Friday, December 14

Recipe File: Almond Brittle, Raw and Fabulous

New Year's Resolution: Find a way to photograph food so it looks better -- not worse -- than real life. (Using a camera other than my cell phone might be a good start.)

What we have here is almond brittle -- crunchy, almondy, sweet, raw candy. What it looks like in this photo is a plate of gorp.

Not even the  gorgeous gold tray it's plated on looks good. Sigh.

But if you squint a bit, you can see the lovely almonds in the brittle candy. Keep squinting. There. See it?

Fine. Cover the photo with your right hand and try to imagine something yummy and purdy. Now we're all happy.

Equipment
Spice (coffee) grinder
Food processor or blender
Dehydrator with teflex sheets

Ingredients
  • 1 C whole raw almonds
  • 4-5 dates, pitted
  • 1/2 C flax seed
  • 1/2 C shredded (desiccated) coconut, unsweetened
  • water to cover
  • 5 ripe bananas
  • 2 tsp. almond extract
Instructions
  1. Cover almonds with water, and allow to soak eight hours (overnight). Drain and rinse. Set aside. Refrigerate if storing more than one hour.
  2. Cover dates with water and allow to soak about one hour, until softened.
  3. While dates are soaking, use spice ginder to grind flax seed to meal. Stir ground flax and coconut together in a separate dish, cover with water, and soak for about 20 minutes, until water is absorbed. Add in soak water from dates if too dry.
  4. Peel bananas and blend about 10 seconds. Add almond extract, dates, and flax/coconut mixture. Blend until smooth. After blending, add almonds and blend momentarily until almonds are barely rough chopped. If some or even most almonds are still whole, the resulting candy will look (and taste) better.
  5. Spread mixture onto teflex dehydrator sheets and warm at highest setting for about one hour, then at 116 degrees or less until candy peels from sheets (about 16 hours, or longer if mixture is especially thick or watery.) When it peels without tearing, remove teflex and continue drying until still flexible, but no moisure remains (about 8 hours).
  6. When mixture cools, it will be brittle. Break into large pieces and store in airtight glass jar.
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Today's musical interlude: If (I had a better camera), by Bread. (Are we sensing a theme here?)
 

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