We have some friends coming to visit us here at Struan Farm in the next week or so, one of whom has coeliac disease and is therefore gluten free.
I decided to do a test run of a gluten free crumble recipe I ran across in a recent issue of Dish magazine, "Rhubarb, Pear and Walnut Crumble." While most of the ingredients involved are easy to find, and include pears, rhubarb, walnuts, caster sugar, cornflour, spices and dark chocolate, the crumble topping is made with gluten free shortbread. That was not so easy to find, in fact it proved rather difficult. And can I just say that it's a pet peeve of mine when food magazines do this to us? (Yes, I know, tell us how you really feel Karen...) I suspect they're in cahoots with whatever artisanal manufacturer makes a particular obscure ingredient they are trying to promote, prompting quests for that holy grail ingredient around the country.
John and I were up in Auckland last week for some meetings for John and annual specialist check ups for me. We discovered a newish Farro gourmet supermarket in Greenlane that I hadn't known about, and popped in to see if they stocked gluten free shortbread. Hooray, they did! So I bought two packets, one for the test run, one for the final event.
Now here's the next curveball. When I got home I discovered that the recipe calls for 250 grams of the shortbread for the topping, and the packets are only 200 grams each. While I'm not a conspiracy theorist, this sort of thing does make one wonder. Fortunately I'd purchased some of Delish's new spicy ginger gluten free cookies at a regular supermarket as a possible substitute, so for our test run combined those with some of the shortbread, leaving 250 grams of the shortbread on hand for the final version. I figured that since the mixture of spices in the crumble included ginger that the spicy ginger cookies would work, which they did. That being said, they are as hard as rocks, you could break a tooth on them! Caution advised. When cooked with bubbling fruit they do soften..
While I hadn't been so sure how pears, rhubarb and chocolate would work together, they do. And if you don't care about being gluten free, you could probably just substitute regular shortbread cookies, even Gingernuts, to make the crumble topping, or use your regular crumble topping. But I've decided I won't make this for our guests based on feedback from my tester. I am going to default to some spiced figs in brandy with vanilla ice cream instead. John just wasn't crazy about having chocolate in a crumble and said he really would prefer not to eat this again. Something he rarely if ever says, so I must take his feedback into account and regroup. Maybe we should call this a "so-called crumble" or perhaps "just a pudding." That way traditional crumble purists may not feel quite so betrayed.
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