Discover the secrets to baking perfect gluten-free cookies and making the fluffiest scrambled eggs that will impress any crowd.
Mastering the Art of Gluten-Free Baking and Fluffy Egg Techniques for Your Next Gathering
Many home cooks struggle with achieving the perfect texture for scrambled eggs, often ending up with dry or flat results. To elevate your brunch experience, it’s essential to master the technique of cooking soft, creamy scrambled eggs. This method is particularly useful when preparing breakfast for a crowd, ensuring everyone enjoys a delicious, fluffy dish. The key lies in low and slow cooking, using fresh ingredients, and constant stirring to achieve that coveted lightness.
In addition to mastering scrambled eggs, consider adding a delightful treat to your brunch spread: chewy, almond-scented amaretti cookies. Naturally gluten-free, these cookies pair perfectly with a cup of coffee or tea, making them an excellent choice for an afternoon snack. Their delightful texture and flavor can inspire creativity in your baking endeavors, providing a sweet complement to any meal.
Baking Bliss and Breakfast Brilliance: Unlocking the Art of Gluten-Free Delights and Fluffy Egg Perfection!
Welcome to Food Friends, a podcast inspiring home cooks to try new dishes in the kitchen by sharing trusted recipes, tips, and friendship. Hi, I’m Sonia. And I’m Carrie. We met in Los Angeles over 15 years ago as personal chefs and haven’t stopped talking about food since. We’re so glad you’re.
here. Hi, Sonia. Hi, Carrie. Sonia, I really want to know what was your best bite this week. So, my best bite was not something I made. It was something I was gifted. So, there’s a local baker here in Portland who makes Bodkas and her business is called Bobkush. And she makes bobkas and she makes different.
Kinds of cookies and rugal. And we had never met in person, but we sort of had admired each other’s work from afar. And so we decided to have a coffee and she brought me these beautiful cookies that she makes which are called Amaretti. And they’re naturally glutenfree which I love and they’re dairyf free which I love. So they’re.
Just kind of a great cookie to have in your repertoire for all the people who might need dairyfree or gluten-free cookies. And they were so delicious they made me stop. Now, I didn’t ask her her for her unique recipe cuz this is her bakery. And she added, I think, a little bit of halva or tahini, so there was a sesame flavor, but I’m already our.
Traditional Italian almond cookie. And what she shared with me is that the original recipe that she sort of got inspired by was an ottoi recipe, which we can all make and is available online. So, the ingredient list is really simple and the process is not that complicated. I would say it’s not quite a beginner recipe, but it’s definitely not someone.
Who has to be an experienced baker to make these, but you do need a handheld mixer or a stand mixer ideally. So, what you do is in a bowl, you mix together your dry ingredients, which in this case are ground almonds. So, almond flour, sugar, lemon zest, and a little bit of almond extract. And I do think that almond extract makes a huge difference.
It’s a beautiful flavor. and a little bit of salt because you want that salt to bring out the flavor of the sweetness. And you rub it all together. And when you rub your zest into any kind of sugar, that releases its oils and makes it that much more lemony and flavorful. Same thing with the almond extract. It’s all going to just permeate.
That sugar and that almond flour much more easily. And then in a separate bowl, you whip some egg whites and honey. That’s it. And you whip them till they’re fluffy. And then you fold in that which is essentially a meringue mixture into your almond flour mixture. And then you roll the cookies into little balls and you roll them in.
Powdered sugar and almond flakes. Those are just recommendations. I think you could do this a lot of different ways. And you bake them. And they don’t take that long to bake, like 14 to 18 minutes. And they’re so light on the outside, but then chewy, almost like a martza pan, but not as dense as a martzipan. So, it has all that lovely.
Chewy texture, but not too heavy with a sort of almondy sweetness. It was so delicious. It was one of the best cookies that I’ve had in a long time. And it is so perfect with a cup of coffee. Well, I love that you have brought this idea to us because I’ve definitely heard of Amoretti cookies, but I have always thought of them as a.
Packaged cookie. Like, that’s the only way I’ve ever experienced them. I’m sure my husband who grew up next to an Italian neighborhood, I’m sure he had these at the bakeries that he grew up near, but I have just never experienced them this way. But I really love that almond flavor. And I love an almond dessert. It’s like I do, too. I’m.
Getting kind of obsessed with it. Last summer I was obsessed with Fran Japan as you know and we talked about which is an almond paste. This winter Trader Joe’s had tubes of marzipan. I don’t know if you noticed that like during the it was like one of their seasonal things and it was one of those things that was there for just 3 weeks or something less. And.
I bought a couple tubes and I’ve been making gallettes that like have a little bit of marzipan on the bottom. And then for Passover I made that almond cake. So, I just have been in an almondy kind of state of mind and this really is pronounced almond flavor, but it’s that texture. I’m really obsessed with that texture. Yeah, there’s something about.
That almond flavor, too, that’s it’s both nutty and floral. I think that’s why it also is great for stone fruits like peaches and cherries. And that’s why like cherry, almond, and peaches go so well together like the Fran Japan. And also the texture of like a mering cookie is really nice. And to your point, it’s a gluten-free dessert. It’s.
A dairyfree dessert. And I think that’s always a nice thing to have in your back pocket. And it tastes really good several days later. So it’s one of those cookies that holds up for a long time. I think this would be great for the holiday cookie box, too. I really love that. Well, Carrie, what was your best bite of the week? Sonia, I wanted to.
Share a few ideas from I mentioned that we recently went on our school’s camp out and there are two big potlucks that we have at this camp out. One is on Friday night and it’s kind of a burger night and then one is on Sunday morning and it’s like eggs and bacon and pancakes. But because there are so many people, it’s like over 200 people, maybe.
Up to 250 depending on how many people come. Sunday morning. That’s a huge amount of And everyone goes camping. Yes. Everyone goes camping. We go to a campground. And what’s great is everybody signs up to bring food and there’s this great signup genius that kind of guides people through what do you want to bring? And then people sign.
Up to cook the food. People sign up to clean up the food and set up and and so it’s this very big communal effort. But there were some really great takeaways and I really kind of head up part of this potluck situation. I’m always looking for like what can I bring? What’s going to be easy? So, one of the things that I brought for Friday night,.
I bought some really great sausages from the butcher that I like to go to in my neighborhood. It’s called Huntington Meats. It’s at the farmers market at the Grove and they make all these sausages inhouse. There’s like an artichoke sausage that has garlic in it that’s really delicious. And then there’s another one that has pablanos and some.
Cheese. And so when the cheese comes out of the sausages, it gets like crusty and delicious. But what we did was we threw a bunch of onions and peppers on the grill and then served the sausages with the onions and peppers, which is I think kind of nice if you don’t want a cheeseburger. How many sausages did you bring for 250 people? That’s a great.
Question. No one has to bring enough for 250 people. you’re just bringing enough for 10 people or eight people and so cuz everyone’s contributing and so then it creates enough food. Yeah. Everyone didn’t eat these sausages. Most people eat like a burger or a hot dog or or whatever. But when one of the cooks who’s a friend of mine in Everton was.
Cooking these sausages, too. This is another great tip. He poured some beer onto the grill which really also steamed them. They were getting Yeah, it steams it and it adds a lot of great flavor, too. It’s a trick that my family, my dad definitely used to to use when we was cooking broughtwurst. And then the other thing is on Sunday when we were trying.
To figure out how to cook eggs for that many people, there’s a parent at our school who owns a couple of restaurants and he offered to bring instead of having everyone bring eggs and cracking them and all that kind of stuff, he brought a bladder of eggs. And a bladder of eggs is 18 dozen eggs. So, it’s just this jug of eggs that you can get like.
At a restaurant supply store that kind of that you can get. Yeah. Or I don’t know if they have things like that at Costco, but I think he got it from his like restaurant supplier. And so I went online and I was kind of looking at different recipes like how to cook eggs for a crowd. And there was this great Ali Siggo recipe that is basically to me.
Scrambled eggs really need a lot of butter, but you sort of start with some butter and you cook the eggs. You save some of the butter in little cubes. And as the eggs are cooking, you add these little cold cubes of butter, which kind of slow down the cooking of the eggs, and it helps them stay creamy. We definitely did that. I mean, you’re.
Still cooking eggs for 200 people, so it’s a big deal. So, what this parent was doing when he was cooking the eggs is we were actually cooking them on a flat top. And so, he had a pan of melted butter. He would pour the melted butter out. you would pour the eggs on and just sort of like quickly scramble the eggs, add a little bit more butter, and then.
We’re putting them into small hotel pans and covering them with tin foil so that we could sort of serve them one at a time cuz it was also Sunday morning. It was pretty cold out. So, yeah. And it’s like with the sausage burger night, not everyone’s going to eat a sausage, but at breakfast, you’re probably going to have a lot of people eating eggs, even.
If it’s not everyone. And it’s really hard to make that volume not in a giant hotel kitchen. There’s kitchens designed for that volume. Most people don’t have access to that. Even a restaurant typically doesn’t make eggs for several hundred people at a time. So, it makes sense that you would do it in stages and on a flat top. And what was really also.
Helpful is that people who are good at these things sign up to do this piece. So, Sonia, the thing that I’m most excited to share with you is the pancakes. So, I shared in a recent episode that I made Allison Roman’s buttermilk pancakes, but I actually quadrupled the mix. And so, I mixed up the dry ingredients, which are flour,.
Salt, a little bit of sugar, baking soda, baking powder. I mixed those all up. I whisked them together. I put them in a ziplockc bag and took them separately because you really don’t want to mix up your pancake mix until an hour at the most, 2 hours at the most before you’re going to cook your pancakes. And then because this was a quadruple of the.
Recipe, I took eight eggs. I cracked them into a mason jar and brought them with me to the campground. And then it also called for a lot of buttermilk. So I stuck the buttermilk in the bottom of my cooler. Lots of ice. And we got a big bowl. You put the dry ingredients in. You make a well. You put the eggs in the buttermilk. Mix it all together. But.
This year we also used these batter dispensers. Oh, those are so fun. They were so fun. I bought two of them and I took one of my favorite pieces of kitchen equipment, which is a wide mouth funnel. I took that with me to the campground and I used that wide mouth funnel to transfer the batter into this pancake dispenser. And then it was so.
Easy for the cooks who were working on the cook top because they could just squeeze it exact size of pancake that they wanted. My batter was different than other people’s batters. We sort of mixed everybody’s batters together, but it just made it so much easier because then you’re not trying to hold a big bowl and ladle it in. Those are such.
Great tips. I also, when you were talking about the eggs, it reminded me of what we did at the deli. So, if you didn’t have access to a bladder of eggs, which is a giant amount of eggs, what we would always do for our eggs is we would actually make our own scrambled egg mixture and it could last in the fridge for a couple days. And so what we would.
Do is we would crack a bunch of eggs into a blender, into a Vitamix, but it could be any blender. And we’d season it with salt. And I believe we added a little cream as well. And some people say don’t add salt because it will toughen your eggs, but we never found that to be true. And in fact, the seasoning I feel like really helps the.
Eggs. And our eggs were always extremely light and fluffy cuz we make these egg sandwiches. And we got a lot of feedback about the fluffiness of the eggs. it had more to do with the cooking than whether there was salt in it. So then you just blend that up and it gets kind of foamy and that really can last, like I said, several days. So you could make that in.
Advance on your own. And there’s something with the blending of it that also I think helps with the ultimate texture. And then for me, the thing I’ve always learned about scrambled eggs is you really want whatever you’re cooking in to get hot enough before you ever add the eggs. I mean, there’s a million different methods. There’s a cold pan.
Method. This is just the method we would use. So, if you have your method, go for it. But you’d really let the pan get hot enough, but then you would make sure you weren’t ever cooking on too high of a heat. So, it was pretty much a hot pan, but then lower to low heat. And then you’re slowly like just moving the edges of the eggs from the sides towards the.
Center so that the center runny part goes out towards the edges. And that also gives it height and fluffiness and creaminess. and turn off the heat like a minute before you think it’s done cuz the eggs continue to cook in the residual heat and the longer they cook the more rubbery they get. There’s all these ways to finesse scrambled eggs and.
It makes sense that adding cubes of cold butter is another strategy that would help it because yeah it’s you don’t want it to cook too fast too hot. I think it’s really important this tip that you’re giving about blending your eggs ahead of time with a little bit of salt and pepper and cream or whole milk. I really love that idea because we do this.
Camp out with our school once a year, but our family also likes to go camping. And so being able to make a smaller amount, even if it’s just a dozen eggs and a/4 cup of of cream, you could do that ahead of time and then not have to take all those eggs with you. I think we did two tablespoons of cream for a dozen eggs. Not even a lot. Not even that.
Much. Yeah. But I love these tips. You never know when you’re going to find yourself in a large cooking situation where you’re having to feed a lot of people. So, it’s always interesting to meet just to hear what’s on the menu. Yes, it’s such a community event. This has been fun, Sonia. Until next time. Bye. Thanks for being our food friend.
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