Against the Grain: Extraordinary Gluten-Free Recipes Made from Real, All-Natural Ingredients (2015)

INTRODUCTION

going against the grain

MY IDEA TO START MY GLUTEN-FREE BREAD COMPANY, Against The Grain, began, as many other gluten-free companies do, in our kitchen and with a familiar story. A family member is diagnosed with celiac disease; the mom (and it is almost always the mom) goes into high gear to create baked goods the whole family can enjoy. Before she knows it, she is baking for her family, gluten-intolerant neighbors, local restaurants, and farmer’s markets. But the moment I truly knew gluten-free baking was my mission, however, happened at The Weeping Rock Gas Dock and Café in Thousand Island Park, New York.

A seasonal gathering spot for summer residents on the St. Lawrence River, The Weeping Rock was a modern-day Alice’s Restaurant, built into the ledge at water’s edge around a massive, perennially wet, granite boulder. It was run by Donna, a scrappy guitar-picking singer with an uncanny ability to make almost anything taste delicious. For many, the day began with coffee and conversation on the dock at The Weeping Rock. By noon, it was a hangout for hungry fishermen, sunbathing teenagers, and those traveling through by boat, and Donna fed them all.

Our family of four was at our river cottage, as usual, for my older son Alex’s sixteenth birthday. My husband, Tom, and my younger son, Marty, had both been diagnosed with celiac disease the previous fall. Early on we had made the decision that the entire family would eat gluten-free, so for Alex’s birthday party I had developed a new gluten-free pizza recipe. No one could believe it was gluten-free, and when several guests suggested that I should sell my pizzas commercially, I found it an intriguing idea. Having zero knowledge of the food business, I asked Donna if she would be willing to bake up a few pizzas and give out free samples to her customers in exchange for feedback. Donna was game, so I delivered two pizzas and some general baking instructions and waited for the response. That evening, Donna came by my cottage with two big, white, slightly grease-splattered paper plates, autographed with glowing customer comments. Over a dozen customers tried and raved about the pizza. Most of the taste testers were teenagers, and not one of them was gluten-intolerant. This was before “gluten-free” was a household word, and if asked, most of the pizza’s fans wouldn’t have had a clue what it meant. For me, this was the realization that I had a product that was not just “good for gluten-free” but also appealed to a mainstream audience. A year and a half later, we began shipping our first products out of my house in Vermont, and Donna had moved to Vermont to become our first employee.

Both pastry and pizza doughs made without gums can be rolled out in a variety of thicknesses and are easy to handle.

gluten-free: a parallel baking universe

Pizza was the very first gluten-free thing I attempted to bake. It was a Friday night, two days after Marty’s celiac diagnosis—pizza night. In the pre-celiac era, I prided myself on my homemade pizza, and I liked the Friday night ritual: I would whip up our favorite crust with unbleached flour, knead out all the week’s hassles, let it rest, shape it, spread it with my homemade pizza sauce, and top it with whatever struck my fancy—leftovers, local Vermont cheeses, pepperoni, marinated artichokes, or black olives.

Expectations and anxiety were running high that first gluten-free pizza night. We were still reeling from the celiac diagnosis; gluten, we realized, was everywhere. We had just finished emptying our pantry and refrigerator, thrown away our toaster, the bread maker, assorted pots and pans, and started over. The kids were eagerly anticipating their Friday night pizza, but after only forty-eight hours’ experience with gluten-free products, I was dubious. But I was determined to keep our ritual, so I did the unthinkable. I bought a gluten-free pizza crust mix—the box certainly made it sound appetizing and effortless.

I dumped the mix in the bowl and carefully followed the directions. I might as well have been working with Flubber; it looked lumpy and smelled like dirty socks. I figured if I worked the dough a little more, it would turn into something I could knead. Instead, I got a quivering pudding texture. Convinced that I had missed something in the directions, I plopped the entire sorry mess into the trash. Little did I know that I wasn’t supposed to knead at all. In regular bread making, kneading is key—it disperses the yeast and facilitates gluten formation, and oh yeah, that’s what we were trying to avoid. Instead of gluten, the mix contained xanthan gum, a stabilizer that most bakers—professional and amateur—still believe is necessary. I had entered a parallel baking universe, and I had to learn a whole new set of baking skills.

Glazed Yeast Doughnuts made from scratch are fried into light and fluffy breakfast treats.

So I ditched the mixes and started working from scratch. I bought rice flour, tapioca starch, and cornstarch—the big three of gluten-free at the time—plus xanthan gum after reading over and over how it was required to “add back the elasticity.” No matter how I combined the ingredients, it was always the same—just okay. I tried substituting sorghum flour and potato starch with not much improvement. By that time, I could make rich and fudgy brownies and chocolate cake that fooled the most discriminating palates, but acceptable bread and pizza crust eluded me. I began to seek out every flourless baking recipe I could find to try to understand why they worked. I looked at the ingredients, examined the techniques, and paid attention to the proportions of fats to starches, proteins, and liquids. Among lots of other things, I learned that I had been working with a very narrow definition of flour. “Flour” didn’t necessarily have to be milled and poured from a bag—flourless recipes worked because some other ingredient acted like flour. I also learned that starch is insoluble in cold water. Yikes, no wonder it felt like I was baking with Flubber: I was trying to make bread out of a non-Newtonian fluid thickened by xanthan gum, the same Oobleck that my kids had made in preschool with cornstarch and water to simulate the action of quicksand. Xanthan gum is a pseudoplastic substance, its thickening properties dependent on the force it receives. Mix it at high speeds, it thins. Let it rest, it thickens—really thickens. No wonder it vexes bakers so, and no wonder it is so overused.

Eventually, I had to go back to the basics of kitchen chemistry, to understand how fats, carbohydrates, protein, and water affect the taste, texture, aroma, and shelf life of both wheat-based and gluten-free baked goods. The first thing I did was dispense with xanthan gum altogether. The culmination of all that knowledge was the birthday pizza, and the beginning of Against The Grain Gourmet.

Many gluten-free bread doughs are more batter-like and require high-walled pans. Heavy gauge, dimpled pans help to circulate the air during baking and brown the bread more evenly.

thinking against the grain

Our company is called Against The Grain because we take a different approach to gluten-free baking. We believe that it is entirely possible to bake gluten-free using the natural properties of real foods. We don’t use processed ingredients that simulate the effects of gluten like xanthan gum, modified starches, or things you can’t pronounce that really mean water-soluble polymers derived from spruce tree cellulose. Dough won’t rise? Bread too dry? We don’t go to food chemists to solve the problem—we look for real food solutions that come from your local grocery store. We ask ourselves: “What foods will act as dough enhancers? What foods will naturally facilitate moisture retention?”

When you bake with real food, gluten-free is not about foreign-tasting additives: It’s about using ingredients in inventive ways. It’s about adapting time-honed baking techniques to work in ways you never imagined. And most fundamentally, it’s about never having to lower your expectations or make excuses. We have built a company whose products are purchased by both gluten-free and mainstream consumers. Many people buy our pizza because it is gluten-free, but every day many tell us it’s also the best frozen pizza on the market.

Over the years I’ve learned a lot about how ingredients function in gluten-free baking—not just about their properties, but also that how I use ingredients can be as important as the ingredients themselves. Creaming the butter and sugar in a recipe, for example, will produce a light and airy cake; using melted butter in the same recipe will produce a dense, flat cake. Both use butter, but creaming is a process that physically incorporates tiny air pockets around the sugar in the butter. When baked, these tiny air pockets expand to produce a light crumb. This is not a technique unique to gluten-free baking; it is an established mixing technique to incorporate air in a batter, and it becomes even more important when working with gluten-free flours.

In many ways gluten-free baking is liberating. There are so many varieties of flours to choose from, so many opportunities to improve the flavor and nutritional profile of baked goods. You just have to find the right combination of ingredients and methods. I absolutely love creating new ways to solve old problems, and I invite you into my kitchen to bake alongside me. My approach will change not only the way you view gluten-free baked goods but also the way you bake.

A silky batter for Madeleines is made by melting and then cooling the butter. Before baking, the batter is thoroughly chilled to harden the butter and lighten the crumb.

the fundamentals of gluten-free baking

Gluten-free baking is kind of like having a new baby: There is no lack of unsolicited opinions about what you should be doing.

“That baby ought to be wearing socks” was a common one I got when carrying around my newborn years ago in New York City during the summertime. Socks? Really? It’s like 100 degrees on this pavement. My favorite erroneous gluten-free “should” is “You must use xanthan or guar gum in gluten-free doughs to give them structure.” Or, as some of the most well-known gluten-free bakers might say, “Xanthan gum is a critical component of most gluten-free baking,” and “Every baked item requires some xanthan gum for optimum texture.” Xanthan gum is one of the main reasons that so many gluten-free baked goods have an off, chemical taste. It is an industrial ingredient, an additive stabilizer used in sauces, salad dressings, and ice creams, but totally unnecessary in gluten-free baked goods.

All you need to produce great-tasting and reliable gluten-free baked goods are real ingredients and a good understanding of the fundamentals of gluten-free baking. And here they are:

gluten-free flours are not created equal

Wheat-based flours are very consistent. For example, if you buy a bag of King Arthur Unbleached Bread Flour, it will have a protein content of 12.7% and will be milled from hard red spring wheat in the northern Great Plains. I had the occasion to visit a wheat mill in Manhattan, Kansas, the fall of 2013, and was truly amazed by the very specific characteristics that can be milled into flour. That 12.7% protein is pretty specific, and whenever and wherever you break open a bag of King Arthur flour, you know exactly what a cup will weigh and how it will perform.

This couldn’t be further from the truth when it comes to gluten-free flours. Some flours come from grains; some come from nuts and seeds; and some come from legumes. So it is not surprising that gluten-free flours have different weights and absorption rates, not to mention different flavors. But there are also many varieties of the same flour, and they differ from brand to brand. And, even within the same flour type, the way it’s grown and milled greatly affects its weight and its baking properties. Major brands of wheat-based flours are milled in the same way; this is not the case for most gluten-free flours. And, when multiple gluten-free flours are combined in an all-purpose mix, it is virtually impossible to find consistency across brands.

We purchase truckloads of tapioca starch from the same supplier. Every different lot comes with a material specifications sheet, and there is always a range of moisture content. Extracted from the tuber cassava, the amount of tapioca starch yielded varies with the weather, the soil, the temperature, and the age of the plant. In short, as no two cassavas are alike, no two batches of tapioca are ever the same, and so no two brands of the same gluten-free flour that use tapioca are ever the same either. For the most part, the subtle variations don’t make a huge difference in baked goods in which gluten traditionally has a negligible role, like quick breads, muffins, cakes, pies, pancakes, and cookies. But for bread baking, where the ratio of liquid to dry ingredients is so critical, substituting one flour for another is not a simple matter. Different flours weigh different amounts. A cup of tapioca starch, for example, weighs far less than a cup of potato starch. So if you seriously want to make the best bread possible, you need to invest in a kitchen scale. (See “Some Basic Tools.”)

Gluten-free flours also have different protein and fiber contents. Most pure starches—tapioca, arrowroot, potato, and cornstarch—are pretty much interchangeable by weight, but a number of other flours are not. Coconut flour, for example, absorbs four times the liquid of other flours. Adding ¼ cup (30g) of coconut flour to a recipe is like adding 1 cup (160g) of rice flour or sorghum. (See more on this subject in “How to Adjust for Weight Differences in Flours.”)

most gluten-free flours work better in a mixture

All around Vermont we have stone walls that have lasted for a century or more. If you look closely, you’ll see there is no mortar holding the walls together, and there are big stones and little stones. If you try to build a stone wall of identically sized stones, your wall won’t stand without mortar. The structure of baked goods is a lot like those walls: When baking with wheat, gluten is the mortar. In the absence of gluten, you want flours with different-size granules to improve your structure. Of course, there are some exceptions like pancakes and crepes, in which a single gluten-free flour performs just fine. But for the most part, mixing at least two different flours with different granule sizes—one of those two a pure starch—will significantly improve the structure and integrity of your baked goods. Even if you are baking with something like rolled oats, the structure is vastly improved if you include some oatmeal flour, to fill in the spaces between the whole oats. If you look at commercial gluten-free flour mixes, most contain three or more different flours for this exact reason.

gluten-free hydration ratios are surprisingly high

Bread bakers often refer to the ratio of liquid to flour by weight as the hydration ratio. Liquids include not just water but also ingredients like milk, vegetable oil, juice, and whole eggs (which are about 75% water). Typically, the hydration ratios for wheat-based breads range from 50% to 80%, depending on the type of flour and baked good. Since one cup of liquid weighs ½ pound, this means that a 2-pound loaf of bread contains two to over three cups of liquid. For wheat-based baking, high hydration ratios are used for breads like focaccia and ciabatta, with loose, open crumb structures. On the lower hydration end are dense breads like bagels.

Gluten-free breads require much higher hydration ratios, typically with a ratio of more than 100%. These are very loose doughs, and kneading many gluten-free doughs is more akin to folding the dough over and over with a spatula. Hydration ratios in the recipes in this book tend to be in the 110% range. In practice, high hydration ratios mean that gluten-free breads tend to lose their shape unless baked in high-wall pans or pans that support their structure. Rolls were perhaps the most vexing to me, but the Hot Cross Buns and Biscuits are two examples of recipes that demonstrate that anything is possible. The presence of more water or liquids in gluten-free breads also means that baking times are typically longer.

non-gluten protein builds structure

Most gluten-free bakers believe that the structure in baked goods comes from gluten. Gluten certainly contributes to the structure, but other proteins play a similar role and are just as important. Oddly enough, although gluten is a protein, most gluten-free bakers don’t look to protein sources for a substitute. Rather, they look to gums like xanthan and guar and high-fiber binders like psyllium husks.

Typical wheat flour for bread baking is almost 13% protein. Very few gluten-free flours contain that much protein, and those that do would typically be used in a mixture of two or more flours. During the baking process, proteins, whether they come from the flour or added protein sources like eggs, milk, nuts, and seeds, thicken the dough or batter and add structure. There are many reasons why gluten-free baked goods rise beautifully and then fall, but chief among them is inadequate protein. As a dough begins to heat up and bake, there has to be sufficient protein to set and form the walls; otherwise the dough will flatten or not create a resilient enough structure to hold in gases.

the contribution of starch is as important as that of gluten

Pure starches get a bad rap when it comes to gluten-free baking, yet they are probably the least understood component of gluten-free baked goods. Like protein, starches are essential to the structure of gluten-free baked goods. All traditional flours, whether from cereals or grains, are at least 70% starch, and starch is made up of chains of sugar molecules. These chains may be either straight or branched, and the percentage of each type varies according to the type of starch.

Pure starch is insoluble in cold water, and unless starch granules are broken down by heat, the shearing action of mixing, or enzymes (as in fermentation with yeast), they are dead weight in gluten-free dough. Starch becomes soluble in water when heated and forms an elastic gel as the starch granules absorb water and swell. It is this gel that can help build structure, contribute to the crumb, and aid in moisture retention.

gums are not necessary

If starch acts as an elastic gel, why do you need binders like xanthan or guar gums or other gels? You don’t. Too often xanthan gum is thrown in as a security blanket because bakers think that a gluten replacement is a requirement of gluten-free baking, and yes, gums can often be used to mask shortcomings in a recipe. Put in enough xanthan gum and it will hold most anything together. The only case in which you may need a nonstarch gel or binder is as an egg replacer—in this situation, my go-to is a chia seed or flaxseed slurry. Chia and flax are not only natural binders, but they are packed with protein and fiber, so unlike xanthan and guar gums, they add protein and improve the nutritional profile of any baked good.