More Tips and Tricks for Gluten Free Cooking

Gluten Free flours have gotten a lot better over the years, but there are still some tips that will help you a lot in exchanging regular wheat flour for Gluten Free flour.

1. Right off the bat, NO I have not found a GF flour that you can just exchange in the same amounts that you would use in wheat flour. It just doesn’t work the same.
2. There are so many different blends of flours, some use corn starch, or potato starch, or tapioca starch, (none of them are the same) and they do not react the same to the other ingredients in the recipe. That is why so many Gluten Free recipes fail. When you figure out the positive chemical reaction for each GF flour. Then you will have a successful recipe! That is why I name each Brand of flour I use in all my recipes.
3. A lot of the Gluten Free Flour blends have a rice base. Some are bean flour. Rice and Beans are both hard when they are dry, so in order for them not to have a gritty texture, you must let the dough or batter set for a while and soak up the liquids before baking or cooking. Except fried foods, when fried at high heat the rice flours become crisp not grainy. Also the flours absorb oils better than it does butter, if the butter gets cool. But you also give up a lot of flavor when using oil.
4. Because Gluten Free flours are heavier than wheat flour, it takes gluten free flours longer to rise than wheat flour. So I add more baking powder and more yeast than I did for wheat flour. I also let most of my dough set longer in a warm place to rise. (Except my sour dough, it doesn’t need the extra time) The warmth of steam, seems to help activate the yeast so it can rise. So when I start to bake a loaf of bread, I will start a pot of water to boil on the back of the stove.
5. When baking Gluten Free yeast breads, you should not try to punch down the loaf for a second rise. Most Gluten Free dough will not rise a second time. When it rises, it is ready to bake.
6. Baking times usually will be at a lower temperature setting, but they will need to bake longer. Most of the time I will use 325*F. setting and about 10 -12 minutes longer baking time. It depends a lot on your type of oven, and the thickness of the item you are baking. For instance, bread dough will always take longer to bake than a cake batter.