What I learned from a rotary evaporator was that reducing liquids at very low temperatures saves their flavour. Not that the rotary evaporator stood in front of a classroom of able-minded cooks and told me that. Instead, I tasted it in the spherified orange juice that looked like an egg yolk sitting in the bottom of a hollowed out egg shell.
A rotary evaporator costs a LOT of money. A slow-cooker does not. A slow-cooker also does not cook at a specific temperature or, I believe, at such a low temperature, but it can cook solids and it’s a lot easier to clean (so say the chefs at the Modernist Cuisine cooking lab in Bellevue Washington, who allow a mixologist from nearby Vietnamese restaurant, Monsoon East, to come play at the lab for his cocktails sometimes. My cook friend in Montreal who likes to reduce jam without adding sugar or pectin does not have a rotary evaporator, or access to one. He does, however, have a slow-cooker. And he took tons and tons and tons of raspberries and cooked them down for 24 hours with the slow-cooker lid off until they became jam all on their own. The result was sweet and sour (no lemon either, so mostly sweet – Wonderfully sweet), thick and jammy, and enough to make me eschew standing over a stove for 20-40 minutes waiting for that hard-to-reach gelling point, buying industrial bags of refined sugar, and burning too much jam.
Now, the problem is, the added sugar makes the jam safer. I wouldn’t can slow-cooker jam and sell it, for example. Even cooked down with all its natural sugars preserved, I would keep it in the fridge for no more than a month. Probably less. I wouldn’t chance it with more than 2 weeks, this stuff is so precious. The added sugar also increases the yield of jam, with which economical housewives of the 1940’s-60’s were more concerned than we are now – housewives et al, that is. Meaning that by adding sugar you’ll end up with 10 cups of jam instead of, say, 6. All this is important when you need your jam to last the winter. Fend off scurvy and what not. Nowadays we have the luxury (and sometimes the pocketbook) to buy an entire tray (24 containers, approx.) of raspberries from who knows where (me – California or Mexico, most likely), chuck them in the blender and then into the slow-cooker and let them break down into jammy perfection.
And then he gifted me a 500mL jar of the jam. I could either start a marathon jam-eating expedition (500mL of jam in a few weeks is a lot of sugar to go through), or freeze it and break it out when I got up the sugar-eating courage. Maybe I could train for it? But there was no refined sugar, so I figured eating it in bigger quantities would be alright. It’d just be like eating a small container with every 1 1/2 tbsp or so. Maybe 2 tbsp. Not crazy, right?
But as a gluten-intolerant person, eating jam is a difficult thing. I don’t eat toast in the morning. I don’t make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I put jam on homemade dairy-free ice cream. And I eat it with a spoon.
And I use it to fill thumbprint cookies. THAT is the best way to use a lot of jam. Not that I was trying to get rid of it, but I was trying to make it even better and make sure I appreciated every bite. This was probably $25 jam!! Gifted. For free. From a good friend who made a big mess in his kitchen when the jam splattered from the slow-cooker all over his walls and fall while he slept. Hence very special jam, indeed.
So I went to the New York times cookbook. Found a thumbprint cookie recipe (a jam-filled cookie that I’ve never liked because I always hate the jam used), made it gluten-free and dairy-free, and filled each with the incredible candy-like raspberry jam. Every bite was chewy and deliciously grainy from the gluten-fre flours and then smooth and sweet and bright from the raspberries.
And I savoured every one of those cookies.
You can use any jam for this recipe. You can use one of my jams for this recipe. You can use Bonne Maman strawberry, or Kraft grape if you so choose. But you can also take a whack of fruit, blend them, stick them in the slow-cooker, place some kind of guard to catch splatter above the top instead of a lid (the liquid does need to get out, but it doesn’t need to get all over your kitchen), and let it cook down on low overnight. Take that, rotary evaporator.
Gluten-free Thumbprint Cookies with Raspberry Jam
- 1/4 cup toasted hazelnut oil (or walnut; or other oil; or earth balance; or butter, softened)
- 1/2 cup honey or agave nectar (or light brown sugar, firmly packed; or white sugar plus 2 tsp molasses)
- 1 egg (or egg replacer equivalent to 1 egg. These cookie don’t need to rise much, so it’s a good recipe for substitutions)
- 1 tsp vanilla extract (or seeds scraped from 1 vanilla bean. Place leftover bean case in your sugar bag or rum or vodka to flavour each)
- 1/2 cup amaranth flour
- 1/2 cup tapioca flour
- 1/2 cup rice flour
- 1 tbsp chia seeds (or ground flax. This is only necessary if you use oil and honey – two liquids instead of solids like sugar and butter. It will hold together the dairy-free, refined sugar-free dough)
- 1/2 tsp guar gum (or xanthan gum)
- 1/8 tsp baking soda
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1 cup raspberry jam (or other flavour)
Preheat oven to 350F. Grease 2 baking sheets or line with parchment. Cream oil and honey in a large bowl with an electric beater until smooth. Add the egg and vanilla and combine. In a second bowl sieve the flours. Add the chia seeds, guar gum, baking soda and salt and whisk to combine. Whisk dry ingredients slowly into wet ingredients. Change to a large wooden spoon when it gets too sticky to whisk.
If the dough is stick, sieve over a bit more rice flour (or other flour) – about 2 tbsp – and stir until incorporated. Add more if needed. Form into 20 balls and place on the baking sheets. Press your thumb into them (hence “thumbprint cookies”) to make a deep valley. The cookies won’t spread in the oven, so don’t worry about them needing more room.
Bake for 10 minutes. Remove to wire rack to cool. Spoon raspberry jam into centre of each cookie. I like more on the 1 cup side, especially when I want every mouthful to taste like raspberry jam and the cookie is the foil for the jam.
Makes about 20 cookies.
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