College Recipes I'm starving!

[deelady]

what does gluten free flour taste like??

 

[B'sgirl]

It depends on what kind you use. I used a combination of brown rice flour, garbanzo/fava bean flour, soy flour, and buckwheat flour. That way you can't taste any of them too strongly. Rice flour has a very distinct flavor, IMO. It's sort of like, well, dirt. It's terrible in cookies. Buckwheat is a little sweet and has a hint of something similar to cardamom. I don't know how to describe the others. They aren't really that bad, they just aren't what I'm used to. But my son will never know otherwise so he should be fine with them.

 

[TeonW]

What is Gluten Free flour? What's Gluten for that matter?

 

[B'sgirl]

Gluten is what holds are your breads together. It is a protein in grains like wheat, barley, rye, semolina, and others (and oats by cross-contamination). A lot of people have an intolerance of some sort to it. I think it's somewhere like 1/125 people. Gluten-free flour is made from grains or other things that don't have that protein, like rice, millet, quinoa, buckwheat, soy, garbanzo, fava beans, etc. The problem with gluten-free flours is that they don't hold together very well.

 

[TeonW]

Does that make the bread that you make harder to keep together? what do you use as a subsitute? and if you don't would that make it flaky?

 

[B'sgirl]

Yeah, it makes them harder to hold together or they end up flaky. I used to use xanthan gum to help it stay together, only I recently discovered my kid can't have corn either and it's made from corn so I'm switching to guar gum. You can also use unflavored gelatin to help hold it together.