Southern comfort food - Chicken Fried Steak

We buy a side of beef every summer from a guy up near Athens. It's grass fed and grain finished, no hormones, and no antibiotics. Best of all - it's cheap. Works out to about $3.50 a pound, and we know where the beef came from, plus we're supporting a local farmer instead of a megastore.

I'd never cooked chicken fried steak until we starting buying a side of beef. Partly because I was clueless about what to do with cubed steak, and partly because I never fried anything. But when you have 200+ pounds of beef in the freezer, you learn how to cook it real quick. I learned how to make chicken fried steak watching Tyler Florence on Food Network....only he was making chicken fried chicken. Dip the meat in buttermilk, roll in flour, dip it back in buttermilk, roll in flour again, and then let the meat sit for awhile to let the coating do its thing.

Okay....so how to make chicken fried steak gluten free....after last night's attempt at using a predominantly cornstarch-based flour mix to dredge and brown chicken for Fruited Chicken (that's another post entirely) failed miserably, I debated what to use. For this first foray into gluten free southern cooking, I decided to go with one of the various boxed flour blends sitting in my pantry. Gluten free pancake batter had worked great for fish batter (yet another post for another night), so I grabbed a bag of that as well. After reading all the labels, I finally decided to use the Whole Foods 365 brand gluten free baking mix. It's white rice flour, tapioca starch, potato starch and guar gum. Out of buttermilk, and not feeling the need to hit Publix at 5pm on a Friday afternoon with the eldest child in the car, I went through my gluten free cookbook and found a fried chicken recipe that used a mixture of egg and water as the wash for frying. I decided to go with a mix of egg and milk and then seasoned it well with Lawry's seasoning salt. Dip in the egg/milk mixture, dip in the gluten free baking mix (heavily seasoned as well), another dip in the egg/milk mixture and one more roll in the baking mix. Put the floured meat on a platter, let it hang out for awhile, then into the big ole cast iron skillet (is there any other way?) to fry.

The first indication that I might actually be successful was when the coating didn't fall off. When it started turning brown, I got happy. When it got crispy, I was thrilled. When it hit the plate and it tasted good, I was over the moon. (yeah, last night's failure was still fresh in my mind and my ego was still bruised) When the gluten-eating husband proclaimed that it was good....well, that was the crowning glory. Maybe tomorrow I'll take a picture of the finished product.

Oh, but I forgot to mention the gravy. Gotta have gravy with chicken fried steak. Hmmm....how to make gluten free gravy. Rather than experiment with the baking mix, I went with the gravy recipe on the Argo cornstarch label. It was supposedly for turkey, but being the brave and daring cook that I am, I decided to adapt it for cream gravy. So, I followed the directions, and when the cornstarch slurry hit the pan it turned into big lumps of gelatinous "stuff". Ugh.... Undaunted, and somewhat stubborn, I went ahead and poured in the milk...and then proceeded to whisk the hell out of it with the cuisinart gravy whisk. After a few discouraging minutes, I realized the damn stuff was starting to look like gravy. After copious amounts of black pepper (hey, I was raised in the south), it started to TASTE like gravy. Score!

Pass the fried okra!

A NEW USE FOR AN OLD BLOG - Welcome to Cooking Dangerously

Why am I here? Well, I got diagnosed with celiac disease in July, 2009. It required I remove all gluten (wheat, oats, rye, barley) from my diet forever. I found myself, at 42, having to re-learn how to cook. It's been a challenge, primarily because the American diet is FULL OF WHEAT. It's everywhere, even in things that you wouldn't expect to find wheat in...like canned chicken broth. And I'm a southern girl, so not being able to cook up biscuits, gravy and fried chicken, well, that's just wrong.

Anyway, this blog came about because Mike over at Taro and Ti recommended I blog about my cooking experiments. We co-own a yahoo group together and I've posted several times about some of the things I've tried since the diagnosis, like gluten free cornbread dressing (good), and zucchini bread (BAD). The biggest challenge is cooking things that are gluten free for me, but taste good for the three guys who live in my house. The kids aren't so picky, but the husband, well, let's just say that he has some sort of weird gluten free radar that tells him something is gluten free before I do.

So, with encouragement from Lotznausten and inspiration from the Gluten Free Girl, I present Cooking Dangerously - my experiments in gluten free cooking.

My first post is my experiment in making gluten free eggrolls. I had a recipe in my inbox from the Gluten Free Club, which is basically a mailing list where you mostly get recipes, but also ads to try and get you to join the club. The recipe is as follows:

Ingredients:

1 or 2 tablespoons coconut oil or other cooking oil
1 pound ground pork
½ pound peeled shrimp, chopped
½ chopped onion
4 to 6 cloves garlic, minced
2 to 3 carrots, shredded or chopped
½ head cabbage chopped
2 tsp sesame oil
2 Tbsp soy sauce (optional)
Salt and pepper to taste
½ cup scrambled eggs
Spring Roll Wraps (24)Directions:

Lightly brown pork with onions, garlic and shrimp and cook a minute or two more in hot oil. Stir in carrots and stir fry a minute more. Add in cabbage and stir fry until cabbage is wilted and soft. Season with sesame oil, soy sauce, salt and pepper to taste. Spread on large open pan or tray to cool before putting in wrappers (if you want egg rolls with eggs, stir in some scrambled eggs in the last minutes of cooking).

Soak spring roll wraps (tapioca starch wraps available in Asian section of most grocery stores) in water until soft and pliable, about 30 to 60 seconds. Put softened wrapper on flat surface. Add one heaping tablespoon filling on wrapper close to you. Roll up one turn rolling away from you, turn lateral ends inwards and finish rolling. Let rolls rest 20 minutes before frying, which is about as long as it takes to roll all this filling if you have help. The point is, they fry up better if they have "rested" for a while.

So, I followed the directions, all the way through, including the part about deep frying the rolls in an inch of oil. In the process I learned several things NOT to do, including not to deep fry them. The first time I tried frying them, the oil wasn't hot enough. The wrappers got soggy and fell apart. Second time around, the husband suggested double-wrapping them AND making sure the oil was actually hot enough to fry in. (350) This worked to a certain extent...but the double wrap apparently soaked up way too much oil. They were good, but greasy. I made mental notes of how to do this differently "next time", and decided "next time" would be tonight, when I repeated the filling recipe as a stir fry to use up the shrimp from last night. I decided to pan fry instead of deep fry and ditch the double-wrapping. Miracle of miracles, it worked!

So, here's my list of Dos and Don'ts for making gluten free eggrolls.

DON'T overfill the wrapper. That heaping tablespoon is about perfect.
DO wrap the wrapper tightly. Smaller and tighter is better.
DON'T deep fry. Pan fry with just enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan.
DON'T let the eggrolls touch in the pan AT ALL. They will stick. They will stick like glue.
DON'T try to turn the eggroll until the side that's in the oil is crispy. It will stick like glue.

Oh, and here's a picture of the finished product. There was one out of the four, on the right hand side of the plate, that was near perfect.