PecanBread.com - Treating Autism with the Specific Carbohydrate Diet

Kitchen Equipment

Salton, Yogourmet, and Excalibur dehydrator all make the same quality yogurt.The difference is the quantity.

Some people start with Salton,find it is too little,then buy Yogourmet and use both at once to make more yogurt.So you don't lose anything by buying Salton because you can use it even if you have the Yogourmet. Excalibur dehydrators make the biggest amount .

From Marilyn

And yes, size is an issue. I've used both the Salton multi-cup and the Yogourmet yogurt makers. I like the Yogourmet better.

For serious BULK yogurt (2 gallons at a whack), I use my Excalibur dehydrator, which has dozens of other uses.

Dehydrator

I have the nine tray Excalibur from Lucy. I can't believe it's been less than a year -- I can't imagine being without it!

I can make up to 2 gallons (8 liters) of yogurt at once in it.

I dry onions, garlic, green peppers, etc. etc. for convenient use, and in homemade seasoning mixes.

I dry fruit -- pineapple, apples, pears, blueberries, and so forth for convenient legal "carry around" food.

I haven't made jerky (YET!), but I have made pepperoni snacking sticks. (For this, a sausage stuffer or jerky shooter is useful.)

It also makes a great defroster when I forgot to take the meat out of the freezer!

I use it to crisp up Krivel Krackers instead of tying up my oven.

Also, it's good for getting the last of the oil out of cheese crisps so they are nice and crunchy. (My dad is so fond of these, I'm considering making his Christmas present a 2 pound box of homemade cheese crisps!)

I've made yogurt-honey candies with it.

-- Marilyn (New Orleans, Louisiana, USA)

My daughter loves the banana chips made in the dehydrator.She says they are better than potato chips.

Coffee Grinder

A coffee grinder is a decent, relatively inexpensive tool for small amounts of nut flour. If, however, you are going to be doing this in any quantity, get a real grinder.

Electric Grinder

Either a good hand grinder or an electric grinder is a gift from the Powers That Be. In a hand grinder, get the kind with sucker feet that locks down on any flat, smooth surface, rather than the kind that clamps to a counter.

In an electric grinder, I really like the Maverick #5 grinder, with optional fine grinding plate. It's available from Meijers (my sister got hers there) and also from www.piercechefmart.com. Also recommended by a number of people is a similar grinder made by Northern Tool. Northern Tool advocates maintain that their grinder is superior because it has a reverse on it, comes with a fine grinding plate, and the buttons are located on the side.

Why a grinder? Because if you're grinding 6 pounds of nuts to make a loaf of bread, a cake, some crackers, and so forth, it can get mighty tedious grinding them three-quarters of a cup at a time in a blender or food processor! Ditto a coffee grinder.

With my Maverick, I can:

1) grind nut flour in quantity, using locally available pecans and walnuts. What I like is having a choice of almond, pecan, or walnut flour for working with, as it gives me a nice variety.

2) grind vegetables for the dogs.

3) make chicken salad and other sandwich-type spreads.

4) make cranberry sauce, or other berries.

5) make apple sauce -- I have a neat gadget that peels and cores the apple. Then I run it through the grinder on coarse, medium, or fine, depending on what I want the applesauce for, and then I cook it, with a bit of honey and cinnamon.

6) grind cheaper cuts of meat to make my own sausages. (It comes with a sausage stuffer, but I haven't mastered it get.)

In addition to all this, you can add an optional slicer / salad shredder. This unit is not as well designed as the grinder itself, which is very easy to clean. However, it's extremely quick at grating cheese. Since I am a cheese fiend, I typically buy, grate, and bag in one pound bags, around 16 pounds of cheddar at once, then grate lots of parmesan, and bag it, all in the sizes I usually use. Then I only have to clean the grater once a month.

I bought my Maverick originally to make cat and dog food with -- now I can't imagine being without it.

-- Marilyn (New Orleans, Louisiana, USA)

Food Mill is very helpful to take out the seeds and skins of foods

I have been canning for over 40 years. I use an old Foley food mill, which is tin, or something of that sort. Please, if you invest in a food mill, get a stainless steel one. The older tin ones discolor food, and give an off taste, like a metallic taste to acidic foods, like apples. I typed in "stainless steel food mills" in the google search window, and came up with quite a long list. Here is one site to look at for a moderate priced one.
www.macrobiotic-foods.com/shopnew2/pages/347.html I did invest in a smaller one that is stainless, for using on the SCD diet. Hope that this helps.

Darlene

My son is PDD and has a huge textures adversion so we have to grind EVERYTHING such as eggs, meat, veggies. We use a Brauhn hand grinder. It is normally used for making soups and mashing veggies but it really works. You can even adjust the speed to make it more pureed and then gradually over time decrease speed in order to add more texture to food when chewing improves. It is sold at any major department store or appliance center. We actually bought ours at a Costco. We have been on the diet for a month and it has been great. Our food choices have expanded considerably. You'd be amazed at what you can grind up. For example, if you make the soup, grind the carrots, chicken and celery with a bit of the stock and it's a perfect puree. Then, freeze the remaining stock in ice cube trays and use it for helping the puree to be liquid enough for future meals. Good luck. Nicole

I have a VitaMix and have had it for 7 years and think it is great. It comes with a grinding container and it works great with nuts. It makes excellent baby food, etc. I use it for making almond milk, etc. Mina

I am very happy with our vitamix and have been for years now. I mentioned that I had one to someone and he exploded with disbelief that we'd laid out the money for one, pointing out correctly, that we could have bought, burned out and replaced many conventional blenders for the same price. Still, it works very well and I use it almost everyday.Marisol

I like the fact that the motor has a high temp cutout switch so I'm not in danger of burning out the motor when making almond butter, but I find grinding nuts in it very tedious. It also makes frozen yogurt nicely (frozen fruit and yogurt). And I can put all the ingredients for Jody's Banana Walnut Pancakes in it without grinding the walnuts first and it still comes out smooth. Despite all that, I'm not sure it's really worth the price. Janette in Indy writing about VitaMix