FIFTEEN BASIC GLUTEN-FREE BAKING TIPS

Starting a gluten-free lifestyle can be a huge change, and often a hard one—but cheer up it gets smoother! I am not just filling you with optimistic dreams, I have experienced it, heard testimony of it, and read about how after a year (or give or take some time) you relax in the gluten-free lifestyle. Soon it all becomes a new normal.

Making a gluten-free lifestyle practical is one key achieving a satisfactory diet. What follows are gluten-free cooking/lifestyle tips that will expedite this process.

One: Find a cooking buddy. Trying new things is much more fun when you have got a friend to work with and laugh over failures with.

Two: Keep mixes handy at all times. For instance: pancakes, muffins, flours, and what ever else you eat on a fairly regular basis. There are a number of varieties of gluten-free mixes available in stores. You can also mix all the drys of recipes found in this book (i.e. flours, rising agents, and spices) and seal in an airtight ziplock bag or tin. For the list of flour mixes used in this book see page XX.

Three: Once you pull your bread out of the oven, let it sit for about five minutes, then turn it upside down in its pan for five minutes. This will make the top and sides of your bread softer. It also helps your bread to stay light and fluffy, instead of compacting. If you leave it in the pan, the condensed steam from the bread will make the sides of the bread wet and cause the sides to fall.

Four: Do not eat gluten-free bread cold. If possible always warm up your bread before making a sandwich or eating it for dinner. This makes it more pliable and less crumbly. It also gives it that freshly baked taste!

Five: Make sure to cook the bread at the right temperature. If you cook it at a temperature that is too low, the bread will need to cook longer and will turn out dry and gritty, because it was over baked. If your temperature is too high, the top and bottom of your bread will cook, but the middle will still be gooey. The ideal internal temperature for bread is ninety-six to one hundred degrees Celsius (two hundred- and five- and two hundred- and ten-degrees Fahrenheit).
Six: If you have leftovers, stale, or crumbly baked goods, take that food and break it into crumbs. There are so many uses for crumbs in the kitchen. A few are: To make meatloaf, hamburgers, meatballs, french toast bake, croutons, sprinkle on top of pudding, and last but not least bread pudding.

Seven: Gluten-free baked goods and breads get soggy if they stay in their cozy pans too long. Remove loaves and cakes and muffins from the pan as after a minute, unless otherwise stated. The longer a gluten-free baked good remains in a hot pan, the soggier it gets.

Eight: Lactose? There are many gluten-free substitutes for milk such as: goat milk, almond milk, rice milk, soy milk (soy is tied to Alzheimers), coconut milk, hemp milk, and lactose free milk. Some experts say that half of all Cealiacs are allergic to casein (the protein in dairy). Watch out for gums in the lactose free milks as many of the brands add carageenan, guar gum, and xanthan gum (page XX).

Nine: Honey is a humectant, adds moistness, if your using honey use less liquid in the recipe. Honey to sugar conversions are four parts sugar to three parts honey; in other words, use three-quarters the amount of honey to replace granulated sugar.

Ten: Add warming spices like cinnamon and nutmeg to deepen flavor complexity. I do not know if it is just mean but I find there is a bit of a hostile tango between quinoa flour and spices like these, so I suggest not using quinoa with such spices, but go for it with other flours!

Twelve: Ice cold ingredients or room temperature? Room temperature has always been best in cooking (unless your adding butter to a biscuit recipe than ice cold is best). When making gluten-free bread, eggs at room temperature are a must (place eggs in a cup of warmish water briefly until they reach room temperature).

Thirteen: Oven temperatures vary slightly from oven to oven. Get an oven thermometer. You might be surprised how far off your oven is. Our food kept burning no matter what we did to compensate. When we gauged it with an oven thermometer we found that our oven temperature would swing rapidly upward two-hundred degrees in the mater of three minutes!

Fourteen: If your using a conventional oven, place pans in the center of a pre-heated oven even baking.

Fifteen: Freezing gluten-free baked goods. I am a make ahead of time person, so I like after I have tried a recipe a few time with success, to make a large batch (or a lot of small batches) and freezing what I wont use with in the next few days that way I am only baking one day not seven. Often times freezing actually improves texture. Think your cookies or brownies are a flop? Try cutting, wrapping and freezing them. Eat slightly chille