gluten-free eats

Nut butters you have to stir the oil back into, the worst, am I right?

But last year I made a breakthrough. I'd been meaning to make peanut butter cookies for a while, but it meant I had to open a new jar of peanut butter and mix the oil in with a butter knife, and my hand gets all cramped up and the knife gets greasy and the oil splashes over the side, and it's a whole thing. So the jar had just been sitting on the counter. BUT. I started thinking about how much easier it'd be to just dump it into my stand mixer...but UGH the clean up......and THEN, it came to me:

A NEW TECHNIQUE:

1. Dump the entire jar of nut butter into the bowl of your stand mixer.
2. Turn it on low to start, then increase the velocity.
3. MIX THAT NUT BUTTER.
4. Pour it back into the jar.
5. Immediately make a thing using the already nut buttery stand mixer.

That's right: No waste, no extra clean up, and you get a food out of it. I've used this method with peanut butter and then made peanut butter cookies and almond butter followed by brownie bites, but it should work with any recipe that calls for a natural nut butter and a spin in the mixer.

It's especially worth it for large Costco-sized nut butters and, because you've mixed it up so darn good, it seems like they don't separate as quickly in the fridge, and with the oil distributed evenly throughout the jar, your baked goods will have the right amount of fat in them instead of too much fat, which can make them greasy, or not enough fat, which can make them dry.

One thing's for sure, once you've removed something from your diet, you have to learn how to adapt.

This prompt is for recipes you've adapted yourself, whether it's something you found on the internet or an old family favorite you couldn't live without. It's also for adaptations you've made in the kitchen, like a neat gadget you use on the regular, a workaround you've developed to save time or energy, or a substitution you've had good luck with.

To fill this prompt, you can:

1. Slide into the comments of this post and share an adaptation, or link to a recipe or product and why you like it.
2. Write up a favorite recipe and post it to the comm.
3. Post a review of a related product or cookbook to the comm.
4. Try someone's recipe and reply to their post (or comment) with any changes you made and how it turned out.

This prompt lasts all month, but it's only for inspiration and not a requirement. You can still post to the comm if it isn't related to this topic.

Kosher salt—or kitchen salt—is a coarse salt used for seasoning meats and vegetables but also, more and more, in baking. Because its crystals are much larger than table salt, a teaspoon of kosher salt has less salt in it than teaspoon of fine salt, which means kosher salt and fine salt—whether it's table salt or sea salt—aren't interchangeable. If a recipe calls for kosher salt, you better use kosher salt.

That's pretty obvious. But what isn't obvious is that different brands of kosher salts can have different densities. That means one kosher salt might actually be saltier than another, and this is where we get into trouble. I use Morton kosher salt; Diamond Crystal—another popular brand—is much less salty in comparison. That means if I'm following a recipe that was developed for Diamond Crystal kosher salt, I'm going to end up using more salt than intended because a teaspoon of Diamond Crystal salt might be just right, but a teaspoon of Morton salt is going to be too much.

In savory cooking, this is less of a problem if you're familiar with how much salt you need and you're salting by feel—like salting a chicken before roasting, or a bunch of veggies. This is one of the things kosher salt is really good for because you can grab some and actually hold onto it, unlike fine salt, and over time you get a feel for how much salt is enough. The Salt episode of Samin Nosrat's Fat Salt Acid Heat on Netflix goes into this in detail. It changed the way I use salt while cooking, and I recommend watching it if you can.

But any time you're following a recipe that calls for a precise volume of kosher salt, there's a chance things could go wrong. Maybe it'll just be that your chili isn't salty enough, but that's easily fixed at the table. It's much harder to fix a lentil loaf that could double as a salt lick. And in baking, the amount of salt can be crucial, particularly in yeasted breads, so not only will your bread be salty, you could kill your yeasts and suffer structural failures as well.

So what can we do? If you use kosher salt in a recipe you're sharing here, be sure to tell us what brand you use, or even better, give us a weight in grams. If you're reading a recipe online and it calls for kosher salt, check the comments to see if anyone's complaining it's salty. If you're developing a recipe you plan on sharing, avoid the problem entirely and use a fine salt, like table salt or sea salt. Unless, of course, the kosher salt is being used as a finisher. Coarse salts are great on top of things like brownies, fudge, or cookies. And this is where it pays to know the salt you're using, because if a recipe tells you to sprinkle your brownies with coarse salt, you'll know the right amount to use to give your brownies just enough of a salty bite.

Here's a good article on the problem: The Kosher Salt Question, by Mari Uyehara.

Once upon a time, I used to just gouge out a hunk of cookie dough with whatever spoon was handy, squish it into a ball—or not—drop it on my cookie sheet, and call it good. And it was fine actually. My cookies were about the same size. It all worked out one way or another.

But then, probably under the influence of Alton Brown, I started using a disher, and my whole cookie game changed. A disher is basically an ice cream scoop with a mechanism to eject whatever it is you're scooping. I love them because they give you uniform cookies, which means uniform cooking times and perfect cookies. I highly recommend using a disher when making cookies, especially if you're new to baking.

Dishers come in a bunch of sizes. The one I use is a #50, which is ~1.25 tablespoons, or 5/8 ounce. It doesn't look like much, but it makes a pretty decent-sized cookie.

Note: The bigger the number, the smaller the scoop. So a #60 disher is about 1 tablespoon or 9/16 ounce. Theoretically, the number reflects how many scoops it would take to fill a 32 ounce container, aka a quart. That doesn't help me because who even knows what a quart is, but it does explain why the larger numbers are the smaller sizes. Here's a handy chart.

When you scoop your disher into your dough, make sure you scrape off any excess on the side of the bowl so that once you eject it, you have a perfect half sphere of dough. Otherwise, the edges of your cookie will be wonky, thin and amoeba-like, as any extra dough will spread out and bake faster than the rest of the cookie.

Dishers work with every kind of drop cookie I make, from buttery Mexican wedding cakes (you don't have to roll them by hand anymore!), to dairy-free chocolate chip, to vegan almond gingersnaps. Because some cookies won't spread out much in the oven, like your vegan almond flour cookies, you'll learn you need to flatten their domes a bit before cooking so you have nice flat cookies rather than domely ones. Unless you want domed cookies, like in the case of the Mexican wedding cakes.

And dishers aren't just for cookies. You can use larger dishers to portion out muffin or cupcake batter. Use them for drop biscuits or scones or English muffins or hamburger buns—any time you have a dough or batter and you want the product to be uniform.

Of course, as much as I love them, I admit that dishers can be rough on the wrists and hands with all the repeated squeezing and their unforgiving metal handles. So I know they're not for everyone—they're not always for me—but they remove much of the guesswork when it comes to baking times, recipe yield, and even how many cookies you can fit on a sheet without them running into each other. I know this because I write all this stuff down for the next time I make a recipe, which is also something I recommend.

In short, if you like uniformity and consistent results—or you just want to take the guesswork out of baking—consider the disher.