WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH RECIPE FAILS?

Gluten-free food has come a long way over the past few decades. Nevertheless, it is still a lot of trial and error. Gluten-free bread is tricky and if you are like me you have tried dozens of brands and still are not satisfied. Right?

What can be even more disheartening is when you are make a recipe that boasts to be 'the best', 'amazing', or 'better than gluten'. After all is said and done it falls leagues below your expectations. I have been there many a time. It got to the point where I questioned if I had any baking skill at all. The successive failures made me feel I was just fooling myself all my life.

Do not give up on gluten-free baking because of past experiences. Beware of painting all gluten-free recipes with one brush stroke.

If you find, or have found, yourself in a 'whoa is me' funk, here is a little perspective:

Question: Are all glutinous foods aces, always, without fault?
Answer: No.

Question Likewise, can mistakes be made, too, your first time making a glutinous recipe?
Answer: Naturally.

Before adjusting to the new norms of a gluten-free lifestyle. A person often develops a Stockholm syndrome. We quickly forget how gluten abused our systems and we long for the bread of Egypt (Exodus 16).

Never forget what it was like when you first learned to bake with gluten. Were you a prodigy of the culinary world? More likely you had a lot to learn, and in the process you made a lot of subpar baked goods. Why should one except a different experience when beginning to bake gluten-free? Gluten-free and glutenous baking are two different disciplines. They share principles but draw from completely different wheelhouses. You will need to allow yourself the time to learn this new gluten-free discipline. Do not throw out the baby with the bath water.

I think culinary history clearly proves this: accidents happen… breads stale, fruit ferments, and toast gets burnt.

“Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” – Thomas A. Edison, inventor of the light bulb

The only real mistake is not learning from your mistake. Yes I said it: your mistake. Own it. Get over it. The mistake has happened, sulking will not make it go away. What are you going to do to make the next second different?

If every person chucked their stale bread and did not better apply their creative minds humanity would be at a loss. Where would be French toast; breadcrumbs, to give rise to all things deep fried; bread puddings, and stuffing. Sure, all those can be made without stale, hard bread but many were invented out of necessity. It was some cleaver bloke re-purposing an otherwise horrible tasting loaf.

“Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation, experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way.” – Paul Theroux, novelist and travel writer

I learn well from mistakes, mine and others. Be open to a new direction. Even if a recipe proves unsalvageable you still can be better for it by carrying that memory, identifying the pitfalls and avoiding them the next time around.

During the ladder half of 2013, I made approximately one hundred gluten-free loaves everyone different from the last. I spent many hours raving about how they were utter failures. Despite my attitude, I was also learning to anticipate problems quicker and quicker, to the point I could read a recipe and understand the pitfalls immediately.

While in college, I really appreciated one instructor’s approach. He purposefully made cheese every wrong way at home and tracked the results. So that when he went to a professional cheese making course, he could ask the instructors  there why his cheese turned out certain ways. Armed with the knowledge of how to recognize key errors and how to rectify them he then taught our class how to make cheese. He could now step into the student’s shoes and guide them out of their mistakes.

“Negative results are just what I want. They're just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don't.”– Thomas A. Edison , inventor of the light bulb

I found my leading cause for gluten-free recipe failure was that I was altering a recipe based on how I anticipated the consistency to be based on the glutenous version of the recipe I was used to making.

With time and experience you will learn to bake gluten-free just as you once learned to bake with gluten. While you are on that journey take care to recall these words:

“It is not the critic who counts... not the man who points how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena... who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds... who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” –Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the USA

I hope in the reading you have a new found perspective, the bigger picture.