Fructose free peanut brittle recipe

This recipe is not for the faint of heart, the weak of teeth or the allergic of peanuts. It's also a bit of a marathon to make, which isn't to say it's not easy, it's just not quick. Mine took several hours (yep hours) to cook, and you need to stay by the stove pretty much the whole time (although you can do other things between stirring: fold washing, unstack dishwasher, make White Christmas slice, write blog, etc). But the results are well worth it if you are a peanut brittle fan like me.

You'll do best with a candy thermometer for this one. Believe me.


Ok, here we go. The original recipe is here (for those who stumbled onto this page looking for peanut brittle a la normale)

Fructose Free Peanut Brittle 
2 cups dextrose powder
1 cup glucose syrup
1/2 cup water
240g butter (yep, that's nearly a whole stick of butter)- cut into smaller pieces
2 cups peanuts- raw, roasted, salted, whatever you like. I used Nobbys salted peanuts chopped roughly
1 tsp. baking soda- if your baking soda is anything like mine it will be full of lumps, so I suggest you pre measure and press all the lumps out using a fork, as getting a lump of un-mixed soda in your peanut brittle is an unhappy surprise.

(Note: the above makes a LOT of peanut brittle. When I've made this recipe in the past I have halved the recipe and it works just fine- in fact, from memory, it took a lot less time to cook. Today I made the full recipe without thinking, so luckily mum and dad will be here for Christmas to help me eat it all up).



Method:

Combine dextrose, glucose syrup and water in a saucepan. Cook on a moderate heat (stirring) until the mixture goes from opaque white to almost clear, as pictured. 

Starts white...

Goes nearly clear- that's science for ya!

Let it come to a boil. When it boils, add the butter and keep stirring. It will look a bit funny- like the butter is not mixing in properly. Don't worry about this. Stir some more. This recipe is nearly all about stirring, sorry.

Buttery goodness

So, stir until the butter has melted in and then keep stirring until the mixture boils again. Keep it at a moderate boil. The mixture is now hitting what I call the toddler stage- you can leave it alone for about a minute or so, but don't think that it is independent. Oh no. It still needs lots of your attention. I would say stir fairly frequently at this stage. Use your candy thermometer to check it and once it reaches 230 degrees F (this will feel like forever), change from fairly frequently to frequently. So, not quite constantly. Between stirs you can go tend to that washing, or feed your real toddler, or send me a message below telling me how much you like this recipe (except of course you haven't finished it yet. So, save that for later)

The mixture will darken as it cooks- here are some pictures to entertain you while you stir (I'm presuming you have a laptop while you make this, you see).

Caramelly goodness

Slightly darker caramelly goodness (several hours later- felt like anyway)

Add peanuts when the temperature reaches soft crack stage (280 degrees F). Now you have to change from stirring frequently to- you guessed it- constantly. (To be honest, I just kept with frequently- I'm a rebel like that).

Nut much further to go! Get it?

Keep with your constant stirring until temperature reaches hard crack stage (305 degrees F). Take it off the heat immediately, and stir in your lump-free baking soda, mixing it thoroughly. Pour onto 2 cookie sheets or baking trays- greased or lined with baking paper. You can't spread it once you pour it, but if it's too thick, as the brittle cools, you can stretch it thinner by lifting and pulling from the edges. 

Once it cools you can break it into pieces. If you have such thing as a toffee hammer, then go ahead and use it now. Lord knows you are never going to use it otherwise.

The finished product- the full recipe makes twice this amount.
Yep, I have only photographed half of it for you. I'm lazy like that.

And that's it. If you have any questions, post them below.

I'm dreaming of a...

...fructose-free white Christmas slice!

Oh yes, Christmas time is upon us and this is the time of year to apply the old 'party foods are for [Christmas] parties' advice from Sweet Poison. I don't know why I wanted to try to make White Christmas slice- it's not a traditional treat in our family, but for some reason I always think fondly and slightly yearningly of it around this time of the year. Because it's full of fat (yum, Copha) I haven't made White Christmas for years. I'd toy with the idea of making some, realise that I would only eat far too much of it and turn into a White Christmas-fuelled blimp, and abandon the whole idea. 'If only I could make a low fat White Christmas slice' I would deludedly think to myself whilst chowing down on some of mum's delicious Christmas fruit cake (at a thousand billion calories per slice).

Anyhow,  those crazy days of dieting are behind me, and I'm sticking to the simple plan of eating anything I want minus sugar (specifically fructose). I've lost over 13 kilos, and I'm not afraid of over-indulging because my stomach is now talking to my brain and telling it when to STOP (it speaks in capitals now). So, when mum and I were planning the Christmas menu this year, I said I would make White Christmas as a bit of a treat, and I planned to do it fructose-free.

When turning this plan into reality, I hit a few snags immediately. For those familiar with the slice, besides the Copha it is mostly made of a) sugar, b) rice bubbles, and c) dried fruit. The sugar is no problem- with a few adjustments I can make it with dextrose instead of sugar which has fructuse and glucose. Rice bubbles are out because they are nearly 10% sugar (nearly all of it added), but I have been eating a cereal which is pure puffed brown rice (nothing else added), so I decided this would make a good substitute for rice bubbles.  Simple so far.

But Sweet Poisonites (Poisoners? No, Poisonites) will know that dried fruit is a no no if you want to keep your fructose intake as low as possible. A piece of real fruit will a) contain fructose, b) contain fibre which counteracts what the fructose does in the body, and c) contain enough water to be bulky and fill you up, limiting the amount that you can eat in one go. Dried fruit does the first two, but doesn't fill you up, so you get a bunch of sugar in just a handful of sultanas. The recipe that I worked from had 1/2 cup (80g) of dried fruit- which is about 27g of fructose. Holy crap.

Looks so innocent...

I've avoided dried fruit altogether since starting sugar free, and it's not been a problem. But could I avoid it in White Christmas? Well, it is kind of integral to the slice...so, I decided that, since it's the season to be jolly and all that, I would make the White Christmas low in fructose, with limited dried fruit, diced finely to get the most out of it, dextrose instead of sugar, and rice puffs. As the slice is very rich, it's not difficult to limit yourself to a very small slice, which would mean very very little dried fruit per serve.

That was my first thought. My second thought (which came to me only as I was finishing up the low fructose version) was that this slice would taste pretty good even without the dried fruit. It has coconut and powdered milk as well as the rice puffs, and these make up the bulk of the taste. If I left out the fruit, I could therefore make a no fructose version as well. So, I did both, and here are the recipes for y'all. The no fructose one is first, the low fructose one (with the dried fruit included) is second- there are slightly different quantities to each recipe as I was experimenting a little.



No fructose White Christmas slice
1/2 cup dextrose
1/2 cup powdered milk
1.5 cups puffed rice mine are from the 'health foods' aisle of Coles and are 100% brown rice (puffed). Anything similar will probably work.
1 and 1/3 cups coconut
150g copha


Mix all dried ingredients together.  Melt copha on the stove until it is a clear liquid and then pour over the dry ingredients. Mix together well and press into a foil-lined dish or molds. Put in the fridge for a couple of hours and voila!

Low fructose White Christmas slice
1 & 1/4 cups Rice Puffs
1/2 cup full cream milk powder
1/2 cup dextrose to be honest, you could probably use a bit less- the dried fruit adds quite a bit of sweetness
1/4 cup dried fruit- I used just sultanas and dried apricots, chopped finely to give maximum value with minimum fruit
155g copha

As above, mix the dry ingredients first, add the melted copha. Press into foil-lined dish or mold- a Christmassy one if you've got it- and refrigerate.

I just happened to have a silicone mold with little Christmas trees- tis the season for making tree-shaped food.

And here are the beautiful results:

A trio of  White Christmasses- the trees are low fructose, the squares are no fructose, the hearts are a la normale (for my husband)

A note on Copha- this stuff is sold oil- hydrogenated coconut oil to be exact. They say (pure) coconut oil is incredibly good for us (if you ignore all the nay-sayers who are stuck in the 'saturated fats will kill you quicker than crack' mindset), but the word 'hydrogenated' should alert you to the fact that this stuff is a) way cheaper than pure coconut oil (being a processed, cheaper product) and b) nowhere near as good for you (and potentially quite bad for you). To be honest, if I had pure coconut oil available, I would have tried that instead but alas, I did not. So, keeping in mind that this is a one-off treat (at least for me), I stuck to the Copha. If you happen to try the above with something else instead of the Copha (e.g., pure coconut oil) then please post below to let us know how it went. I imagine it would work fine but perhaps be very very coconutty.

So that's it. Christmas conquered. Well, I also made some peanut brittle- but I'll post the recipe for that seperately- it's a bit of a marathon.

Have a lovely Christmas and New Year everyone, and a big shout out to those doing it sugar free for the first time this year- may it be merry and bright without the need for a sugar high!

Free your chocolate

When I wrote my last post, I planned to take a few days break while I visited family in Tasmania. I thought I should come back to my blog on Monday next week, and maybe do a post reflecting on the fact that I’m staring down the barrel of a sugar-free (and therefore chocolate free) Easter. I’d talk about how my very supportive husband decided that we should have Easter cheeses instead of Easter chocolate, and how I felt this was a very ‘off the grid’ thing to do, and that I decided to call it Cheester.

Well, two days into visiting mum and dad, and I’ve thrown all those ideas out the window because I just made delcious, fructose free chocolate from scratch! Now THAT’s off the grid. Thought I'd better write down what I did before I forgot the details. Here is a sneak peek for those who can't be bothered scrolling:

(For those thinking “huh? There are a range of ‘sugar free’ chocolates available from every health food store you care to name, not to mention the health food aisle at the supermarket”, here’s a quick run-down on why I’m making this from scratch. Basically commercial sugar-free chocs (and most sugar-free sweets as well) contain maltitol (or a similar sweetener) which is a sugar substitute. Although these are not the same as cane sugar, many of them act like cane sugar when they enter the body. For example, maltitol becomes glucose and fructose just like sugar. So no, I can’t have those if I want to stay off fructose. Also where’s the fun in that? I’ve never made chocolate before, I feel like Nigella Lawson right now.)

The idea for making chocolate started back in Melbourne when I found some blocks of 100% cacao in Jones the Grocers. The blocks are by Willy’s World Class Cacao and Chocolates from the UK. I had watched a TV series about Willy who is a passionate chocoholic who wanted to make and sell these 100% cacao as a gourmet cooking ingredient. He sources the cacao beans from places like Venezuela and Madagascar. You can order the blocks online and have them shipped from the UK, but Jones the Grocer stocks them in Australia, so I happily purchased two 180g blocks of the Madagascan black 100% cacao (at $20 a pop) and took one with me to Tasmania to present to mum and dad who are also trying to be fructose free.

For anyone who hasn’t tried 100% cacao before, let me tell you it is strong, bitter stuff. It tastes like the very essence of chocolate, minus the sugar and cream.

Mum and I decided to try making some (edible) chocolate from this, and with the help of a friendly local health food store (who not only gave us a recipe but supplied us with the right ingredients), we were able to do this pretty simply. The recipe handout is credited to Roar Vanilla. It called for cacao powder and agave syrup (which has a lot of fructose), so we had to experiment a little. We also added soy lecithin as an emulsifier which I'll explain further below.

But without further ado, here is our version, adapted from theirs, which is 100% fructose free, very simple, and delicious. 

Fructose-free chocolate

• 80 grams cacao butter, chopped finely (we sourced ours from the health food store)
• 40 grams chopped/grated 100% cacao
• 3 Tablespoons dextrose syrup (see below)
• 3 x rock salt crystals (we used Himalayan salt- long story but mum wanted some anyway so we happened to have it. I’m sure normal salt would do!) You can leave salt out altogether if you choose
• 1 tsp lecithin granules soaked in 1 Tbs boiling water (health food store had these but we also saw them at the supermarket health food section)

Dextrose syrup:

Stir 100g boiling water and 230g dextrose in a saucepan on the stove until the dextrose is dissolved completely. It should go from being a white liquid to a crystal clear one (see pics). You could halve this recipe as you don’t need much (I used 3 tablespoons) but it seemed easier to do all the stirring in this quantity than a smaller one.

When dextrose is dissolved and syrup is clear, take off the heat and place to one side.

Note: Dextrose is glucose, so you may be able to just use glucose syrup from the baking section of the supermarket instead of making the above. Glucose syrup is much thicker than the syrup described above, so I’m not 100% sure it would work the same- if you try it, let me know how it goes!

To make the chocolate:
Place at least 2cm of water in a pot and put a bowl on the top to make a bain-marie. Don’t let the bowl touch the water.  Heat the pot until the water boils, then remove from the heat.

Add cacao butter to the bowl.Stir until melted. It melts pretty quickly into a clear but yellowish oily liquid

I'm melting...

Add salt crystals (optional)- these will dissolve during the next steps.

Add 3 tablespoons of the dextrose syrup. You can add more if you wish- depends on how sweet you want it to be.

Add 2 teaspoons of the watery-lecithiny mixture (see pic of what our lecithin mixture looked like- ours was not fully dissolved in the hot water but the lecithin granules were soft and pretty quickly broke down further in the chocolate mixture).

Lecithin is an emulsifier, and we wanted it to help the syrup and cacao butter to mix better- which on our observation it seemed to. The original recipe did not have this step at all, so you could leave it out if you prefer, but I’ve left it in because we think that it helped the texture of our chocs.

Add half of the 100% cacao, stir until it melts into the mixture, and then add the second half and do the same.

Ours had a bit of a foamy look on the surface as you can see. I think on reflection this was the lecithin and perhaps I should have left it to dissolve further. However, it didn’t affect the texture (which was entirely smooth) or taste of the final chocs.

The liquid at this point was very thin, much thinner than I was expecting to be honest.  

Pour into molds or ice trays.

Ours made 36 chocs- 16 in the heart mold and 16 in the ice cube  tray.

Put in the freezer or fridge to set. Ours went in the fridge and by about ½ hour they were set enough to pop out of the mold and eat. Here they are again.

My babies. I'm so proud.

As it doesn't have any cream or milk, it obviously makes a pretty dark chocolate which we estimate tastes about the same as 80% dark chocolate. Mum pronounced it ‘as good as Lindt’. The texture is chocolate heaven- it melts so deliciously in the mouth. When I do it again, I’ll experiment with adding some chopped hazelnuts or similar to the chocolate in the last step. Yum!

I guess the only other thing worth posting is the cost. The cacao 100% bar was $20 and we used 40g so $4.44 worth. The cacao butter was $19 for 250g and we used 80g, so $6.08 worth.  So the main ingredients cost $10.52 for 36 chocs.  Up to you whether you think it is worth it- I loved doing it and will enjoy experimenting with different versions.

If you do try this, be sure to let me know, below. I’d love to hear how you go, especially if you experiment with any modifications.

So that’s it. A long post, but a pretty easy recipe in the end, and the result was fabulous. I’ll be making more of these at home for Easter, although we might keep the cheese idea as well. J