February 21, 2026

Season Six Begins

We had this Saturday afternoon/evening free so what better opportunity to jump right into Season Six?

The first recipe I wanted to try was the Curry Chicken Pot Pie. I love chicken pot pie, and I’ve been wanting to try out some gluten free puff pastry.

Reading the comments on the recipe, folks said it helps to use more liquid, so given that the recipe calls for 12oz of chicken broth, I figured I’d just use a whole 14.5oz can, and then add another 9.5oz of milk for a total of 3 cups liquid. I used 2% milk, and I adjusted the flour and butter up by 1 Tb each. That finished up the prep for all my ingredients.

For the flour, I used Bob’s Red Mill measure-for-measure flour. I followed the recipe from here exactly, and I put it all in a glass 9x13 baking dish.

Once that was done I set it aside, and turned my focus to dessert – chocolate eclairs. Now, these obviously rely on gluten and I needed to figure out how to adapt the recipe. Turns out that King Arthur has a recipe for gluten free pate a choux on their web site. Looking at that recipe, it’s pretty close to the Sweet or Savory Pate a Choux that Alton does in the episode. So, after reading it, I decided I’d just go for the Good Eats version but just substituting the King Arthur 1:1 flour. I did the boil and then added the result to the mixing bowl to cool.

It actually took about 20min to cool. The King Arthur recipe helpfully says that the dough ball should be about 125 degrees before adding the eggs. So I waited, then added egg by egg. When it was done I put it in the piping bag and then… attempted to pipe them into eclair shapes.

So you can see they did not turn out very well. I figured out later that the piping set I have doesn’t have a big enough tip for this. I should have just used the set without a tip, and it would have turned out way better. Oh well. Another difference that King Arthur has in their recipe is cooking time, which I figured may have something to do with the lack of gluten, so I followed their timing: 15 min at 400 then another 25 at 325. When they were done, I turned back to the pot pie. I have been looking forward to using this gluten free puff pastry for a while.

I rolled it out and cut 6 circles out, placed them on top of the casserole, and got it all in the oven.

It took about 30m to cook.

The puff pastry didn’t puff as much as I’d hoped it would, but it was cooked and the whole dish was really good. We all agreed, though, that the curry powder was a bit too present, and while it does add a really good dimension to the dish, perhaps halving it would be a better way. We also lamented the small amount of pastry crust. Next time I do this, I’ll probably just put a whole sheet over the top and let it be the crust.

Once the pot pie was done and eaten, I turned my attention to finishing off the eclairs for dessert. I started off by making some Ganache to top them off with. Then, I grabbed the Jello vanilla pudding I had made earlier from the fridge. I put the pudding in a piping bag, and filled a few of the pate a choux shells. Finally, I covered them with the ganache and we had beautiful looking eclairs.

Just kidding. That picture was, uh, enhanced. The eclairs actually looked like this.

Yeah, not winning any beauty contests. Actually the photo makes them look kind of gross. But, I’ll tell you, they were pretty darn good. Not as light and fluffy as gluten eclairs, but they were definitely passable. I think next time I make pate a choux I’ll do them as little dumplings and make profiteroles – that would be a perfect application for this gluten free adaptation.

All in all, a great way to begin Season Six!

A note on gluten free modifications

This will be the first season where we start out with the mission of trying to make every recipe gluten free. We need to be real about this, though – modifying recipes to remove gluten many times results in something very different from the original. Therefore, the ratings for some of those recipes may be skewed a bit by how the results of modification turn out. This is especially true for stuff like pastries, desserts, and breads.

So starting now, I’ll be tagging recipes where we made significant modifications for gluten removal. Significant modifications would be substituting gluten free flour for baked goods, for example. An insignificant modification might be using gluten free breadcrumbs as a topping. Beware if we rate one of those recipes low – it might be due to fact that gluten free recipes sometimes just don’t translate well. For example, I suspect that the pate a choux might have been a 4 if we were able to use regular gluten flour. If we ever rate a GF recipe a 1 or 2, I’ll probably try the full gluten version just to be sure.

A little Season Six preview

There’s a lot to look forward to and be excited about in Season Six. I’m looking forward to artichokes, which I’ve never cooked before, and doing the chimney starter tuna loin. Lots of good dips, a cheese souffle, and making home made yogurt. I’m also looking forward to a return to home brewing, something I haven’t done in a long time.

There’s a few in this season giving me a bit of a pause, though. Ravioli and tortellini will be interesting to try out gluten free. There’s the funnel cake and golden cake, too. We’ll give our best GF efforts on those, though I may need to adjust the recipes a bit to account for it.

Anyway, it took me almost 3 years to get through season five, let’s hope it’s way less for season six!

Curry Chicken Pot Pie

• Crowd: 4/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Used a whole can of chicken broth, then topped off to 3C total liquid with milk
• Adjusted based on the liquid content by adding another Tbs of flour and butter
• Used the white meat from a fresh supermarket rotisserie chicken
• Next time would halve the curry powder
• Next time would just put the whole sheet of puff pastry on top

Sweet or Savory Pate a Choux [GF]

• Crowd: 3/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Used 155g King Arthur Gluten Free 1:1 flour, and an extra Tbs butter
• Made Jello vanilla pudding using 1.5C milk instead of 2C as eclair filling

Ganache

• Crowd: 3/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Used 50% dark cacao dark chocolate, it was still very chocolatey