Gluten-free baking

Sorry to hear, @truman.

I cooked / baked GF for the first year of the pandemic as 3 of our 5 of the household (including both my nephews) had a suspected gluten issue. Because it was the peak pandemic timeframe, there was a lot of cooking and eating and limited outside options, so I experimented a lot.

I didn’t love any of the ready AP mixes that were easily available. Cup4Cup (which is supposed to be the gold standard) was finally available many months later, but I found it terrible for anything other than bread (it seized up into a giant glob instead of cake batter, for eg — but made great bagels).

KAF has ready brownie mix that’s pretty good, also muffins and things. Namaste makes a pancake mix that was also good (other mixes too, but I haven’t tried them).

For pizza, they preferred frozen Capello crusts to most box mix options (Bob’s, etc). I did experiment with homemade, but the kids were fine with frozen so we redirected that effort.

My best outcomes were from tinkering with my own flour combinations, so given that this is a permanent change for you, that’s what I’d recommend. I used jowar (sorghum), rice (brown rice flour for breads and flatbreads, superfine indian or thai white rice flour for some finicky stuff), cornstarch, tapioca starch, and cassava (different than tapioca starch even though the same plant). (I do NOT like besan / gram flour / chickpea flour — I can taste it in most things, and it tends to lean dry, so I didn’t even bother with any ready mixes that listed it first.)

Your choices will depend on the texture and flavor outcome you want. For Indian (and other) flatbreads, I had a very specific goal in mind, and the GF version was ultimately almost indistinguishable from the wheat version (just more work / components / tinkering). Ditto bagels - really good either with Cup4Cup or my own blend. Bread was a bit more challenging for rise and texture, but even not-best outcomes were good toasted. (The methods and mindset had to change for bread, which was the bigger challenge for me.)

I preferred psyllium husk (powdered) to xanthan or other choices for stretch / binding (xanthan results in a specific mouthfeel which I don’t like, ymmv).

I mostly googled to recipe shop, but you have to be careful to look at pictures and read descriptions, there are a lot of things that clearly don’t look or sound like they’ll be similar to the gluten version. I also borrowed Flavor Flours (Alice Medrich) but didn’t really bake from it, because what I wanted was an alternative to something the kids already loved, as opposed to a great recipe for a different flour like teff or sorghum. You may find it more useful.

If you’re looking for specific things, I’d be happy to look back for recipes I may have saved and notes made back then.

(As an aside, I’m guessing you already looked into whether einkorn, spelt, and certain indian wheats might work for you.)

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