Learning to Cook with Gluten Free Flours

It's an art-form, cooking. It becomes especially so when you are having to change the chemistry of your food. Well, you're not really wanting to change the chemistry, as much as to reproduce the effects of the chemistry in a round-about way.

...Yeah.

You see, gluten free flours are missing the very component that make dough rise and give it structure, gluten. Gluten is an elastic molecule that keeps the dough from breaking as it fills with little air pockets and expands. It's a binder, linking or cross-linking the ingredients in dough together. Yeast breads need lots of gluten, while soft breads like pancakes and biscuits and pie crust don't need as much.

In gluten free foods,  your binder can be xanthan or guar gum or even, to a lesser extent, gelatin. They act differently from each other and from gluten, so learning their behavior is the trick. For instance, too much xanthan gum, and your baked goods will eventually collapse.

To see xanthan gum at work, make yourself a mocha shake without it, take a few sips to get the texture, then add 1/4 teaspoon of xanthan gum, whirl it together, let it stand for a minute or so, then sip it.

What I have done to learn to cook with the gluten free flours is to always start with pancakes when trying a new mixture. I've done pancakes with rice flour blend (RFB) only, RFB + brown rice flour, buckwheat, RFB + buckwheat, RFB + millet, RFB + sorghum, RFB + sorghum + millet, RFB + sorghum + ground flax.

My latest endeavor is a good biscuit. I've not been happy with the numerous ingredients in the ones I've found online, or the fact that many call for a specific brand's mix. I want to make my own, and save a few bucks, thanks.

So, I continue to experiment. As far as biscuits are concerned, I've used GF Bisquick a couple of times, now, and like the texture, but the sweet flavor leaves something to be desired. To have a "meal biscuit" you need to add enough salt to overcome the heavy-handed addition of sugar in the original mix. Since I was running out of the mix when I made these cheddar biscuits, I learned a few things about how to make GF biscuits!

Next time, I'll try them from scratch!