Stuporstar's Guide to Gluten-Free Baking

If you've ever had gluten free bread from the grocery store, you may have come away with the impression that making gluten free bread that's not bland, crumbly hard-tack must be next to impossible. After-all, the people baking this stuff must know what the hell they're doing right? Not really. I've found, that if you want really good gluten free baked goods, you pretty much have to do it yourself. I'm here to share all the tips and tricks I've learned, and reveal the true secret of gluten free baking: It's not that hard, and it's really really fucking delicious.

These cookies contain no gluten, and yet they taste just like my mom's delicious wheat flour cookies. Modifying her recipe was actually pretty easy. Recipe: Stuporstar's Favorite Chocolate Chip Cookies

I've been experimenting with GF baking for a while, and I've reached a point where I can take almost any regular recipe, convert it to a GF recipe, and have it come out almost exactly the same as the wheat version. The only exception is yeast breads. You will never get the same amount of rising out of a yeast bread with a GF mix, but you can make yeast breads that are just as light and fluffy and delicious. And now I shall tell you how.

The Most Important Ingredient -- Gluten Replacers

The not-so-secret and most important ingredient is Xanthan Gum. Some GF recipes use alternatives like Guar Gum, but in my experience xanthan gum is superior in every way. Commercial GF baking tends to use guar gum instead and this is why I think they fail so miserably. Guar gum is cheaper and more commercially available because companies tend to use it as an additive for other purposes. Xanthan gum is expensive. A small 250g bag cost me about $20. However a little goes a long way, and if you're serious about getting into GF baking so that you too can enjoy delicious baking, it's the best investment you will ever make.

Note however that some people can be allergic to xanthan gum, so you may need to use guar gum instead if you find yourself getting sick.

Xanthan gum is a gluten replacer. Without gluten, baking is next to impossible. It keeps the dough pliable and helps keep the dough from crumbling into nothing after it's baked. Without it, your GF flours are just useless dust. With a replacer like xanthan gum, which is seriously the best thing to happen to Coeliac's ever, you can get almost the same results as you would with a gluten-based flour. The trick is in the xanthan gum to flour ratio.

[This site] has a good breakdown on flour mixes and the xanthan gum to flour ratios, but I'll summarize them here: You need about ¾ teaspoon per cup of flour for breads; ½ teaspoon per cup of flour for cakes; and ¼ to ½ teaspoon per cup of flour for cookies. I always err on the side of too much xanthan gum rather than too little when experimenting. If you're serious about experimenting with GF baking, write these ratios down in your recipe book. They are essential when converting non-GF recipes into GF recipes.

GF Flours and Flour Mixes

There is a HUGE variety of flours you can use, but the trick is to mix them in the right ratios. You can buy GF flour mixes from most health stores, and more grocery stores are beginning to carry them as well. Having a pre-made GF flour mix on hand takes a lot of the guess-work out of GF baking, and it's always good to have some around even when you've moved on to making your flour mixes. The basic GF flour mix generally consists of:

• 2 parts white rice flour
• 2/3 part potato starch flour
• 1/3 part tapioca flour

This basic flour mix has never let me down. You can mix your own or buy it pre-made. The pre-made GF flours will usually consist of this mix. "According to Carol Fenster of Savory Palate, Inc., potato starch usually comprises no more than approximately 33% of the mix while tapioca flour typically accounts for about 20%" The rest will be your base flour. It's always a good idea to have a bag of tapioca starch on hand. If you're not happy with the texture of your baking, adding a little more tapioca starch will usually improve it (there's not really any difference between tapioca starch and tapioca flour, it's the same stuff).

So why mix different GF flours? Mainly because GF flours on their own tend to be too heavy, too gritty, or too light. You need to mix your flours to balance these qualities. In the case of this mix for example, the rice flour alone would be too gritty, and alone would make nothing but hard-tack, so the potato starch flour is thrown in to make the flour lighter and smoother, and the tapioca starch is used to make it less crumbly, help browning, and make the bread more soft and chewy.

Here's a list of some common GF flours:

Base Flours: brown and white rice flour, sorghum flour, and certain bean flours like garfava bean flour make very good bases for a flour mix.

Lighter Flours: potato starch flour (not potato flour), tapioca flour, and cornstarch often comprise of the rest of a GF flour mix. These help balance the heavier base flour, and in the case of tapioca flour, significantly change the texture of the dough making it smoother and lighter.

Specialty Flours: amaranth flour, quinoa flour, teff flour, buckwheat flour, millet flour, potato flour, cornmeal, and soya flour all have strong enough flavors that you wouldn't consider them for most GF baking (ARGH I HATE the fact that almost all store-bought GF cookies are loaded with soya flour. It tastes like ASS!). They do make very nice breads though. Amaranth and quinoa are pseudo grains that are high in protein and very delicious. Whole, they can also be cooked and eaten in a similar manner as rice.