Gluten Free “Baking” – another Oxymoron?

I love to bake so going gluten-free was definitely a challenge. I’m from German stock; we bake; I have my great grandmother’s recipes. What are the holidays with out days of baking cookies and breads?

Recipes for gluten-free zucchini bread or raspberry bars, cookies and cakes, etc. are everywhere now, not just in specialty magazines but in main stream magazines and there are numerous gluten-free cook books.

But there’s a hitch, they require a variety of “flours” and additives. Do you have room for bags of xanthum gum, white rice flour, brown rice flour, almond flour, coconut flour, garbanzo bean flour, tapioca starch, potato starch, corn starch, guar gum, and corn meal, all to replace a single bag of unbleached all-purpose flour? Not to mention many have expiration dates long before you could use it all.

Rarely did any of the recipes get more than a grade of “B” and frankly, I missed my tried and true family recipes.

So what to do?

I experimented with the pre mixed “baking flours” in my own recipes. Some were dismal flops, literally. Without gluten to make dough stick together and rise and even with the addition of xanthum gum which does help avoid crumbling, gluten-free baked goods are heavier and just not born to rise.   And I’ve come to the sad realization that some things like Granny’s Christmas cookies or Auntie’s Marble Cake will never be gluten-free.

Unfortunately, all pre mixed “baking flours” are not created equal and some are down right awful. But all is not lost for you bakers out there.

These are the 3 “flours” that I have had the most success with: Kinnikinnick All Purpose Flour Blend, Williams Sonoma’ Cup4Cup and King Arthur’s Gluten-Free Multi-Purpose Flour.

Kinnikinnick www.kinnikinnick.com is a Canadian company. I placed an order on Monday and it arrived Wednesday and you can purchase them on Amazon. Not only have I had great success with their flour but their Graham Style Crumbs and Bread Crumbs are wonderful. Kinnikinnick is also a dairy, peanut and tree nut free facility in addition to gluten and wheat free.

Yeasty breads and multi layer fluffy cakes may become a distant memory but settling for only cheesecakes and brownies and sheet cakes isn’t so bad.