Remember the taste of real bread? As any gluten free foodie will tell you, its all about missing the real thing. The warm, yeasty aroma of fresh baked bread. Sandwiches that taste like real sandwiches. Toast with your scrambled eggs. Anything that doesn’t look and taste like cardboard. Comfort food.
Well baby, you’ve arrived!
This. This is why I learned to bake gluten free. One more rice cake and I was going to scream. One more crumbling, dry, unpalatable slice of what was supposed to pass for bread and….never mind the and, let’s just say I had had enough. It was time to take matters into my own hands.
Rewind to several months previous. When I discovered that gluten was causing me intense misery and had in fact been the cause of said misery for a very long time, I decided bread wasn’t worth it. It was time to try the gluten free alternatives. Couldn’t be that bad, right? Wrong. It was worse. Sawdust comes to mind. “I’ll have a slice of rice bread and could you serve it with a quart of water (tea, coffee, milk, whatever) and keep those refills coming, cause that’s the only way its going down”. Seriously!?
It didn’t take long before I decided I could do a better job. I am the third child in a family of twelve (yes, I said twelve!) and I could bake bread all by myself by the age of eleven. Armed with this experience, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. Pouring over multiple gluten free cookbooks and trying to absorb as much information as possible about this new world of gluten free baking, I realized this was not going to be easy. The folks out there who had already done it had made a valiant attempt, but frankly I wasn’t impressed.
Gluten free Betty Crocker. That’s what I wanted. A gluten free flour I could use to sub in my wheat recipes, and voile! Cookies, cakes, and bread again! Unfortunately, what I wanted did not exist. Now, mind you, this was about nineteen years ago and those of us who were gluten free were definitely not enjoying the abundance now available to this segment of the population. There was a ton of experimenting going on and much of it was not terribly inspiring. Ergo, I was about to do something pretty radical. I would simply create my own gluten free all purpose flour.
Several tons (kidding, but probably close) of rice flour later and after what felt like millions of attempts, I had created an all purpose gluten free flour that could sub for the flour in all of my wheat recipes. Hooray! I was baking bread again. I kept experimenting and improving on what I had created, always working for perfection. Good was not good enough. For me it had to be perfect.
The good news is that you get to be the recipient of all this baking and baking and baking until I got it right stuff. 
When my son told me that I could indie publish my recipes, there was really no turning back. It was time to share these recipes with people like me who had given up on ever having real food again. Want some? With the help of my tech savvy son, we have created the first in a series of baking samplers; “Bake It Better Gluten Free Sampler #1”, a gluten free baking book specifically designed to help you get baked goodies back on your menu!
Happy Gluten Free Baking! 🙂
Want to read the book but don’t own a Kindle? No problem! There’s a FREE Reading App for that.
Leave a Reply