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Fellow listmembers,

In my quest to find good gluten-free and corn-free
substitutes for wheat flour-based ingredients in
recipes, I recently found an unusual dried rice
product called Dragon Toast.  It seems to work well
as a substitute for matzoh meal.  I've been using
a wonderful Jewish cookbook and have been adapting
its recipes.  I don't know if my recipe permutations
are kosher (which wasn't my aim, personally), but
they have been good.

The cookbook I have been using is _The New York Times
Passover Cookbook_, edited by Linda Amster.  It
includes recipes from a variety of sources, from
treasured family recipes to recipes developed by people
I expected, like Mimi Sheraton and Claudia Roden, to
those I didn't expect, like Wolfgang Puck and Paul
Prudhomme.  I've tried two recipes so far, and I was
very pleased with the results.  Although I had
originally bought the cookbook to explore its
grain-free cake recipes, I've now been able to try
the recipes calling for matzoh meal too.  For those
of you who are cookbook fans, you might enjoy this
one if you haven't seen it already.

To give you more information on the "Dragon Toast",
its sole ingredient is whole grain sweet brown
rice.  It seems to have been cooked and dried and
then milled in some fashion.  It's fairly expensive,
in my opinion, about $5 for a one pound bag, but
it's the first product I've found that gives a
pleasing result when substituted for matzoh meal
(I think I used a touch of some starch in one of
the matzoh ball recipes in addition to the Dragon
Toast, but it was almost perfect before that too).

The company that makes Dragon Toast, Betty Lou's,
has a webpage: www.bettylousinc.com
The Dragon Toast isn't listed there, but the
gentleman I reached when I called said that they
definitely still carry it, and it will be added
to the web page the next time they update it.

The product is supposed to be really good for
pizza crusts too, although I haven't tried that
yet.

So, I thought I would share a happy product
find.  Out of curiousity, though, has anyone
else found any other good matzoh meal substitutes?

I'd love to find something cheaper, ideally.

I'll be happy to summarize if anyone else has
ideas to share.  Thank you.

Best wishes,

Kirsten Klinghammer


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Kirsten Klinghammer
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