomato Sauce

This allowed me to avoid anything with corn syrup in it and avoid the soy sauce in the original recipe.

Directions:

Place everything except the ketchup in a medium saucepan and stir well.  Bring it to a boil and reduce heat to allow it to simmer for about 5 minutes.  Add tomato sauce, stir well and return to a boil.  Reduce heat again and allow it to simmer until desired consistency.

Taste it.  To be honest, I thought it was a bit too sweet but decided to allow it to set overnight to allow the flavors to continue to mingle before changing anything.  So I let it cool down and poured it into a jar to refrigerate overnight. I'm not sure refrigeration is needed as everything that goes in it is stored at room temp, but better safe than sorry.

I was making this as the BBQ sauce to add to my BBQ Beans (recipe upcoming) and to use on the burgers we were going to grill.

The next morning I removed the sauce from the fridge and tasted it.  The flavors had mixed together some and it didn't seem as sweet.  So I decided to use it "as-is".

The beans were very good, as was the sauce added on the burgers after cooking. While I don't know if I would use this recipe on beef again, I think it would be great with pulled pork or shredded chicken.

I may have to go get a pork shoulder and whip up another batch of this to test my theory!