I believe that Carla asked about adding water to cake and
pastry recipes if you use a fat replacer like Wonderslim (if you
can get it), pureed prunes (works better with pectin added), and/
or Sunsweet Lighter Bake.
In my experience the answer is no. If you add more water to
a bread machine recipe it may not rise and turn into a disaster.
Some readers have suggested picking up the top of the bread
machine cover while it is in the kneading mode, and checking
to see if the dough is on top of the stirring device (like it
is supposed to be).
According to these readers, the dough should be wiggling in a little
ball on top of it. If it is not, you need to add more flower to it.
Just a little to get it up where its supposed to be. Bread machine
recipes are rather touchy. If you vary them too much they won't
turn out. If you lift the cover too often you will lose some
necessary heat and it may not rise enough. But I think you'd
have to lift it a lot before that happened. The manufacturers
of bread machines know the exact range of temperatures necessary
to get optimum yeast activity. That is one of the main advantages
of using a bread machine to make your dough for you...also it is
much neater to clean up. Our no-fat pizza dough is VERY successful,
made in the bread machine.
For those who are tired after work and crave a pizza, I'd recommend
making it the day before, except for baking it, covering it with
alum. foil and into the refrigerator. (Don't use plastic wrap--it
imparts a chemical taste to the pizza topping)---and throw it in the oven
when you get home from work. ALWAYS PRE-HEAT A PIZZA OVEN--and never bake
anything
else in with it at the same time. 400-450 degrees. It only takes
about 25-30 minutes if your oven gets really hot.
I have advised against using Ener-G egg replacer in a recipe
that is supposed to rise with yeast because I had a bad
experience when I did. I used Lighter Bake, which ordinarily
works out beautifully. When you use Lighter bake, you can
spare a lot of calories from fat because LB has no fat in it.
For readers new to this list, or are having a hard time getting
to VLF diets, cutting out fat works like this:
1 gm of fat has 9 calories, whereas 1 gm of carbohydrate has only
4 and 1 gm of protein has only 4 calories. Fat is so highly
concentrated with calories, it is surprising that Americans are
not fatter than we actually are. If one wants to include high
fat food items, you can eat only very small quantities
of these foods, or you will gain weight...and more often than not,
you will still be hungry when you finish eating, because so little
roughage is included in most high-fat foods. The exception to this
is for peole who are in training for iron-man marathons, etc.
I know that you VLF readers know this very well, but you may be
able to explain this to some friends and relatives who don't
understand. I hope they don't hate you for trying to teach them.
Mike Rosenblatt
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