Your latest bread success made me wonder if you've tried or had much luck making gluten free bread? I'm so tired of most commercially available options, they all seem to dissolve instantly. Awful for burgers or anything with sauce. I miss sourdough.
I'm afraid I haven't done much work with gluten-free baking; the problem is the gluten tax. As I'm sure you know, gluten-free anything, even just ingredients, are more expensive, and the process of baking is more labor intensive and time-consuming for a product that isn't the same. Even the best gluten-free bread, lacking gluten, is lacking one of the defining characteristics of the thing it's emulating.
Since I can eat gluten and am not regularly responsible for feeding anyone who can't, there's no real motivation to do it. I try to always have gluten-free options when I'm hosting, but that's usually stuff like crudite and dip, charcuterie, or fruit -- things that can also avoid other allergens, and depending on the item be eaten by vegetarians or vegans.
Now, all that said, I can recommend King Arthur's Cup For Cup GF flour for baking; it makes the process fairly smooth and the final product seems pretty sturdy, although admittedly the flour is about twice the price of their normal bread flour per pound. I haven't encountered Bob's Red Mill GF flour in a while, but partly that's because when we stopped using them they hadn't really reformulated in a few decades and their GF flour was pretty coarse, and sometimes made from beans my family members couldn't tolerate. They may have advanced since, this was like 10-15 years ago at least.
The King Arthur website has a variety of GF baking recipes as well as mixes and I do have some experience making their GF bagels, which are pretty good, although I think they're actually better if you halve the size (easier to manage, easier to store, since they really need to be kept cold, preferably frozen, and eaten warmed). I baked those regularly for a while for a colleague's kid who was allergic to wheat, and they weren't much more work than baking regular bagels, just required more delicate handling pre-bake.
I realize this is basic and you've probably tried it, but just in case, any GF product you're going to be saucing (as you say, like burgers), you might try griddling first -- little scrape of butter, toss it in a hot pan for a few minutes. In regular bread it helps to both create a flat barrier so the sauce doesn't sink into the bread, and it also dries it out a little so that it can take more moisture to begin with. This is theoretical though, I've never done it with GF buns. I do know that generally King Arthur recommends toasting GF products baked with its recipes.
Readers, feel free to chime in with recommendations! Remember to reply in comments or reblogs, as I don't post asks sent in response to other asks.
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Howdy sorry to bother, but ran into the post you added onto about GF. You mention a cake with no gluten/dairy/eggs, I was wondering if maybe you still had access to the recipe at all, especially if it doesn't use soy
My partner is allergic and I really want to bake him a cake that he can actually eat without consequences
Thank you either way, hope you have a fantastic day
I don't have the recipe anymore as this was about 14 years ago and the bakery has since gone out of business. In terms of substitutions though--eggs can be left out entirely of most cake recipes or substituted with a little bit of oil, and butter can be substituted in most cases with oil (in the cake itself) or shortening (in the frosting). For gluten free cakes we used Bob's Red Mill flours (mainly rice flour but it was a mix I don't totally remember--pure rice flour does NOT come out well) and a little bit of xanthan gum which helped bind it together in a similar manner to gluten. If you use oat flour you need to be careful where it's sourced as oats that are grown in a field that has had wheat in it will be contaminated by the wheat; we lucked out in that there was a farm in Canada not far from us that had a GF oat field with no wheat in it ever. Our cakes tended to come out better than our breads, I think because cakes with gluten need it to be less developed--so we could use less of the xanthan gum. Problems with xanthan gum if you use too much are a bitter taste and gummy texture.
I hope that helps and I wish you luck with finding a recipe that works for you!
Adapted myself from the ingredients of my favourite vegan & gluten free brownies, and my favourite brownie cookies. Credits at the end.
Ingredients (makes 35-40 21g cookies)
250g gluten free flour (I use Doves Farm/Freee brand, #notspon)
180g golden or light brown sugar
30g cocoa powder
Ÿ teaspoon baking powder
Πteaspoon salt (a small pinch)
150g dark chocolate (I use dark cooking chocolate from Tesco that is soy based and dairy-free)
100ml vegetable oil
100ml milk
1 teaspoon lemon juice
Coarse/flaky salt for sprinkling (optional, so damn good)
Tools (and I donât mean the one writing this)
Large mixing bowl
Medium bowl for dry ingredients
Smaller bowl for melting chocolate
A saucepan of similar size to your small bowl if melting chocolate on the hob
Wooden spoon (or if you have one of those fancy silicone spatulas, theyâre perfect)
Dinner plate
Baking tray + baking paper
A few teaspoons for scoopinâ
Measuring spoons (optional but very helpful for accuracy)
Recipe
So when I was a lad⊠just kidding. I do have stories about how I learned to bake, but this is my own recipe, so those stories are pretty irrelevant here.
Step 0: Donât preheat your oven.
I usually donât preheat my oven until shortly before Iâm ready to bake, I donât know why recipes always start with that.
We will not be baking anything for at least an hour, as the cookie dough requires chilling for at least 45 minutes once mixed, ideally longer. This helps prevent spread on the baking tray, and makes it easier to form into dough balls.
Step 1: Measure your dry ingredients.
I am very inclined to forget one as I go, so hereâs a checklist:
Flour: 250g
Cocoa: 30g
Sugar: 180g
Salt: Πteaspoon
Baking powder: Ÿ teaspoon
Add all the dry ingredients, except the sugar, to the medium bowl. Pop the sugar into the large bowl. Iâm bolding those because I tried following my own instructions and I messed it up.
Step 2: Vegan buttermilk. Wait, thatâs not an instruction!
Weâre going to curdle some âmilkâ, for chemistry reasons I donât really understand. Add 100ml of soy milk to the large bowl, then add 1 teaspoon of lemon juice. The milk should âsplitâ, and look gross! If it doesnât, thatâs fine too.
Add the vegetable oil, and observe hydrophobicity in action.
Step 3: Melt the chocolate.
I like to do this in a âdouble boilerâ, which is a fancy way to say melting it in a bowl over a pan of simmering water. Feel free to do this in a microwave. If you do, be careful not to overheat it, do it in bursts until the chocolate has a silky consistency.
Itâs harder to get wrong with the double boiler, for physics reasons, but it should only take a few minutes with a steady simmer. Once a knife can be pushed through the chocolate with no resistance, turn the heat off and stir the chocolate to ensure it has melted all the way through.
Add the melted chocolate to the large bowl, and stir until combined.
Note: This is the one time before baking that we are adding heat to the mix. Before baking, I highly recommend the dough is cooled completely, so the hotter the chocolate is at this stage, the longer the mixture will need to cool.
Step 4: Add the dry ingredients and mix.
Shake or spoon in the dry ingredients gradually, stirring a couple times between each addition to avoid making a dust cloud. Once youâve added them in, stir to combine, taking pains to scrape down the sides of the mixing bowl and incorporate large lumps of flour/cocoa powder. Small lumps (smaller than a pea) will bake out, so donât worry about those. Your dough should be smooth, firm, and probably looking the way the cookies will look a day after you eat them. Sorry.
Step 5: Chill out.
Cover the bowl and stick it in the fridge. 45 minutes is the absolute minimum I would suggest, but if you can give it an hour or two, or overnight, even better. The next step is to scoop the dough into little balls, and that will be less messy and less of a f***ing nightmare if you just chill it for a while.
Pro tip: Put your dinner plate in the fridge with the bowl. I wished I had done this every single time.
Step 6: Okay, I lied to you. The next step is actually to preheat the oven.
180°C conventional, 160°C fan. I donât know what that is for gas ovens, sorry.
Step 7: Balls.
Using a spoon, maybe two, and your hands (unless youâre a magic space wizard who can do this with just the spoons), scoop a lump of the cookie dough out of the bowl and weigh it. My control weight for this recipe is 21g, but you could go larger if you wanted to.
This makes a cookie of approximately- whereâs my ruler? 5.5 cm diameter. I weighed each ball, because Iâm a really fun person, but you can just weigh one and make the rest about the same size. Or weigh none of them, and guess the baking time adjustment! You feeling lucky, punk?
If itâs taking you a while to get through this, and it probably will, I suggest covering the balls and returning them to the fridge for a few minutes before baking, as theyâve probably warmed considerably from being handled. Tee-hee.
Step 8: Prepare for baking.
Cover your baking tray with parchment. Put your balls on the tray, spaced 3-4 cm apart to avoid creating a colossal, all-consuming cookie mon- uh, beast. Unless you want that. I did this by mistake once, and donât recommend it. Squish the balls down slightly into pucks, maybe 1.5 cm tall but I didnât measure, this just makes it easier to sprinkle some coarse, crunchy salt flakes on top. Yum yum!
I donât know if I need to say this, but donât overcrowd your tray. If you have more balls than you can fit on the tray, use another tray or wait until the first batch are baked and reuse this one.
Step 9: Bake.
Stick that mofo in the oven, for 8 minutes if you made them 21g like I said, or longer if you made them bigger. Theyâre done when theyâve spread out and the tops have dried up and cracked, revealing a darker, cakey interior. Iâm drooling right now.
If you poke them at this stage (careful, theyâre hot, duh), they should give with little to no resistance. This is good! If theyâre completely solid straight out of the oven theyâre overcooked, and will be rocks by the time they have cooled down. Iâm sorry if this happened to you! Take the next batch out just a little bit sooner.
Let the cookies cool on the tray until the tray is cool enough to touch. This will take longer if your tray is thicker, but I promise you itâs worth the wait. Once the tray is warm but not hot, the cookies should be solid enough to transfer to a cooling rack. If youâre nervous, use a metal fish slice or a fork, slid underneath each cookie to avoid breaking them up.
Step 10: There were no more steps. This is the end.
You can eat them now! Alternatively, allow to cool and eat within⊠okay I donât know what the shelf life is, but theyâre cookies, they shouldnât last very long. Anecdotally, when I did my last batch, I had some in the tin from three months ago, and they tasted fine, but I donât recommend eating three-month-old baked goods!
And now: pictures.
Captions (and alt text) in the alt text.
Credits
Do recipes have credits? Not in my experience. This recipe however borrows heavily from:
Alison Andrews at Loving It Vegan: https://lovingitvegan.com/vegan-gluten-free-brownies
Janine Ratcliffe at Olive Magazine: https://www.olivemagazine.com/recipes/baking-and-desserts/classic-chocolate-brownies
/u/dundundah at reddit dot com: https://reddit.com/r/Baking/comments/97ag96/brownie_cookies/e46zinq
Iâm Rachel. Thatâs as much detail as youâre going to get about me. K bye!
âI am supposed to be touched. I canât wait to find the person who will come into the kitchen just to smell my neck and get behind me and hug me and breathe me in and make me turn around and make me kiss his face and put my hands in his hair even with my soapy dishwater drips. I am a lovely woman. Who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me?â
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