As in the UK, cookery shows appear to be popular in Sweden too. Having watched some of them, I went to look for the recipes of the stuff that seemed good. Things are organised somewhat differently in this respect though and not entirely to my liking, but it resulted in finding this recipe (in Swedish) that seemed very intriguing.
Now my family do like nuts, so they are always readily available in the house. I showed the recipe to my Sister Bip and we decided to give it a try.
Ingredients
20 gingersnaps
¼ tsp hot chilli powder
1 dl aquafaba or 2 egg whites
4 dl mixed whole raw nuts
Method
- Pre-heat the oven to 175 °C or 165 °C fan.
- Crush the gingersnaps into crumbs with a pestle and mortar or food processor. Mix in the chilli powder.
- Place the aquafaba or egg whites in a glass or metal bowl and whisk to stiff peaks stage.
- Stir in the nuts into the foam, then add the crushed crumbs and stir around to coat the nuts well.
- Spread the nuts out on a large shallow baking tray and roast for no more than 40 minutes, stirring occasionally.
- Remove and leave to cool down before serving.
Now I managed to burn these slightly unfortunately and I also added some salt as per the original recipe and the result wasn't very good. I used shop-bought gingersnaps and they were perhaps a bit on the mild side, spice-wise. I'll try with my own gingersnaps to see if it works better. Or even just the spice mixture I use.
The really interesting bit of this recipe was the aquafaba. I thought it meant waterbean and indeed a quick google confirmed this - it is in fact the liquid from a can of beans or chickpeas. Weird.
What's even weirder is that it can foam up like egg whites do and seems to be a viable alternative for vegans and people allergic to eggs.
My Sister Bip hadn't heard of this before and she's well into her experimental foods, so we played it safe and used 2 egg whites that Mum had in the freezer. They whipped up very nicely.
But I kept on googling about this curious aquafaba, especially since I've always felt bad about draining it in the sink every time I open a can of beans. The wikipedia entry is here.
I've yet to try this out, I found this recipe for meringues, which also helpfully indicates that some brands of canned chickpeas give better results than others and mentioned Lidl in particular, so I've bought one to try out on meringues or macarons. But when I made chilli con carne the other day, I couldn't resist saving the liquid from both cans of kidney beans. I whisked them up while the chilli was cooking and although there was a lot of liquid, so took ages to reach the soft peak stage, reach it it did! it was reddish-brown like the kidney beans, and Lundulph thought it smelt like beans, so really not suitable for anything sweet, but the fact that it whipped up was amazing and I was sorely tempted to just add sugar and go ahead with the meringues.
