Gluten-Free Baking

Here is some great information from a cookbook called "Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef"!

Gluten-free baking is not like your mother's baking.  Traditional baking is elastic and easy.  You can stretch pizza dough, form air pockets in crusty bread and make cookies in ten minutes without thinking too much.

But gluten-free baking, at first, seems far more difficult.  You know why?  There's no gluten in it.  However, if you give yourself some patient time to play, you'll figure it out.  We have.  Don't expect gluten-free baked goods to match the taste and texture of the original.  Let them be themselves.  Some of those treats might taste better to you than those with gluten flours, like banana bread with teff.  Some baked goods might never match your conception of them, but does that mean you give up?  What are you doing to do, go without muffins the rest of your life?

You might need to add a bit more protein (an extra egg white, a splash of milk), as well as a binder like xanthun gum, to replace the gluten in a recipe.  We usually use 1 teaspoon of xanthun gum plus 1/4 teaspoon of guar gum for each cup of flour.  Sift each flour before you combine them all in a bowl, and then sift them again before you bake.  This makes the final mixture on coherent flour.

Cookies, crisps, quick breads, and pie doughs are fairly easy to make gluten-free.  Pie doughs are actually easier to make without gluten, because you can't overwork the crust, and you can just pat any spare pieces into the pan when you are done.

Refrigerate pie doughs, cinnamon roll dough, and cookies before you bake them.  They need to rest for at least an hour and ideally overnight.  Let them sit out a bit before you work with them, to make the dough more pliable.

Be gentle with the doughs.  The first time you roll out a gluten-free dough, it's not going to do what you want it to do.  When you make gluten-free cookies, don't over cream the butter and sugars.  Mix them until they are just combined.  This helps prevent spreading.

The hardest baked goods to make gluten-free are those that require a certain structure:  some cakes, bread, puff pastry, croissants.  Those are where gluten is especially necessary.  We're still working on those.  That doesn't mean you will never eat bread again.  we make bread from the recipe in this book three times a week.  But just expect a lot of interesting mishaps at first.  You'll want to blame the recipe if it all goes woppy-jawed.  Keep trying.

If you bake by weight instead of by volume, measuring out grams or ounces instead of scooping flours into a cup, your baking will be more successful and satisfying.  Buy yourself a kitchen scale and start baking.

In short, you will have to do some tasks differently, creating new muscle memory, and playing with different ingredients than you did before.  However, once you have learned, it will all feel familiar.