Tag Archives: Gluten-free

Sapodilla and Orange Peel Curry.

March 1, 2015 Munchkin

Just catching up on some recipes that I created over the last few weeks: It is sapodilla season!! This is a sweet tasting fruit with the flavour of caramel and cinnamon. Gnome has got first dibs for making a Melomel (honey and fruit wine) but I have been sneaking some past him to create some tasty dishes..they don’t call me Ninja Munchkin for nothing!

Sapodilla fruit makes a great base for a curry especially with its aromatic cinnamon tones. I have complimented this “earthiness” with dried orange peel which I have coarsely ground with a blender:

Other spices in the curry include: cumin, mustard seeds, fresh curry leaf and fennel. Venison was cooked in the curry and then the dish was served with basmati rice.

Gnome decided to overlook the fact that I had taken some sapodillas, without his permission…since the curry was so good!!

For the full recipe, click on Sapodilla and Orange Peel Curry with Venison.

Belize, Farming, Food, Plants

Pigeon Pea and Green Papaya: Farm Fresh.

February 28, 2015 Munchkin

We have been podding green pigeon (cajanus cajun) peas everyday to eat:

The plants have been very generous and we have had wonderful meals with this pea. The pea tastes like a “green pea” and maintains its texture very well. It only needs a 5 minute cooking time which makes it a versatile ingredient.

Today, I cooked Pigeon Peas with Green Papaya…all fresh from the farm. Everything had the taste of vitality…something money can’t buy!! Since we started living like this and cooking our own food, we actually find that we dislike eating out because nothing seems to have the freshness and individuality of home-cooked food. Going to a restaurant just means eating something that is displayed nicely on a plate but does not necessarily have the best ingredients (ie. bulk buckets of processed material).

Check out my recipe in the Belize Wild Recipes Section. You can have this meal with a carbohydrate like bread or rice, if you like. I am on a non-carbohydrate diet since the Chinese New Year Pig Out…too many mochi balls!! So, we just ate this with by itself. Right now, my diet consists of fresh vegetables as above (one meal a day), no whites (carbs) and plenty of fresh fruit like papaya and oranges. Seems to be working out well for me.

Belize, Food

Basmati Rice with Chinese Sausage and Shiitake Mushrooms.

January 27, 2015 Munchkin

I found a 20lb bag of Basmati rice in Belize City and I grabbed it off the shelf quick-smart! Usually you can only find Basmati rice in pathetic little 400g (not even a full lb!) packets and it is enough for one measly meal.

So, today I cooked Basmati rice with Chinese Sausages and Shiitake mushrooms…you could say that it was Chinese-style.

Basmati rice has a lovely fragrant aroma. It is so much better than the ubiquitous long grain rice which is found in Belize; I find this rice really gummy and starchy.

I will have more Basmati rice recipes in the future since I have to work through a 20lb bag!

Belize, Food

Corn Cous Cous with Pastrami and Olives.

January 18, 2015 Munchkin

As a follow up from my previous post about Corn Cous Cous, I have yet another recipe for you to read about. This one is cooked with onions, pastrami, olives and fresh tomatoes.

This delicious recipe is really simple to cook. It is gluten-free so it makes a great alternative to wheat cous cous. For more details click on my link to Corn Cous Cous Italian Style.

Belize, Food

Chinese Sausage and Corn Cous Cous.

January 16, 2015 Munchkin

As a continuation of the Corn Cous Cous theme, which I wrote about 2 days ago, here is another recipe.

This is a variation of the original recipe; this one contains Chinese Sausage and Chinese Cabbage. I suppose you could call this one “Corn Cous Cous – Chinese Style”.

If you are in Belize, you need to befriend a Chinese person to find Chinese sausage. I have no idea where they get it from but this is a favourite one for a local chinese person to stash in their personal pantry. For everybody else, you can probably get it at your Chinese Grocery.

If you want the details on this recipe, click on Sausage and Corn Cous Cous.

Belize, Food, Saving Money

Corn Cous Cous Style.

January 14, 2015 Munchkin

Hello there, it is bun-eating Munchkin again!

Today, I want to talk about how to cook Corn Grits in a different way. This involves grinding whole corn and steaming it with a minimal amount of water which results in a cooked, gritty meal which behaves just like ordinary wheat cous cous. This is great because it is gluten-free and you are not eating the usual gloopy consistency associated with cooked corn (hominy/polenta).

For those interested, corn is one of the cheapest carbohydrates which you can buy in Belize. A 100lb bag of Mayan Corn (GMO-free, I might add) costs only $35 Belize Dollars (USD 17.50).

The trick is to thoroughly wash the starch out of coarsely ground corn. If you want to know how to prepare this click on Corn Cous Cous.

Belize, Fermentation, Saving Money

Maize Beer Bottling Day.

January 13, 2015 Munchkin

Today was supposed to be a day of hard outside work, the coconuts still need more cleaning and weeding but…the plans of mice and men aften go astray…so the rain and cold weather decreed. The next best thing, I guess, is to bottle some of that New Year’s Eve Brown Ale I made.

It is a fair bit of work, to be honest, especially this first time that we had to wash, clean and sterilize the bottles we got from town. They were filled with old napkins, cigarette butts and I hate to think what else…

Here two cases have been cleaned, washed and filled with some sanitizing solution.

After a few hours, they have to drip dry before they can be used…

In the mean time, the maize beer needs to be siphoned into a bottling bin…

…and the priming sugar needs to be boiled…

It is only after all this is done that we can start filling the bottles and placing the caps on them.

The bottles are filled and the caps are resting on top of them.

Now we can finally use the capper to seal everything up. As a side note: A big thank you to Speedo for bequeathing his bottle capper to us…I would have hated to do this job by hand…

Capping away...almost done... — Capping away…almost done…

And here is the finished project!!

I’ll let you know what it tastes like in a few weeks…in the mean time…may all your beer be cold and bubbly!!

Belize, Fermentation, Saving Money

Mashing, Lautering and Sparging on New Year's Eve.

December 31, 2014 Munchkin

I’ve had to postpone brewing until today…it is amazing and unfortunate that people get sick around New Year and interfere with our best laid brewing plans…but such is life and I am always a doctor first. Better late than never and I get to call today’s brew New Year’s Eve Jackass Bitters Brown Ale!

As I mentioned previously, maize has a higher gelatinization temperature than barley; so high, in fact, that the active enzymes for starch conversion are denatured. This means that the usual temperature steps in mashing have to be altered so as to both keep the enzymes and gelatinize the maize starch.

The way to get around this then, is to start mashing in the usual way with the normal Beta-glucan and protein rests and then siphoning off the wort that is there, keep it somewhere safe and clean while more water is added to the grains. The grains and water are then boiled for five or ten minutes, cooled to mashing temperatures and the liquid that was taken off is added back in (hopefully with all the enzymes still intact); the conversion then is finished in the normal way.

If you want the detailed recipe and procedure followed check it out here: Bored-In-Belize: Brewing New Year’s Eve Brown Maize Ale.

I’ve only included a few photos (look at the full recipe for more) since they really all look the same…a big pot with stuff in it…

Here is the wort siphoned off into a gallon jar for safe keeping:

Jar of Siphonings Collected After Protein Rest.

Here’s a photo of sparging all of the wort before the final boiling with Jackass Bitters.

The rest of the brewing process is straight forward and follows the usual steps.

There it is, the New Year’s Eve Brew is completed!

Belize, Fermentation, Saving Money

Brewing Preparation Day.

December 28, 2014 Munchkin

I would continue on the theme of brewing maize beer today: As I mentioned before, home-brew shops, barley and hops are unavailable here so, I have had to go about things a bit differently. One of my previous posts was about malting corn (maize); having done this and having kilned some of it into the maize equivalent of Chocolate, Crystal and Munich malt, I am ready to proceed to the next step…getting everything ready physically and psychologically (I have never done whole grain brewing using firstly, my own malted grains and secondly, those grains being maize and thirdly, replacing hops with a different bittering agent).

So here are my kilned malts, Chocolate, Crystal and Munich…

Chocolate, Crystal and Munich Maize Malt.

Maize has a higher gelatinization temperature compared to barley which means some playing around with temperature is going to be necessary in order to make the starch do what it is supposed to and at the same time not denature the necessary enzymes prematurely before conversion has taken place. The other issue is that maize does not have a hull and I am going to use rice hulls from the rice mill during sparging. Since I am doing this, I decided to grind the maize malt very finely…

Doing this by hand took a ridiculously long time and that is why I have needed a whole day just for preparation! The rice hulls also needed a lot of cleaning since “getting rice hulls from the rice mill” does not mean buying a packet from them, it means going out the back with a sack where the mountain waste pile is out in the open and finding the freshest hulls next to outlet. It further means soaking them, bleaching them, drying them, sieving the sand, bugs and crap out of them…it took about two weeks of work…

In terms of hops, I have decided to go with Jackass Bitters. I was thinking of Serosi or Bitter Gourd but Jackass Bitters won out simply because to be able to say, “I made beer with Jackass Bitters!” sounds way cooler than “I made beer with Bitter Gourd,” I’m sure everybody would agree. I decided to extract some Jackass Bitters into a tincture just to be able to standardize the bitterness; again, I’ve never done this before and I have to start somewhere in order to get some sort of reproducibility for future batches.

Okay, all the ingredients have been prepared and everything is getting sanitized today, let’s see if tomorrow is a nice day for the actual brewing…

Catch you later!!

Belize, Fermentation, Saving Money

Let’s Make Some Maize Beer…Part I, Malting.

December 17, 2014 Munchkin

Like most foreigners that have come to Belize, we wasted a lot of money buying (really crappy, cheap, screw-top wine priced like fine, premium) wine in an attempt to have a taste of home and feel sophisticated. In addition to the price, the heat and humidity, the higher alcohol content of wine was sure to make us uncomfortable for the whole night, the fuzziness continuing to the next day and making work difficult. Now, after having lived here a while and given up all pretense at being sophisticated, we just want some good, honest-to-God, alcohol that doesn’t burn a hole in our pocket or our stomachs.

Having had some experience while at University with brewing, the obvious answer is to brew some beer. How to do this, though? There is no friendly brew-shop down the road to get all the essential ingredients…no barley, no hops, no nothing!

Well, we do have plenty of maize, grown by the bushel by our friendly Mayan neighbours (I’ve tried growing corn and I just haven’t managed yet…go figure!), GMO free and cheap. What do you do with it, though?

The first step is this…

After the maize has sprouted it needs to be dried before it can be turned into the different types of malt we are all familiar with…like, pale malt, chocolate malt, Munich malt, crystal malt, etc. Here it is dried…

And this is the basis for my maize, gluten-free beer.

For a more detailed discussion on the malting process have a look in our Bored-in-Belize section for Malting Maize.

Tune in next time for Part II, Brewing with Maize.

Casa Mascia Apothecary

Tag Archives: Gluten-free

Sapodilla and Orange Peel Curry.

Pigeon Pea and Green Papaya: Farm Fresh.

Basmati Rice with Chinese Sausage and Shiitake Mushrooms.

Corn Cous Cous with Pastrami and Olives.

Chinese Sausage and Corn Cous Cous.

Corn Cous Cous Style.

Maize Beer Bottling Day.

Mashing, Lautering and Sparging on New Year's Eve.

Brewing Preparation Day.

Let’s Make Some Maize Beer…Part I, Malting.

Everything Handmade in Belize.